The Restorative Project aims to co-create and maintain safe, positively connected, inspiring school communities
through the faithful implementation of restorative and social-emotional practices. Our partnerships last 3-5 five years.
Join us in cultivating connected school communities where all children and adults feel like they belong, like they are valued, and like they are competent. Let's work together to develop and support the systems and routines that promote high expectations, high engagement, and high connection.
Meet Our Founder +
Executive Director
The Restorative Project, LLC is a community-building organization led by restorative practices specialist and certified parenting coach Andria Cole. Andria has supported the school-wide implementation of restorative and social-emotional practices at dozens of schools in a variety of states and also regularly facilitates community-building and responsive circle processes all across the country. She brings a trauma-informed, compassionate lens to the work and models what she teaches by cultivating inspiring and practical training experiences; building and maintaining relationships with students, teachers, staff, administrators and parents; and by challenging her school partners to center the health of their communities’ relationships above all else.
Andria was a special education and GED teacher for 15 years. In 2009, she began coaching teachers in an academic capacity and continued to do so until she was introduced to restorative practices in 2015. Restorative practices revolutionized her approach to coaching and consultation, effectively transforming her worldview to one grounded in empathy, interconnectedness and true accountability. Recent certifications in transformational parenting and African American, multi-generational trauma have sharpened Andria's coaching perspective and repertoire to include and focus on family and kinship systems and the elimination of toxic stress in both the home and school.
Andria is the co-founder and former executive director of A Revolutionary Summer, an intensive critical reading and writing program dedicated to shifting harmful narratives about Black women and girls. Most importantly, she is a mom and deeply fortunate to take the motherhood journey with her daughter Sol and son Jagger. Currently, she is seeking partners for a cooperative enterprise dedicated to providing, organizing and advocating for long-term, consistent parenting support for Black families in Baltimore.
Whole School Transformation
At-a-Glance
Children are the ways that the world begins again and again. If you fasten upon that concept of their promise, you will have trouble finding anything more awesome, and also anything more extraordinarily exhilarating, than the opportunity and/or the obligation to nurture a child into [their] own freedom."
-June Jordan
Our partnership is designed to strengthen your school’s capacity to prevent and respond to conflict, to fortify the school community’s relationships (between and among students, parents, faculty, staff, and administrators), and to ensure the faithful implementation of school-wide RP and SEL systems and practices. In order to begin the implementation process, a school must have established a moderate level of safety (a meaningful number of community members report feeling physically safe in the building). If safety hasn't been established, we must first work to interrupt any violence or harm that consistently threatens the community's well-being and to make small shifts that make a big difference (for example and in no particular order: stopping random loud speaker announcements; muting walkie-talkies when on classroom visits; providing students with agendas replete with transitions ahead of time; establishing consistent classroom entry routines; ensuring that all bathrooms have soap, paper towels and working locks; introducing parents to restorative principles). Once safety is established, we can begin priming the community for the beginning stages of the transformation process.
Whole school transformation necessitates the faithful implementation of restorative and social-emotional practices at the individual, organizational and systemic level. The shift from a traditional, typically punitive school model to a restorative one requires a period of 3-5 years well spent. Educators, administrators, support services professionals, parents, community partners and district personnel all play key roles in the transformation process. They must work to embody restorative and social emotional philosophies, understand deeply their frameworks and tools, and commit to applying and imparting their strategies on a moment-to-moment basis.
The model school incorporates restorative and proven social-emotional practices at every possible turn—we see a commitment to relationship-building, to minimizing shame, and to cultivating experiences of joy and authentic pride. Discipline codes, school-wide rituals, grading policies, classroom routines and discussions, interactions between school community members, and even the posters we see in a school’s hallways reflect a restorative community's unwavering commitment to its own health and well-being. Restorative communities are equitable and just communities that are committed to treating all their members with dignity and respect; to tending to their relationships with great care; to seeing conflict as an opportunity; and to challenging themselves to be better.
The Restorative Project appreciates the magnitude of such an undertaking and understands that the resources for managing a successful school-wide restorative practices and SEL implementation plan may not always be available. Because of this, we offer three tiers of support and work closely with school partners to develop a program to suit their specific needs and capabilities.
The Restorative Project's
Core Responsibilities
Restorative justice services
Professional development
Collaboration and planning
Monthly onsite support
Your Core Responsibilities
Adequate time and space
Dedication to collaborative planning
Commitment to professional development
Duty to accountability
Praise for The Restorative Project
“Ms. Cole is a great presenter. She is patient, kind, and empathetic. She really helped me understand [restorative practices].”
-Whole School Training Participant
“This truly was the most in-depth restorative practices training that I've attended. I feel that this PD built on the other trainings I experienced, and then took me even farther.”
-Whole School Training Participant
“The affective statements...I used them with my son soon as I learned the formula.”
-Whole School Training Participant