Truth, Community Healing & Transformation™

The LMU TCHT Alliance provides a hub for campus and community partners to transform the culture and climate of institutions by catalyzing equitable, reciprocal, and authentic relationships through Ignatian reflection, intergroup dialogue, and Story Circles.

Vision

Inspired by our university mission, the Truth, Community Healing, and Transformation (TCHT) Alliance at Loyola Marymount University will transform our campus culture through humanization, dialogue, and belongingness.

 

 

Goals

• Serve as a hub to coordinate cross-campus efforts to address instances of impact or harm using a restorative framework:
  • Develop a collective understanding among all constituents of the need to intentionally prioritize proactive relationship-building as a foundation for making generative conflict possible.
  • Leverage the partnerships between the TCHT, LMU Restore, & Ombuds to build capacity for generative conflict.
  • Continue to build capacity among faculty, staff, and students to develop related skills and competencies.
• More transparently articulate connections between the TCHT framework and our University's mission:
  
  • Express the relationship between our commitment to educating the whole person and the power of self-reflective storytelling to deepen empathy and understanding.
  • Foster interfaith work as one fruitful pathway toward increasing a sense of belonging among all community members.
• Deepen and sustain relationships grounded in mutuality and reciprocity, informed by the TCHT framework:
  • Advocate for and centralize reconciliation from colonialism, enslavement, settler-colonialism, and other harmful practices initiated by the Catholic Church and beyond.
  • Nurture partnerships and give agency with entities on campus and with community-based organizations via TCHT whose work aligns with the TCHT framework.

The TCHT Alliance offers facilitated circles and other workshops by request for departments, units, and other groups at LMU. We also provide capacity-building opportunities for faculty, staff, and students interested in building their capacity to engage in dialogue across differences to facilitate spaces that catalyze growth, change, and a sense of belonging among all community members.

Capacity Building Offerings

Facilitator Practice Group: If you have gone through any programs and would like to further contribute to our mission to create a justice-centered campus, you can join our Facilitator Practice Group. You will get the opportunity to develop facilitation skills related to conflict engagement, restorative practices, and other areas. Facilitators will receive a stipend for their work and the group is made up of faculty and staff throughout campus.

Intercultural Facilitators (IF): The premise of the program is to develop a group of students, highly skilled in principles of facilitation, to effectively facilitate other students in critical cultural conversations. These conversations lead to an authentic understanding of self, simple but comprehensive ways to engage and inspire community and an honest and inclusive approach to transformative student develop. Learn more about the IF program.

Restorative Justice Facilitators Work Group: The work group provides support for the implementation of restorative justice practices on campus. Through a structured monthly meeting, participants engage in practice and skill building as well as receive support for their department-level implementation of RJ. Through regular circle practice, members also utilize social-emotional learning to build community and connection. The work group contributes to staff retention by providing a space where everyone can feel heard, valued and supported. Learn more about LMU Restore.

Truth, Community Healing and Transformation Alliance: The TCHT Alliance offers facilitated circles and other workshops by request for departments, units, and other groups at LMU. We also offer capacity building opportunities for faculty, staff, and students who are interested in building their capacity to engage in dialogue across difference, to facilitate spaces that catalyze growth, change, and a sense of belonging among all community members.

General Community Building

Generative Conflict: Five-Part Listening: This interactive workshop is designed to support you in preparing to engage conflict skillfully and in ways that can strengthen relationships and build community in generative ways. Participants will engage with foundational tools drawn from the traditions of restorative justice practices (RJ/RP) and nonviolent communication (NVC).

Generative Conflict: Difficult Conversations: This interactive session will invite participants to deepen their practice of addressing conflict skillfully through an exploration of conflict avoidance, cultivating our capacity for discernment related how to approach conflict skillfully, and by practicing how to implement distinct strategies for engaging in difficult conversations in productive ways.

Generative Conflict: I-Messages: Participants will practice on an essential strategy for deepening self-awareness through a needs-based framework that can help to de-escalate conflict and invite others into a collaborative mode of relating about an issue or conflict that needs to be addressed. By developing, practicing, and reflecting on I-messages, new insights will be revealed about the root causes of conflict within interpersonal relationships that can lead to creative and collaborative problem-solving.

