The CHAT Project is a community-based approach to addressing harm and advancing safety.
We help families and communities connect with each other and to learn (or relearn) practices for moving through conflict, reducing violence, and strengthening connections.
Based in the principles and practices of restorative justice and circles, The CHAT Project works with individuals, families (however defined), friends, and community members who are seeking solutions to interpersonal harm and violence.
The approach and guiding questions that arise from restorative justice help guide the work of The CHAT Project in addressing conflict and harm as a community in non-punitive ways.
To learn more about Restorative Justice, please visit:
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“Restorative justice is an approach to achieving justice that involves, to the extent possible, all those who have a stake in a specific offense or harm to collectively identify and address harms, needs, and obligations in order to heal and put things as right as possible”
Howard Zehr
Circles originate from Indigenous and First Nation communities’ ways of life, ceremony, of being and coming together. Indigenous communities are where circles were and continue to be rooted.
The CHAT Project is a non-indigenous program whose members experienced and learned about circles in different ways prior to coming to CHAT. Currently, The CHAT Project helps families, their loved ones, and communities create and gather together in their own circles as a primary way to have safe and meaningful face-to-face dialogues.
We see ourselves as learners and honor the histories and indigenous communities where the wisdom and ceremony of circle is rooted.
To learn more about Circles, please visit: