The TREE Blog: Ripples of Knowledge

Youth stand in a semi-circle holding a web of yarn, smiling.

Celebrating Five Years of Peacemaking

In 2016, our small team of peace practitioners, educators and facilitators joined together to envision and plant new seeds of peace education for youth in Ontario. Over the past five years, our team has grown to include 42 facilitators and volunteers who have empowered 6,145 youth to build the peacemaking

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Positive diverse schoolchildren standing in corridor and talking

Managing Polarized Positions with Children and Youth

Have you ever been in conflict with someone where it seems like there is no solution because your views on a topic are so opposite? Have you ever felt like you couldn’t even enter into conversation about a topic because you felt you had no common ground? In these situations,

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man reading book beside woman reading book

Books to Build Your Conflict Toolkit

I love conflict.* *I love what healthy conflict can teach us about ourselves and the people around us, but even with years of training and experience, I still get anxious during tough conversations. So naturally, it comes up often in conversation with my friends and family. When they ask me,

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Multiethnic upset women scolding in room

Gottman’s 4 Horsemen, and What We Can Try Instead

When having conflict conversations, it can be easy to engage in behaviours that aren’t actually helpful to the situation. I know it happens to me sometimes, and it can happen in any relationship. Therapist Dr. John Gottman identified four behaviours, which he called the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” that

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Black woman with coffee near dog standing in kitchen.

3 Peaceful Ways for Educators to Rest this Summer

I smiled and waved at the screen, thanked the class for their great participation and wished them well for the rest of their quadmester. There were seconds of silence, the “bloop-bloop” MS Teams log-out sound, and an anticlimactic rising in me. “Thud,” is the sound that would come after closing

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Acrylic abstract painting of rainbow colours across the canvas from top to bottom: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink.

Celebrating Pride: Book List for Children and Youth

June is Pride Month! While we at TREE affirm and celebrate the 2SLGBTQIA+ community all year round, this is a special opportunity for us to celebrate and affirm the importance of recognizing queer identities. We are committed to supporting 2SLGBTQIA+ youth in our community! This non-exhaustive book list has been

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