Specialist areas
Senior Leaderhsip, Advanced Restorative Practitioner, Restorative Justice Champion, Safeguarding Lead Officer, Criminal Justice, Prision Service, Chaplaincy, Youth Services and Education, Family based services, Environmental Health, Training Delivery, Conference Speaker, Project Management and Delivery
Length of experience
25 years
Experience
Julia is Chief Executive of Wales Restorative Approaches Partnership. Julia has over 15 years’ formal restorative experience, although she has always been committed to positive relationship development and conflict resolution work throughout her life. She is proud to be a Restorative Justice Champion with the Restorative Justice Council. She is a widely experienced trainer and expert practitioner in an extensive range of restorative approaches, from prevention and early intervention in education and families, through to complex response work, including working with offenders and victims around the most serious harms. Julia has been trained in a wide range of models and restorative practices and is committed to continuing professional development and learning. Julia was a restorative justice co-ordinator and champion in the prison service locally and nationally for 12 years. She has been a driver of restorative approaches development in local government collaborative cross sector partnerships, community safety, children’s services and residential care, and in whole family based restorative interventions. Julia also delivers conflict resolution facilitation and skills training in organisations and teams, and offers managers training in a values based restorative approach to leadership, relationship building, and problem solving. She has always been a passionate supporter of multi-agency collaborative projects across sectors and with service users, and believes in the ongoing active participation and scrutiny by ex-offenders, recovered victims, and all service users in interventions.
Julia has led and co-authored the design of several national and local restorative interventions, including the SORI programme of restorative prison interventions (Supporting Offenders through Restoration Inside, approved by the National Offender Management Service) in prisons, with a number of local partners. Julia enjoys co-producing bespoke interventions to respond to sector specific needs and issues, such as school and local authority service area and team mergers, workforce development, community consultation processes, and pupil transition work. Consequently, Julia has expertise knowledge in what works in partnerships, engagement and delivery, and ensuring the sustainable resourcing and embedding of restorative projects. Julia has had a usefully eclectic career, with qualifications and relevant experience in youth work, teaching and community education, environmental health and housing, pastoral care, and in prison and university chaplaincy, family-based services, team work and leadership. She is passionate about working ethically and co-operatively, and is committed to practicing and modelling being restorative, especially in the way WRAP develops and operates.
She has been a regular contributor to media coverage of restorative justice, and is a regular local and national conference and event speaker and organiser. Julia was nominated for the Butler Trust Award and the Guardian Public Servant of the Year Award for her prison work, and has been awarded the Catholic Woman of the Year Award. Julia has been a school governor for 15 years, which has brought valuable current knowledge and experience of the many challenges and opportunities facing schools, and those they serve. To keep her skills alive, Julia helps lead local church youth groups and music activities whenever she can, and attempts to parent restoratively, her lifetime work.