Restoring Relationships

Hi, my name is Laura Rook and I have worked for the Portsmouth Mediation Service for 16 years. Our team are extremely passionate about helping to make Portsmouth a Restorative City. So what do I mean by a 'Restorative City'? I mean a place where its citizens have positive relationships and where people are equipped to deal with conflict in a positive way. 

Most of us experience disputes and disagreements throughout our lives, yet we don't always know how to effectively deal with it. Portsmouth Mediation Service facilitate Restorative Meetings within the community to enable people to understand each other’s thoughts/feeling's and needs, to help them restore/build relationships and to help them find a good way forward together. 

Because Portsmouth is one of the most densely populated cities in Europe, there has often been cases of neighbourhood disputes – but this has been compounded by the Covid pandemic and Lockdown, with more complex situations and issues. The recent years have been extremely challenging for everyone, we have all been impacted in some way and we are seeing the effect of this particularly in people's mental health and well-being. We know that the stress and upset of conflict has a huge negative impact on people’s health and well-being. 

With conflict being at its greatest and most complex level, we need to raise funding so we can add something much needed to our current provisions and that's the 'Restoring Relationships' Mentoring Program'. The purpose of this mentoring will be to help people understand how to have positive relationships and conflict resolution skills. 

By offering this new provision I believe we can strengthen relationships and therefore prevent the amount and level of conflict across Portsmouth. 

If you would like to support this new project, please hit the donate button! Any size donations are very much appreciated. 

Thank you for taking the time to read about this project. Laura