Source: (2008) Report of the fifth conference of the European Forum for Restorative Justice, Building restorative justice in Europe: cooperation between the public, policy makers, practitioners and researchers, Verona.
The main question about mediation often is “how can we spread mediation?.” The
existence and diffusion of a “mediation culture” is an important tool of peace building. The idea of creating a multicultural group of people that has been trained for one year with the aim to go back to their work places or to start working in places where different cultures meet and encounter each other is the main pillar of a project which has been carried on in southern Italy in 2007.
People living in Puglia have gone through a one-year mediation training session. In this training session participated Italian people, and also people from Sudan, Afghanistan, Albania and so on, who worked together in a “human oriented” multicultural workshop. Several months after the end of the training it was possible to collect the opinions of each of those people on how mediation and mediation tools have been used and applied according to the situations and the culture where they have worked. Each one of them has developed and applied different strategies and approaches to address the people they met. A follow-up reflection about this experience has provided us with more than one answer to
the initial question on “how to spread mediation” and different ways to address people in order to build knowledge on mediation. (excerpt)
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