Generative Conflict: Nervous System Fluency & Assertive Communication Participants will engage in strategies to increase nervous system fluency, which serves as a foundation for self-awareness in how to address conflict skillfully. Opportunities will be provided for further reflection on positionality related to a range of identities and will be supported in interrogating how our perspectives on and experiences with power dynamics influence our ability to communicate assertively.

Generative Conflict: Presupposition and Multipartiality: This dynamic workshop invites participants to explore presupposition through powerful psychological concepts like implicit bias, cognitive distortions, neutrality, and multipartiality in a hands-on, interactive way. Through engaging activities, we will uncover ideas that twist our perception of reality and explore how they shape our interactions. With practical tools and thought-provoking discussions, you’ll leave empowered to challenge your own thinking, become a more empathetic communicator, and create more inclusive spaces wherever you go.

Restorative Conferences: The Restorative Conference is a safe and structured way to invite people in conflict, along with their supporters, to address a harm. Neither a counseling nor a mediation process, conferencing is a participant-sensitive, straightforward method requiring a trained and multipartial facilitator to help guide a conversation about the incident and how it affects everyone. The facilitator ensures everyone gets a chance to speak, however, the facilitator is not an active participant. The outcomes are approved by all of the participants and when an agreement is reached, a document is written and signed to provide a roadmap for future interactions. The Restorative Conferencing facilitator asks the group three key questions:

Restorative Practices Individual Consultation: An informal meeting with a trained facilitator to talk about a conflict, explore how you're feeling, what your goals are and brainstorm an action plan for next steps. Take the Conflict Profile and/or get some tools for having difficult conversations and identify ways to follow up on what you're currently experiencing.

Restorative Practices Group or Organization Consultation:  A multipartial staff member is available to meet and work with student groups and Registered Student Organizations, faculty, and staff. This resource can take multiple forms, all beginning with a consultation with the multipartial staff member to listen to the concern, assist with identifying goals and collaboratively generating options for moving forward. The consultation can take place with an individual or multiple members of the group or organization. 

Restorative Practices Facilitation: An informal process that assists groups in respectful dialogue, collaborative decision-making, establishing, or resetting group norms and expectations. A multipartial staff member guides the facilitation to help two or more people achieve mutual understanding or reach a decision. The goal of facilitation is to help individuals and groups efficiently and collaboratively work together toward their larger common goals and interests.

Assessment Driven Coaching

Prices cover the license for the assessment and require a 1:1 meeting with a trained facilitator.

Conflict Dynamics Profile:

The CDP-I report contains graphs measuring constructive behaviors, destructive behaviors, and hot buttons. It is accompanied by a 40-page Development Guide which gives suggestions for improving behaviors and cooling hot buttons.

The CDP-360 report is much more comprehensive. In addition to containing graphs measuring constructive behaviors, destructive behaviors, and hot buttons, it also has narrative comments from other raters, measures of the organizational importance of various conflict behaviors, and indications of how the individual is viewed during different stages of conflict. Accompanying the CDP-360 report is a 115-page Development Guide with suggestions for development, recommended resources, and guidelines for successful action planning.

Intercultural Development Inventory®: The IDI measures individuals’ and groups’ placement along the Intercultural Development Continuum (IDC). The IDC describes orientations toward cultural differences ranging from the more monocultural mindsets of Denial and Polarization through the transitional orientation of Minimization to the intercultural mindsets of Acceptance and Adaptation.

Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory®: The Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory is an 18-item questionnaire that is available online (in multiple languages) and in print (English language) versions. The ICS Inventory is an easy to use, cross-culturally validated assessment of an individual’s approach to communicating, resolving conflicts and solving problems. The ICS Inventory takes 15 minutes to complete. The online ICS Inventory has been professionally “back translated” into multiple languages using rigorous, scientific protocols to insure each of the items possess both linguistic and conceptual equivalency. This ensures that the various language versions of the online ICS Inventory have similar meaning across cultures. We recommend the ICS Inventory be used with individuals 15 years of age or higher.