Restoring Rochester is an opportunity to bring together individuals with a common heart and call to action for the city of Rochester.  This year’s conference will focus specifically on the call to action to empower young men of color in our city.  As our young people face challenges and adversitites, the call to action for every one of us, is to declare and explore how we can all be our brother's keepers.

Restorative champions across the city and country are using Restorative Practices in settings such as schools, community based organizations, faith based organizations, the judicial system, and mental health organizations to heal harm and rebuild relationships. Through a series of keynote speakers and panels, the Restoring Rochester conference will provide opportunity for learning, growth, community and celebrating our tremendous potential as a Restorative Rochester.

Cost includes a continental breakfast and lunch.

Early Bird Ticket Price:  $45.00 (until Friday, April 5)

Ticket Price: $60.00 (after Friday, April 5)

4 CEU credits are available

4 PDI credits for RCSD employees

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Victor Rios

Dr. Victor Rios is an award-winning college professor, author, and speaker.  Dr. Rios works with educators and service providers on Educational Equity, Cultural Responsiveness, Resilience, Closing the Opportunity Gap, Teacher Well-Being, and Restorative Justice.

Based on over a decade of research, Dr. Victor Rios created Project GRIT (Generating Resilience to Inspire Transformation) a human development program that works with educators to refine leadership, civic engagement and personal and academic empowerment in young people placed at-risk.

Rios is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in comparative ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005. His book Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys discusses the many ways in which young urban males of color encounter the youth control complex: a ubiquitous system of punitive social control embedded in what has come to be known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

What others say

“Many specialists in juvenile justice say they admire what Rios has achieved in Punished: to show, from his unusual perspective, how inner-city Latino and African-American boys develop their sense of self in the midst of crime and intense policing, and how it can come about that young minority men lose trust in the institutions of civil society.” — The Chronicle of Higher Education

Plenary Speaker

Dr. Yohuru Williams

Described in Diverse Issues in Higher Education as “one of the most exciting scholars of his generation,” Dr. Yohuru Williams is the History Department Chair and the Director of Black Studies at Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT. He is also Chief Historian for the Jackie Robinson Foundation and Museum in New York, NY. He received his Ph.D. from Howard University in 1998.

Dr. Williams is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power and the Black Panthers in New Haven (Blackwell, 2000) and Teaching U.S. History Beyond the Textbook: Six Investigative Strategies, Grades 5-12 (Corwin Press, 2008) and the editor of A Constant Struggle: African-American History, 1865-Present (Kendall Hunt, 2002). He is the co-editor of In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Duke, 2006), and Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party (Duke, 2008). He also served as general editor for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History's 2002 and 2003 Black History Month publications The Color Line Revisited: Is Racism Dead? (Tapestry Press, 2002) and The Souls of Black Folks: Centennial Reflections (Africa World Press, 2003). Dr. Williams served as an advisor on the popular civil rights reader Putting the Movement Back into Teaching Civil Rights (Teaching for Change and PRRAC, 2004). Dr. Williams is presently completing a single-authored book, titled Six Degrees of Segregation: Lynching, Capital Punishment, and Jim Crow Justice, 1865-1930. 

Restoring Rochester is sponsored in partnership with the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, ROC Restorative Team and the Rochester City School District, the City of Rochester.