In Search of Peace Fund
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In Search of Peace Fund

What do we do with sexual harm, if we don’t turn to police, prisons, or forced silence?

We sit down together.

The Fund holds circles that respond to sexual harm with care instead of punishment, and resources the practice of the people who keep them.

What the Fund does

We hold circles. We resource practice.

What we hold

Circles

Participant-led, community-held, free to join. The list grows as communities ask for them.

  • In Search of Peace healing circlesCentral Virginia & onlineCommunity-rooted circles for those who have experienced harm, those who have caused it, support people, and community members. By donation; no one turned away.
  • Tenderfeet CirclesComing soonPeer-led healing circles for people who were sexually abused as children in the Boy Scouts, and for the people who love them. Modeled on Hidden Water.
  • Community DialoguesAcross the Southeast & beyondLarger inquiry circles that ask the hardest question out loud, and connect the practitioners and communities already answering it.
About the circles →
What we resource

Practice

Resourcing keepers is also educating the public, so everything here is open to anyone.

  • Keeper stipendsIn developmentDirect stipends to circle keepers doing otherwise un- or underfunded work, so the people holding circles can afford to keep holding them.
  • The field of practicesA mapSeven families of community-held practice, from safety planning to visionary work, with the practices in each named plainly.
  • We BeginCurriculum · in developmentA community justice curriculum organized around the seven practice families, for print, web, and the room.
  • Feelings & Needsfeelingsandneeds.orgFind the word for how you feel, and see what you might need. A free tool built on the work of Marshall B. Rosenberg.
  • Training & mentorshipFor keepersTraining, supervision, and company for the people holding this work across the southeastern United States and beyond.
  • LettersBy emailOpen letters from inside the work: what we're learning, what stays unresolved, what we're asking of each other.
About the practice →
Circles

A circle is a social technology of listening.

A place where questions can breathe, stories can be honored, histories held, and new growth can emerge. Circles take three shapes.

Parallel

Sometimes circles are only for survivors, or only for those who've caused harm, or only for loved ones. Separate rooms, the same questions.

Overlapping

When readiness, safety, and relationship allow, circles overlap — and people who were kept apart by harm sit in the same room.

Held

Every circle is shaped by the people in it and held by a keeper: not a neutral facilitator, but someone grounded, attuned, and in relationship.

Where this goes

A world in which communities respond to sexual harm through collective care, not punishment. Where no one is discarded, and accountability is a relational process, not a legal destination.

Values

Eleven commitments.

AccessibilityLiberatory practiceCommunity over carceralityConsentInterdependenceLineageMultiplicityParticipant-ledRelational accountabilitySafety through careSlowness

Letters

Open letters from inside the work: what we're learning, what stays unresolved, what we're asking of each other. By email, free, whenever there's something worth saying.

Support

We are building something slow, brave, and essential. Circles don't run on goodwill alone.

Every circle is free to join. Your support is what makes that true: keeper stipends, interpretation, transportation, child care, the slow work of seeding circles where no other community-based option exists.

The Fund is held by Wilfred Henry, a circle keeper and community justice practitioner in Central Virginia, with a growing network of co-keepers, collaborators, and advisors across the southeastern United States and beyond.