Conferences and Membership Maintain Restorative Justice Values

Source: (2003) VOMA Connections. Fall (15): 3,15.

In this essay, Susan Wiese celebrates the history of the Victim Offender Mediation Association (VOMA) and its role in advancing principles and practices of restorative justice in the United States and other countries. She traces the early history of the field of victim offender reconciliation and mediation programs in North America in the 1980s, and she continues to the present with a sketch of VOMA’s growth, even beyond North America. Wiese presents a helpful table chronologically highlighting all of VOMA’s conferences. VOMA conferences and membership, she asserts, keep people in the field engaged with each other and with new developments, while maintaining restorative justice values as the core of the field.