 Good morning. Thank you. I want to acknowledge the Mi'kma and the African Nova Scotians who opened us up in such a beautiful way this morning with their song, their drumming, their prayer, their smudging. I also wish to acknowledge the Mi'kma as the first peoples of this land acknowledging that this is a post-genocidal context, a post-genocidal land while recognizing that Canada as a nation is beginning to acknowledge responsibility for this historical harm and is taking first steps to address it through the historic settlement and truth and reconciliation process which has ended but which I hope will continue. I also wish to acknowledge the African Nova Scotian people who were here historically. We were hosted by them on Saturdays, was said by another speaker and it was such an eye-opening experience for me. Again, I want to acknowledge the historical suffering, the institutional and systemic inequities and also recognize that the province of Nova Scotia is taking steps, is taking responsibility through the historic settlement and restorative inquiry process. And I want to acknowledge the formidable Jen Llewellyn and Amanda and the rest of the wonderful organizing team and all of you we hear from all over the globe. I want to tell you a little bit about our work in Oakland, California. I co-founded Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. The acronym is RJOY, RJ-O-Y. I became its director in 2008 and our mission is to promote restorative justice practices and policies in Oakland's schools, community and juvenile justice system. We started with a middle school pilot in a black area, probably the most economically depressed and highest crime area in Oakland. And we were successful in reducing suspensions by 87% and also reducing racial disparities because as was said earlier by Moana and by Richard that you can reduce suspensions using restorative justice without touching or even with increasing racial disparities. We also were able to eliminate violence, that was a school where there had been a lot of fights because students learned to talk through instead of fight through their differences. We were able to reduce or eliminate teacher attrition. It became a school where students wanted to learn and teachers wanted to teach and we were also able to increase test scores. So this got the attention of the entire school district. They didn't even know that we were there the first two years. And they, with some youth organizing, the school district, the board, adopted restorative justice as official school policy, not only as an alternative to out of school discipline but also as a proactive means of creating a healthy and caring environment and a cultural connectivity. And could we go to the slide? There's a triangle there. We used a three-tiered approach. Well, that's the pilot. We can go on to the next slide. And that's the resolution and we can go on to the next slide. Actually, is there one with a triangle? There we go. So this illustrates the three-tiered approach. And it needs to be clicked a couple of more times so you can see all three tiers. The first tier involves training teachers, cafeteria workers, school security guards, counselors, everyone as much as possible. At least 80% of the adult staff is trained in how to conduct restorative conversations, is trained in how to facilitate community-building circles, not the more complicated and time-consuming conflict circles or family group conferencing. This tier one impacts the entire climate of the school. And we feel that it's more important to do tier or we want to do, I should say, we strive to do more community-building circles than conflict circles because these proactive circles promote social-emotional learning and reduce the chance of unhealthy conflict occurring or unhealthy responses to conflict. So the second tier would be for persons who are in charge of discipline, deans of discipline for administrators who are tasked with discipline. And they are trained both in tier one and in tier two, which is how to facilitate conflict circles. Tier three are reentry circles and these are circles for youth who are returning from a period of incarceration or other absence and the whole purpose of the circle is to bring them and their family in so that the student can reintegrate into the school in a positive and healthy way. Now can we go backwards, please? So a study was done in January of 2015 a little bit more than a year ago comparing restorative justice schools with non-restorative justice schools over a period of three years and we had some pretty amazing results. First, the graduation rates, I can't really see, the graduation rates at restorative justice schools increased by 60% and only by 7% at non-restorative justice schools. The blue bar would be the restorative justice schools and the orange one would be the non-restorative justice schools. The reading scores increased by 128% at restorative justice schools and only by 17, is that 17%? No, 11% at non-restorative justice schools. Chuanxi chronic absence decreased by 24% at restorative justice schools versus an increase of 62% at non-restorative justice schools. The dropout rate decreased by 56% versus 17% and the suspensions decreased by 50% and so on. So in Oakland, are we practicing school-based restorative justice through a racial justice and social transformation lens? Absolutely, we are. We make it a point of understanding how schools reproduce and replicate and