2025 Virtual Forum

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Recordings Now Available!

ACCESS THE FORUM PROGRAM HERE


This two-day Virtual Forum took place on February 4, 2025 and February 5, 2025 from 1:00 to 4:00 pm Eastern Time.

This Learning Network Virtual Forum explored how alternative justice practices can enhance prevention, practices, and responses within the gender-based violence (GBV) movement and sector. Forum speakers included community and organizational leaders, practitioners, researchers, and advocates working across sectors to end violence, ensure accountability and build safer, more equitable communities. 

Alternative justice practices, rooted in the knowledge, traditions and care practices of Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities, include not only restorative and transformative justice, but also a range of diverse culturally grounded and community-based approaches. In the context of GBV, these practices play a crucial role in community responses, emphasizing empowerment, healing, relationships and accountability, while shifting away from punitive carceral models of justice. While alternative justice practices have, at times, been adapted or repurposed within mainstream systems, this Forum aimed to explore how these practices are deeply rooted in diverse cultural traditions and their role in challenging historical and ongoing colonial structures of power, as well as resisting broader systems and institutions of power. 

Anchored in its roots, alternative justice practices offer restorative and transformative potential to prevent, respond to, and address GBV, which often stems from colonial power structures. It is important to consider reimagining how we approach justice, grounding our work in decolonized practices, with the goal of creating a more just, healing, and transformative system for addressing GBV. 

This Virtual Forum provided an opportunity to learn more about alternative justice practices within the context of GBV work in Canada. Diverse speakers focused on the history and core principles of alternative justice practices and shared the strategies, challenges and opportunities for advancing them within the GBV sector and movement. Speakers also highlighted existing and emerging alternative justice models to GBV that centre Indigenous, Black and racialized communities, offering practical tools and approaches that can be integrated into your everyday work supporting survivors, communities, and those who have done harm.  

Individuals supporting those who experience GBV and working with those who have done harm benefited from this Forum. Participants also received a Certificate of Participation for their Professional Development Portfolio. 

Learning Objectives:

By attending this Forum, participants enhanced their: 

  • Understanding of the history and core principles of alternative justice practices and their role in challenging colonial structures of power

  • Awareness about alternative justice models and processes to end violence within diverse contexts including lessons learned, concerns, and challenges

  • Application of culturally responsive and trauma- and violence-informed responses for supporting survivors and working with those who have done harm

Check out our speakers here 

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