A home for circle-based responses to sexual harm.
The In Search of Peace Fund is a grassroots initiative with support from a growing network of co-keepers, collaborators, and trusted advisors across the southeastern United States and beyond.
Mission
The In Search of Peace Fund seeds and sustains participant-led, community-held circles that respond to sexual harm, while resourcing and training the keepers who facilitate them.
Our work holds space for the full ecosystem of harms — harmed parties, those who caused harm, loved ones, and other impacted community members — creating parallel and overlapping spaces for accountability, dignity, and collective repair beyond carceral systems.
Vision
A world in which communities respond to sexual harm through collective care, not punishment.
Where people impacted by violence — whether harmed, causing harm, or witnessing its ripple effects — have spaces to gather, reflect, and heal individually and together. Where no one is discarded, and accountability is a relational process, not a legal destination.
We envision a future where circle practice becomes common, trusted, and resourced as a public good — held not by institutions, but by the people most connected to the harm and the healing.
Eleven commitments, held in practice.
The principles that guide our circles and shape how we hold this work.
Accessibility is foundational
We work to remove financial, linguistic, technological, and cultural barriers to participation. Circles are always free, and we prioritize material support for those who need it.
Building liberatory practice
We are not just responding to harm — we are growing the practices, relationships, and conditions that make collective thriving possible. We are committed to transparency, iteration, and relationship. We share tools, reflections, mistakes, and insights so that others can adapt, remix, and grow this work in ways that serve their communities.
Community over carcerality
We believe that healing and accountability must be rooted in relationship, not punishment. We are committed to building practices that do not rely on police, prisons, or forced isolation.
Consent and voluntary participation
We believe that participation must be freely chosen. Consent is not a one-time event, but an ongoing process of checking in, listening, and allowing space to say yes or no.
Interdependence and sustainability
We cannot do this work alone. We resource keepers, communities, and ourselves in ways that make the work livable, not extractive.
Lineage-rooted
We honor the traditions, practices, and communities that inform our work — including Indigenous circle practices, community accountability work, and liberatory Black movements such as the Black Panther Party, the Combahee River Collective, Black feminist thought, and the long history of abolitionist organizing in the U.S. South. We are also shaped by somatic abolitionism, restorative and transformative justice, and the many ancestral, familial, and cultural lineages of holding and repair. We do not do this work in isolation or invention, but in continuation.
Multiplicity and complexity
There is no single story, no perfect resolution. We make room for contradiction, grief, tenderness, rage, and emergence. We hold complexity as a strength.
Participant-led, community-held
Circles are shaped by the people in them. We honor the agency of those most impacted by harm, while recognizing that collective holding makes healing possible.
Relational accountability and repair
We approach accountability as an ongoing, relational practice — grounded in honesty, care, and connection. We believe in the possibility of repair, but only through truth-telling, mutual readiness, and processes that do not erase harm or silence the harmed.
Safety through care and connection
We create conditions where people can feel held through care, co-regulation, and shared responsibility. Safety is not something we impose — it's something we build in relationship, with room for truth, difference, and nervous system pacing.
Slowness and spaciousness
We move at the speed of trust, allowing room for breath, reflection, and body-based awareness. Clarity and connection come through time, not force.
How we're structured
Our nonprofit status is pending, and we operate as a non-carceral, non-clinical, community-rooted initiative. We exist to support the people and practices that make collective healing and accountability possible — especially in the places where institutional systems have failed.
As we grow, we are committed to building participatory, accountable governance rooted in the values we practice. Our circles are shaped by the people in them. We are committed to accessibility, consent, collective learning, and building capacity to stay in relationship — even when the path is unclear.
Who holds it
Wilfred Henry (he/one) is a community justice practitioner based in Nelson County, Virginia, founder of In Search of Peace, senior circle keeper with Hidden Water, and facilitator with Central Virginia Community Justice. He is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse within the Boy Scouts and the criminal and civil legal systems’ response. A rural letter carrier and believer in public goods, he dreams of non-carceral community justice practices as a universal service, reaching every household.