perpetuate systemic inequities and we figure out how restorative justice, the way that we practice it, can help break those cycles. Let's say, for example, mass incarceration or racialized mass incarceration. As many of you know, the U.S. forms only 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prisoners. You may not know that one out of every three black males can expect to go to prison at some point in his or her life. You may not know that the incarceration rates of black youth is six times that of their white counterparts. You may not know that black youth are nine times more likely to have an incarcerated parent. Black and brown people form only 30% of the general population but 60% of the prison population of the U.S. And with the rise of the prison industrial complex with the rise of mass incarceration over the last four decades where we've seen a quadrupling of rates of incarceration we've seen a parallel rise in the use of out-of-school suspension and school-based arrests. Black youth are being suspended at three times the rate of their white counterparts and we know that once a youth is suspended their chances of being incarcerated triples according to a study out of the UCLA Civil Rights Project. Their chances of dropping out doubles and we know that once a kid drops out they're headed into that school-to-prison pipeline. Even one suspension as I said earlier can put them in that school-to-prison pipeline. So the question is how do we practice restorative justice in ways that will disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline? First of all it takes a lot of awareness, a hyper-awareness about these issues and secondly it requires us to look at data and follow it especially disaggregated by race and look at it on a regular basis and make changes in our work as we need to. I want to tell a story about Cameron. Cameron, his first suspension was at the age of four and it was for that of his own candy. He had some candy, the principal took the candy, the principal put it in his office under lock and key. Cameron was resourceful as he was even then found an open window, got a chair, jumped on the chair and went through the window and retrieved his bag of Skittles. And for that he was suspended for four days for theft. And this ensnared him in this system where he ended up by the age of, by 11th grade with 150 suspensions, multiple school-based arrests and multiple expulsion hearings. His second, his first arrest was for having a milk fight, an adolescent milk fight when he was in middle school, a milk fight in the cafeteria. He and his friends were throwing milk cartons at one another. It was not until he got into 12th grade and was sent to a restorative justice school that things changed for him. Even though he was sagging, you know what we mean by sagging, right? And was wearing a hoodie and had a terrible attitude. As soon as he walked into the door of this new school, he was embraced. He was used to being stereotyped. He was used to being jacketed as someone who is a gangster, is a thug, if not a super-predator. But this school welcomed him with open arms. He felt that they could see him. The principal invited him into her office and she gave him his thick jacket of arrests and expulsions and suspensions and invited him to tear that up and throw it away. And then he was escorted to the restorative justice room where he saw a bunch of youth talking about their feelings and crying. He'd never seen anything like that before, because a man don't do that, you know, as far as he understood. And he ended up graduating with a 3.7 grade point average. I don't know if that translates here to how it affects in Canada, but a very high grade point average. And today he is a trainer and presenter in traveling all over the country for restorative justice for Oakland youth organizations. And so our task is to create these kinds of opportunities, not just for Cameron and other young men, but for all of the young men. And we do this by not only creating programs and offering these services to our individual youth, but creating systemic changes. As I said earlier, we engaged in advocacy so that restorative justice would become official policy and not just an alternative. So to close, oh, I should say... Oh boy, okay. I need to close right now, but very quickly, is this the way we practice restorative justice as a whole in the United States? No. This has been a real challenge. The first 35 years of the restorative justice movement in the United States, there has been no consciousness of race, no consciousness of racial justice. I'm happy to say that this is changing, especially with the work that we're doing in Oakland. Now, when I... Well, I should say when I first learned about restorative justice in 2003, I googled race and restorative justice and only got maybe four hits and knew from that moment that we would need to get about some work to change this. And we have been successful in doing that, especially those of us in Oakland. And today, if you google race and restorative justice, you'll get tens of thousands of hits. There's still no books yet that have been written on the subject. We still need to do that, but there are many conferences and regional convenings and lots of conversations and discussions on the subject. So thank you so much for your time and it's really been a pleasure being here. I'm certain that the next few days will be equally pleasurable and enlightening. Thanks again.