Restorative/Transformative Justice — the practice of repairing and healing our connections where harm has been inflicted — informs much of how we approach the work we do here at BEHOLDEN. It informs how we relate to people, our other-than-human relationships, as well as our inheritances from ancestors, cultures, and histories. It’s why BEHOLDEN has accountability as one of the the three pillars: accountability as a person’s ability to take responsibility and to repair. While we provide training and consulting with human organizations like schools, prisons, and non-profits, we extend the ethics and practice of RJ to inter-community relationships, to lands, to ancestral dead in the land, to one’s own lineages, and to identities structured by modern systems of exploitation, division, and extraction.

Dr. Noël Amherd has been consulting, facilitating and training for 15 years. He has provided training to schools and districts throughout California - from Crescent City down to Los Angeles - and in New Mexico. He has designed and implemented RJ programs with district attorney’s offices for both youth and adult diversion. Noël’s commitment is to justice as repair and accountability, relationship and understanding. Noël’s experience includes his facilitation of Victim Offender Dialogues that bring together victims of violent harm with the person/s responsible. He participated for years in San Quentin’s Restorative Justice Interfaith Roundtable Symposia out of which he additionally volunteered for 8 years as babaláwo (prison chaplain) for the men worshipping òrìsà and Ifá.

Contact us to discuss your needs and vision of restorative justice for your organization, school, public defender or district attorney office, prison program, or community. We look forward to building programs of justice and repair with you.