The challenges of growing up black and female in apartheid South Africa has led Naomi Tutu to her present as an activist for human rights.  Those experiences taught how much we all lose when any of us is judged purely on physical attributes.  In her speeches she blends the passion for human dignity with humor and personal stories.

Ms. Tutu is the third child of Archbishop Desmond and Nomalizo Leah Tutu.  She was born in South Africa and has also lived in Lesotho, the United Kingdom and the United States.  She was educated in Swaziland, the US and England, and has divided her adult life between South Africa and the US. Her professional experience ranges from being a development consultant in West Africa, to being program coordinator for programs on Race and Gender and Gender-based Violence in Education at the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town.  In addition, Ms. Tutu has taught at the Universities of Hartford and Connecticut and Brevard College in North Carolina.  Growing up the ‘daughter of …’ has offered Naomi Tutu many opportunities and challenges in her life.  Most important of these has been the challenge to find her own place in the world.  She has taken up the challenge and channeled the opportunities that she has been given to raise her voice as a champion for the dignity of all.

John Braithwaite is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Founder of RegNet (the Regulatory Institutions Network) at the Australian National University.

He is embarking on a 20-year comparative project called ‘Peacebuilding Compared’,  with Hilary Charlesworth, Valerie Braithwaite and Kate Macfarlane. In the past he has worked on a variety of areas of business regulation and on the crime problem. His best known work is on the ideas of responsive regulation and restorative justice.

John Braithwaite has been active in social movement politics around these and other ideas for 40 years in Australia and internationally. His most recent book is Regulatory Capitalism: How it works, ideas for making it work better (2008).

Kathleen Daly is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University (Brisbane).  She writes on gender, race, crime, and justice; and on restorative, Indigenous, and international criminal justice.  Her book, Gender, Crime, and Punishment (1994, Yale University Press) received the Michael Hindelang award from the American Society of Criminology.  With Lisa Maher, she co-edited Criminology at the Crossroads: Feminist Readings in Crime and Justice (1998, Oxford University Press); and with Andrew Goldsmith and Mark Israel, Crime and Justice: A Guide to Criminology (2006, Lawbook Company).  First based in the United States, she travelled to Australia in 1995 as a Senior Fulbright Scholar to study restorative justice.

From 1998 to 2006, she received three Australian Research Council (ARC) grants to research restorative justice and the race/gender politics of new justice practices.  In 2008, she launched an international project on innovative responses to sexual violence; and in 2009, as co-PI with Elena Marchetti and Jackie Huggins, a project on sentencing Indigenous partner violence in Australia, both funded by the ARC.  In addition to books and edited volumes, she has published over 70 articles in journals, law reviews, and books.  She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and immediate past President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (2005-09).

---

Widely known as “the grandfather of restorative justice,” Zehr began as a practitioner and theorist in restorative justice in the late 1970s at the foundational stage of the field. Zehr continues in this third decade to deepen the principles of restorative justice and grow its practice worldwide. He has led hundreds of events in some 25 countries and 35 states, including trainings and consultations on restorative justice, victim-offender conferencing, judicial reform, and other criminal justice matters. His impact has been especially significant in the United States, Brazil, Japan, Jamaica, Northern Ireland, Britain, the Ukraine, and New Zealand, a country that has restructured its juvenile justice system into a family-focused, restorative approach, causing a dramatic drop in youth crime.

A prolific writer and editor, speaker, educator, and photojournalist, Zehr actively mentors other leaders in the field. More than 1,000 people have taken Zehr-taught courses and intensive workshops in restorative justice, many of whom lead their own restorative justice-focused organizations, such as the Council for Restorative Justice at Georgia State University, the Youth Justice Initiative in Iowa, and Mediation Northern Ireland (a major contributor to peace in Northern Ireland).

Zehr was an early advocate of making the needs of victims central to the practice of restorative justice. A core theme in his work is respect for the dignity of all peoples.

---

Harley Eagle is of Dakota/Salteaux First Nations, enrolled in the Wapaha Ska Dakota First Nations Reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada. He resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with his wife Sue, who is of Russian Mennonite descent, and their two wonderful daughters, Danielle and Emma. They share a position as co-coordinators of Mennonite Central Committee Canada’s work with Aboriginal people. In addition, Harley is co-director of the Anti-Racism Program (ARP) of Mennonite Central Committee U.S., where he is also a Dismantling Racism trainer. Harley’s most recent work involves designing a process for People of Color to address internalized racist oppression.

