Our Projects

The In Search of Peace Fund holds and supports multiple expressions of circle-based practice. Each project reflects a commitment to participant-led, community-held responses to sexual harm, shaped by context and community. Each of our projects holds space for conversation, not conclusion — building capacity to stay with what’s unresolved, together.

Clean & Reverent Healing Circles

Circles for those impacted by harm within Scouting (Boy Scouts of America)

This project emerges from the longstanding, systemic sexual violence that occurred within the Boy Scouts and the failure of institutional and legal processes to create space for healing or repair. The Clean & Reverent Project creates facilitated, community-held circles for people impacted by these harms — beginning with survivors and loved ones, and expanding toward parallel and overlapping circles that may also include those who caused harm and others in the extended network.

These are not therapy groups, legal proceedings, or accountability processes imposed from above. They are voluntary spaces where people connected by shared histories of harm can gather, be witnessed, and begin to reconnect to themselves and one another in the wake of rupture.

Longleaf Healing Circles

Community-rooted circle practices in Central Virginia

Longleaf is our local initiative grounded in abolitionist values and deep relational practice. It responds to harms that ripple through families, schools, social spaces, and local institutions. Longleaf circles are designed to meet the needs of survivors, those who have caused harm, support people, and community members — sometimes in separate spaces, sometimes overlapping.

We begin with pilot circles for those impacted by harm, growing toward a local network of practitioners, community members, and keepers who can hold complex harms with skill and care.

In Search of Peace Community Dialogues

Regional inquiry circles across the South on abolition and sexual harm

This namesake project invites communities across the Southern U.S. to ask — and begin to answer — the hardest questions: What do we do with sexual harm if we don’t turn to police, prisons, or forced silence? These, often larger scale, circle-based dialogues explore lived experiences, fears, longings, and possibilities — not as abstractions, but as collective openings.

The project also seeks to connect with and support practitioners, groups, and communities already engaged in these conversations — restorative and transformative justice practitioners, rape crisis and domestic violence interventionists, community organizations, and beyond —learning from local leadership, sharing resources, and building interdependence across regions.

If we can learn to talk about these harms without defaulting to punishment, we can accelerate our ability to build a world where prisons are no longer required.