Learners' Own Words

Conflict can be an opportunity to heal relationships and grow into our best selves, and yet much of our society is rooted in punitive approaches to conflict that leave few possibilities for authentic accountability and healing. Even as many youth-serving organizations seek to adopt trauma-informed practices, they often unintentionally continue to perpetuate shame, blame, and punishment through their conflict practices. Transformative approaches to conflict seek to deepen our capacity to understand the needs that drive conflicts and to develop responses that speak to those needs while offering opportunities for meaningful repair.

With transformative practices, you can build your skills to approach conflict directly and humanely, while deepening relationships and finding freedom from the incredible drain that unhealthy conflict causes our communities. Shifting your individual and organizational understanding of conflict can open up the space that youth need to interrupt and mend cycles of violence.

This training will give youth workers techniques for fostering de-escalation, while deepening your understanding of the root causes of challenging behaviors. You’ll practice shifting from reactive responses, often rooted in your own histories of trauma, oppression, and privilege, to centered responses that make room for the unique experiences and needs of the youth in front of you. You’ll reflect on how to shift the practices of your programs away from punitive approaches and towards the individual and collective possibilities of conflict transformation.

• Explore healing-centered approaches to conflict that are rooted in restorative and transformative justice
• Understand how domination-based binaries of right/wrong, good kids/bad kids, and victim/perpetrator recreate cycles of violence and oppression
• Build skills in trauma-informed approaches to conflict by distinguishing practices of accountability from those of punishment
• Increase understanding of the needs beneath challenging behavior to move from reactions of judgment and blame towards empathic, strengths-based responses
• Explore how to embody a centered and centering presence that can hold boundaries and de-escalate difficult situations

Each of YIPA’s trainings are designed around a broad framework of eight youth work competencies. The competency focus of this training is: COMMUNICATIONS.

Gain communication flexibility which allows you to develop healthy, productive work relationships, engage in collaborative problem solving with youth, and improve individual and group facilitation.