Branches and Roots
Restorative and Transformative Practices in Tandem
In every living system, balance is not found in stillness but in movement, in the ongoing interplay of forces that shape and sustain life. A tree does not stand by branches alone — it is held by the unseen roots beneath the surface, drawing nourishment from deep within the earth. In the same way, our work in justice, education, and community must be both restorative and transformative — one tending to repair, the other forging new possibilities. One reaching out, the other reaching down. As Ella Baker said, “lift as you climb.”
Too often, we see these practices as separate, even at odds with one another. Restorative practice asks: How do we heal what has been harmed? Transformative practice asks: How do we reshape the conditions that created harm in the first place? But these questions are not in competition — they are a rhythm, a call and response. Healing and change must breathe together.
The Role of Restorative Practice: Repairing the Canopy
Restorative practices are about mending, making right, bringing people back into relationship with one another. In communities, schools, and workplaces, this often looks like:
Circles and dialogues that centre voice and accountability.
Restorative justice processes that seek to repair harm rather than simply punish.
Relational trust-building, creating spaces where people feel seen and heard.
Restorative practice is the branches of the tree — extending outwards to reconnect and realign. It acknowledges the reality of harm but believes in the possibility of return. It tells us that justice is not simply about consequence; it is about relationship.
But healing alone is not enough if the soil remains poisoned. A branch can be bound and healed, but if the roots sit in contaminated ground, harm will come again.
The Role of Transformative Practice: Reshaping the Soil
Transformative practice moves deeper. It asks not only how to repair harm but how to uproot the systems, structures, and ways of thinking that made the harm inevitable. At its core, it is:
Policy and structural change that shifts power, not just process.
Liberatory education and pedagogy that expands what we believe is possible.
Cultural and systemic interventions that prevent harm before it begins.
If restorative practice is the branches, transformative practice is the roots — working beneath the surface to disrupt and reimagine the possibilities inherent in the patterns of a person’s behaviour and how that person can be transformed through community. I recall one of my colleagues saying, when a student would push her away, she would draw them in closer as she shifted the environment alongside the student — there is such great wisdom in that belief system. Transformative practice does not just reintegrate those harmed or those who caused harm; it changes the conditions that create the harm to begin with.
How They Work in Tandem: The Ecology of Change
Restorative and transformative practices are not competing frameworks. They are an ecosystem of relationship and trust. If we only focus on restoration, we risk maintaining unjust systems under the guise of healing. If we focus only on transformation, we risk losing the human, relational work of repair.
One without the other is incomplete.
In practice, this will shift in varying environments but can be adapted to any environment. We are all capable of repair and restoration, we are all capable of transformation, we are all in a constant ebb and flow between pathology and possibility. What this means:
In Education
Restorative circles for students in conflict, but also decolonizing curriculum that prevents that conflict from being rooted in systemic harm. If we never address the realities of colonization, systemic oppression, and the embedded injustices of our inherited collective traumas, we will reduce our understanding of harm as individualistic alone instead of as a collective accountability. When I see adults complaining about how young people are nihilistic or cruel, as though this is an abstract phenomenon, I have to remind them that we were the ones who created an attention and outrage economy culture where young people see that attention means you’re important, regardless of your intention. And if you’re important, you have power over others, not with others. And if you have attention and power, you are an influencer regardless of integrity. Consider who is in the White House in 2025 and the story of how how he arrived there. How else have we shown our young people a better way of being and that empowering others to heal and not harm is the way to be? Time for a new template: Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry to name a few.
In Justice Work
Healing-centred mediation for those impacted by harm, but also abolitionist frameworks that ask what justice could look like beyond carceral logic. When I have worked with white supremacists, individuals who have reached the extremes of violence and hatred, I interrupt their ideology and recognize that no child grows up wishing to be a white supremacist. There is a gap that is filled: a lack of belonging becomes an opportunity for indoctrination. Many times, when one of the individuals I have supported is working through the motions of their internalized indoctrination, they might become violent or scream slurs at me. I maintain composure as I understand that this hatred is an addiction, a dopamine hit, a way of psychologically presenting that they are not afraid. One thing I know from working with members of hate groups is that they fear everything, it is the core of the ideology underneath all of the intense hatred that seeps into every fibre of their being, and that fear and insecurity becomes a breeding ground for violence that destroys the lives of innocent people their hatred motivates them to harm. When they would finish screaming, I would politely ask them, “Are you ready to talk about your father now?” Or their mother. Or the incident that happened in middle school. Or the abuse they endured, the neglect, the self-loathing. It is no coincidence that many of these individuals are indoctrinated young and age-out in their twenties, a time when identity is fragmented, fragile, and vulnerable to insinuation and misdirection. There is never an easy answer, but every single one of these individuals who has been rehabilitated has become a devoted anti-racist working to draw more recruited extremists out of the organizations they were once devoted and hateful members of, which means that there are people who are walking the streets safely because one more person was transformed.
In Communities
Spaces to process trauma and build relational repair, but also movements that address inequities in housing, healthcare, and governance. So many community-based issues are rooted in systemic oppression and distribution of inequity. I have seen the domino effect in my own life as a racialized person: a target of someone in power over me can begin a chain of events that begin to implode all other areas of my life. For example, being harassed out of one’s home due to a power differential rooted in oppression (racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, classism, homophobia, transphobia), which impacts your ability to perform at work (survival mechanism rooted in capitalism, exploitation, and being a worker before you are a human being) as you are displaced, which impacts your ability to maintain emotional, physical, and mental well-being, which creates a despair and hopelessness that destroy you spiritually and isolates you from a network of support. In harmful environments, the effects of this domino effect can also be interpreted by biased observers as evidence of inferiority, incompetence, of not belonging or being an appropriate “fit” for an environment that was never conducive to safety and belonging to begin with — and the cycles of colonial and oppressive harm carry on and are reinforced. If we are not looking at the interconnection of how each aspect can uplift or perpetuate oppression and harm, we will continue to have the same harm repeat. The roots are where the patterns lie, let’s begin to disrupt them in ourselves, in others, and in the spaces we inhabit.
Growing the Future: A Living Commitment
A tree cannot survive without both its roots and its branches. Likewise, our movements, schools, and organizations cannot thrive without both restoration and transformation. The work of justice is not simply to fix but to reimagine. Not simply to heal but to create conditions where harm is less possible.
We must be gardeners and healers, strategists and storytellers. We must tend to the wounds and the soil, knowing that justice is not a singular act but an ongoing process — one that requires deep roots and wide-reaching branches.
As adrienne maree brown reminds us:
“Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.”
There is no single moment when the work is “finished.” Justice is not a destination — it is a forest we are growing, a network of roots and branches that will stretch far beyond our own time. What we restore today, what we transform tomorrow, becomes the ecosystem that future generations will inherit.
So let us keep tending. Keep reaching. Keep rooting.
The tree is still growing.
We may not see its full bloom, but we are a part of its becoming.
Rooted and resilient,
Ms. K