Joan Pennell, MSW, PhD is a professor of Social Work and Director of the Center for Family and Community Engagement at North Carolina State University. Her center has received funding for work on family meetings in child welfare, schools, domestic violence, and system of care. She co-authored Community Research as Empowerment (Oxford University Press) and Widening the Circle: The Practice and Evaluation of Family Group Conferencing with Children, Youths, and Their Families (NASW Press). She has presented on family engagement and family violence in Australia, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and USA. For her, restorative justice is about peacemaking in the home and community and around the globe.

Mary P. Koss is a Regents’ Professor in the Mel and Enid Zuckerman Arizona College of Public Health at the University of Arizona. She is co-editor of a two book series for the American Psychological Association, Violence Against Women and Children (2011). She was the principal investigator of the RESTORE Program, a restorative justice option for selected sex crimes among adults. In 2010 she was the 8th recipient of the Visionary Award from the law enforcement training and technical assistance organization, Ending Violence Against Women International.

Ms. Penelope Griffith, LICSW, is the Executive Director of the Columbia Heights/Shaw Family Support Collaborative.  She received her Masters of Social Work degree from the University of Maryland.  Ms. Griffith has worked extensively with families and children for over eighteen years and has worked at the Collaborative since 1998.  Over the past decade Ms. Griffith’s training expertise placed her as one of the leading experts in the field of Gang Violence Intervention and Prevention Methods. In 2008, Ms. Griffith assisted the District of Columbia government to design and pilot a city wide response to youth violence in the city and neighboring states.

Ms. Griffith has been intensively trained in Solution Focused interviewing by the Solution Focused Brief Therapy Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  She is an expert in the field of Family Group Conferencing and Solution Focused Interviewing and provides ongoing training and consultation to partner agencies in the Columbia Heights and Shaw communities.

Dr. Mark Umbreit is a Professor and the founding Director of the Center for Restorative Justice & Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota, School of Social Work. For the 2005-06 academic year, he served as the Boden Chair Visiting Scholar at the Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee and has served as a Fellow of the International Centre for Healing and the Law in Kalamazoo, Michigan for two years.

Mark also serves on the faculty of the Center for Spirituality and Healing in the U.M. Academic Health Center, teaching courses on Peacemaking & Spirituality, and Forgiveness & Healing. He is an internationally recognized practitioner and scholar with more than 39 years of experience as a mediator, trainer, researcher and author of seven books and more than 200 articles, book chapters, and monographs in the fields of restorative justice, mediation, and peacemaking. Dr. Umbreit has conducted training seminars and lectures throughout the entire United States and Canada, as well as in Belgium, China, Colombia, Denmark, England, Japan, Germany, Hong Kong, Northern Ireland, Holland, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Norway, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Trinidad, and the Ukraine.  Dr. Umbreit is currently serving as a Visiting Professor at the Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee.

---

Stephen Mugford is formerly a Reader in Sociology at ANU. He holds an Honours degree in Sociology from the University of London (1968) and a PhD from the University of Bristol (1974).

Dr. Mugford is involved in a number of organizational change projects providing high-level advice to, team building with, and executive coaching of, senior managers. He also conducts social research with an applied/policy focus.

His academic background and experience in sociological research provides wide-ranging knowledge and conceptual skills, underpinned by a distinguished record of academic publications. This includes national and international journal articles and book chapters as well as numerous research and policy reports for Federal government agencies and the private sector.

Dr. Mugford has worked extensively with uniformed services and has carried out major projects for the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Army, the Defense Equity Organization, the Australian Defense Force Academy (ADFA) and the Royal Australian Navy as well as Commonwealth and State Government Departments (e.g. Health, Family and Community Services, Transport and Regional Development, ACT Health & Community Services), statutory bodies and offices (e.g. Federal Office of Road Safety, NSW Roads & Traffic Authority, Australian Institute of Criminology), tertiary institutions (e.g. University of Technology Sydney (UTS), and Sydney University) as well as organizations such as Divisions of General Practice (ACT, Wagga Wagga), and service providers (e.g. Karralika Drug Rehabilitation Service).

Currently, he is involved with the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in several aspects of their cultural change program (including executive development with the senior leadership team), with the Australian Defense College, and with executive training programs for Macquarie Graduate School of Management and the Australian Institute of Police Management. Work for the RAAF blends training, development and research aspects with coaching, advice and assistance with achieving strategic goals in the human resources area.