The Virginia Center for Restorative Justice (VCRJ) was formed in August 2010 as a faith-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. We began to recruit and train volunteers right away. One of our first programs were dialog circles, based on restorative justice and the principles of trust, honesty, respect, empathy, forgiveness, integrity, accountability, determination, humility and service to community.  We offer this popular dialog circle program in prisons as a five-week or ten-week class, called “How to Handle Conflict.”

We began offering the Victim Offender Conference as a diversion program in Henrico and Richmond City Juvenile Court Service Units in 2015.

• Being able to offer young people a second chance to take responsibility and make things right to the people they harmed was exhilarating. 
• Over the first few years, we received 50 case referrals for Victim Offender Conferences.
• We had an 87% success rate. (87% of the young people who completed our restorative justice program did not re-offend within a year.)

This evidence supports our belief that people are less likely to re-offend when they are held accountable, given the opportunity to face their victims and “make right” the harm they created.

Since 2017, VCRJ has also provided an after-school program that showed children about restorative justice values.  

We created dialog circles for high school youth, restorative justice training for teachers and school administrators, and training/workshops on restorative justice for state employees and VCRJ Volunteers.