Trustees:

Helen Bowen and Jim Boyack, New Zealand criminal lawyers, set up the Restorative Justice Trust (the trust) in 1999. They remain its trustees.

Among the trust’s charitable objects are the study and promotion of best practice in restorative justice processes both in New Zealand and internationally.

The trust’s objects include teaching restorative values and practice, designing and implementing restorative programmes and pilot schemes, and funding evaluations of such pilots, either itself or with government and/or NGO partners.

Helen and Jim’s immediate plans for the trust were to get funding to write a restorative justice (RJ) practice manual encapsulating their learning as volunteer RJ facilitators over the previous five years with New Zealand’s first RJ group, Te Oritenga, to evaluate the manual’s teachings in a RJ pilot programme at a local criminal court and to lobby the government to expand RJ practice to all courts in New Zealand.

The NZRJ manual, currently unavailable to purchase due to being updated, was published in early 2000, its processes were trialed and evaluated at the Waitakere District Court in Auckland over six months that year and the government decided to pilot restorative practice over four years in Auckland, Waitakere, Hamilton and Dunedin (2001-2005).

Government tenders were called for to train 120 facilitators nationwide, and Helen and Jim’s tender, because of their experience in the field, was accepted.

Then in 2002, because of proven RJ success stories, legislation was amended to provide for restorative outcomes to be recognized nationally at sentencing, at parole release and in all official dealing with victims of crime. New Zealand remains the only criminal jurisdiction in the world in which all courts must take into account RJ outcomes.

The trust’s objects enable Helen and Jim to consult internationally, and they have done so with government agencies, NGOs, corporates and community groups in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.

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