BYC – Restorative Practice Blog
Restorative Practice Blog
This blog documents the BYCRP project (BYC to the power of RP) and offers resources for other youth services willing to embark on a similar journey. Articles are based on board members, staff and young people’s testimonies and stories. However, it’s important to note...
Where do we go from there?
Jenny Courtney, BYC CEO, consistently underscores the transformative nature of our journey in becoming a restorative hub within the community. James, the RP coordinator, aptly describes the process as "hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end"...
Opening BYC
When implementing RP in BYC, the youth club community tries to achieve four outcomes: Role models are emerging, inclusive structures are in place, positive communication informs our work, and an outward-looking community vision defines our ambition. Inclusivity is one...
Training Young People
There is a debate between practitioners regarding directly training young people in RP or not. For some, training the young people is not necessary. It is enough to model RP in all interactions with them. They became familiar with it, and it slowly grows in their...
A visit from Derry!
On 19th and 20th October, we received visitors from Derry, who embarked on an “experiential learning expedition”, as Mickey, who initiated the project, called it. Mickey had been in touch in the past months with James, our RP coordinator and Paul, the lead board...
Improving buy-in and working together restoratively
This piece was compiled following interviews with the staff, informal chats, observations and more formal restorative circles. In our overview of the implementation process, among others, we highlighted one challenge: two years into the implementation, approximately...
Youth Work and Restorative Practices
BYC is the first Youth Club in Ireland to have such an ambitious plan for RP. If youth workers and youth service are using RP in their daily work (see for examples these testimonies from Cabra for Youth or Clare Youth Service), no other youth organisation has...
Community of Practices
Community of practices (CoPs) are an important part of the RP implementation process. They prevent teams from falling into one of the mis-implementation traps listed by Evans and Gregory(2020), the “train and hope” approach, where there is no support for the teams...
Approach to training for staff
All BYC staff and board members underwent Restorative Practice training in 2021 and 2022. RP training Most of the staff was trained by the coordinator during the first phase of the implementation. As it was in the middle of the pandemic, the training took place online...
Refurbishing the building
When BYC secured a grant from SMBC Aviation Capital through Community Foundation Ireland, part of it was to refurbish the building. This article has been written from interviews with Jonathan, team lead, Darragh Lynch, board member and architect and young people. A...
Our model
In 2019, BYC secured funding from SMBC Aviation Capital through the Community Foundation for Ireland to facilitate the refurbishment of the building and the creation of a hub for Restorative Practice (RP). An RP committee was set up among board members to look at the...