Best Practices in Trauma-Informed, Resilience-Oriented,
​Restorative Justice-Focused Care

People are good. Trauma creates perpetrators and victims. 
When we have difficult, stressful and traumatic experiences in life, our peace is stolen from us.
We want peace restored in our lives.

STAR teaches us how stress and trauma impact the brain and the body. 
STAR teaches how and why people confuse the drive for revenge with the basic human need for justice. 
When victims seek revenge it never heals trauma.  It never restores justice and peace. 
Revenge turns victims into perpetrators. Revenge always creates more victims. 
STAR teaches tools to heal the effects of psychological trauma.   
STAR builds on restorative justice principles and practices to help people break free from revenge, heal trauma, and reconnect with others to satisfy our basic human needs for justice. 
STAR empowers individuals, communities, and organizations to be agents of positive change within their spheres of influence. 

Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience – The STAR Training is a  5 day evidence-based, research and practice supported, multicultural training integrating neurobiology, trauma healing and resilience, restorative justice, nonviolent conflict transformation and broadly defined spirituality that is accessible to individuals from diverse personal, educational and professional backgrounds.  STAR provides an inclusive, transformational system to not only address individual and community trauma healing needs, but also STAR teaches resilience strategies that set the stage for authentic sustained individual and community engagement, healing and reconciliation.  STAR was developed at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (Learn More) following the United States tragedy of September 11, 2001, and since then STAR has had a 15 year reputation of national and international success.  STAR was originally developed with an inclusive multi-cultural, multi-faith perspective and is having a powerful, growing collective impact within diverse communities locally and globally.  

Since 2010, STAR has been an invaluable asset in Saint Paul/Minneapolis where the Minnesota Peacebuilding Leadership Institute has sponsored 15 successful STAR Trainings.  Research demonstrates STAR's evidence-based effectiveness.  In Minnesota, STAR has been approved by state professional licensing boards for 27 hours of continuing education credits for teachers, nurses, and mental health professionals.  STAR is also provided by contract arrangement to organizations, community groups, and corporations.  View STAR’s collective impact: 
STAR Training Objectives:
By the end of the STAR Training, trainees will have:
  • Defined and distinguished between various types of psychological trauma and learned positive and negative responses to trauma and how these relate it to individual, community, and societal history.  
  • Examined the direct links between unhealed trauma and cycles of victimhood, aggression, and violence and described how the cycles of unhealed trauma and violence operate within individual, community, and society’s contexts.  
  • Studied STAR’s strategic trauma healing model, analyzed the model in light of one's own experiences, and identified ways to integrate strategies into one's own spheres of influence. 
  • Identified and examined practical ways to build resilience to accompany individuals and groups on their trauma healing journey through identifying personal and systemic resilience strategies that set the stage for authentic reconciliation. 


Interested in STAR but can't take the  5 day training right now?  
Check out our single day STAR-Lite Training.

For additional information and questions, please contact the Minnesota Peacebuilding Leadership Institute.

Training Dates:

Monday, May 13 – Friday, May 17, 2019
Minneapolis, MN

To request group discounts or scholarship assistance to attend STAR, please request a scholarship application from info@mnpeace.org