Black woman-led practice · Open to aligned work

Moving restorative,
transformative
+ healing justice
from values into
lived practice.

BREATHE Circles partners with organizations and communities to change how they hold relationship, power, conflict, accountability, leadership, and community. Not as a program. As a practice.

Explore Our Practice Begin a Conversation
Ashley Ellis addressing a room during a restorative justice facilitation

Ashley Ellis · Founder, BREATHE Circles
Restorative Justice Practitioner · Circle Keeper

What We Mean by Practice

Three lenses.
One practice.

Restorative justice, transformative justice, and healing justice are not separate program areas. They are lenses through which BREATHE plans, facilitates, leads, implements, learns, and makes decisions.

Together they form a way of working — with organizations, with communities, and within ourselves.

Read Our Practice →
RJ
Restorative Justice
Not: what rule was broken and what punishment follows? But: who has been harmed, what do they need, and what does genuine accountability look like? A proactive orientation toward relationship — building trust and belonging before they are tested.
TJ
Transformative Justice
What conditions produced the harm? What systems and power arrangements keep generating the same problems? TJ holds individual and structural accountability together — and keeps the long view toward building something genuinely different.
HJ
Healing Justice
A political framework defined by Cara Page and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective — rooted in Black feminist and radical Southern traditions. Collective care, ancestral practice, and the sustainability of people doing liberation work. Not self-care. Infrastructure.

How We Work

Four bodies of work.
One through-line.

01
Implementation + Organizational Transformation

Helping organizations move justice practices from training or aspiration into relationships, structures, leadership, accountability, conflict response, and everyday culture. This is long-view, relationship-centered work.

Implementation strategy · leadership coaching · organizational assessment · restorative design · long-term partnership

02
Practitioner Development + Learning Communities

Developing the people who hold the work. Through training, coaching, circle practice, reflection, technical assistance, communities of practice, and genuine care for the practitioners themselves.

Training · coaching · circle keeper development · communities of practice · practitioner care

03
Facilitation + Conflict Transformation

Holding circle, dialogue, retreats, community-system spaces, organizational conflict, repair, and complex conversations across difference and power. Sometimes the most important thing is the quality of presence in the room.

Circle · dialogue · retreats · conflict transformation · repair processes · community convenings

04
Strategy + Organizational Learning

Supporting implementation strategy, technical assistance, learning systems, restorative organizational design, reflection, and adaptation. Understanding what is happening, what is shifting, and what needs to change.

Implementation strategy · technical assistance · organizational learning · program design · relational mapping

See How We Engage →

Our Practice Principles

How BREATHE shows up.

01
Accompaniment

We walk with, not ahead of. We build alongside people and remain in relationship through complexity.

02
Relationship is the practice

Trust and relational capacity are not preconditions. They are themselves part of the work.

03
Power must be practiced differently

Participation is not the same as power. We name this — and design for it.

04
Care makes transformation possible

Healing, consent, reflection, and sustainability are implementation infrastructure — not afterthoughts.

05
Sankofa

We return in order to move forward. Innovation does not require abandoning what came before.

Selected Work

What sustained
implementation looks like.

2.5-Year Partnership · RWJF
Interdisciplinary Research Leaders

What began as an effort to implement RJ as a process became whole-organization transformation — changing how people navigated conflict, held responsibility, made meaning, and embodied practice. Ashley also directed a short film documenting the journey.

Read More →
Multi-Year · Trinity Church Wall Street
Who Keeps the Keeper

A practitioner community of practice grounded in circle, learning, coaching, reflection, and care. Built on the insight that justice practices cannot remain sustainable when the people holding them are unsupported or depleted.

Read More →
Long-Term Relationship · South Bronx + Harlem
Community Connections for Youth

A decades-long relationship: from Youth Advocate to Director of Restorative Justice to first consulting client. Youth justice, alternatives to incarceration, credible messenger practice, and restorative implementation in community.

Read More →
~18 Schools · NYC
NYC Department of Education

Moving restorative practice beyond a single training and into school relationships, culture, leadership, and conflict response. Implementation support across approximately 18 schools in New York City.

Read More →
Ashley Ellis, Founder of BREATHE Circles

Ashley Ellis

Founder · BREATHE Circles · Restorative Justice Practitioner

About Ashley

A practitioner-strategist
rooted in lineage,
community, and practice.

Born and raised on the West Side of Chicago, Ashley's practice is rooted in African-centered ways of knowing, womanist tradition, collective care, and a spirit-centered approach to healing and liberation.

From the Chicago Restorative Justice Hubs — under the mentorship of Cheryl Graves and Pamela Purdie — to leading restorative justice implementation at Community Connections for Youth, to building BREATHE Circles as an organizational and community practice: the thread is relationship, practice, and the long view.

"My practice is relational, emergent, and honest — shaped by what a moment, team, or community is actually asking for."

Full Story →

In Their Words

What people carry
out of the circle.

"

Ashley doesn't just facilitate — she holds. We left changed, not just informed.

Participant · IRL Minnesota

"

Working with Ashley is one of the best organizational decisions we've made. She's the real thing.

M. Simpson, MPH · IRL

"

It felt like a reset. Learning new information — but learning information we always had. It felt original. It was an opportunity to find our common values and lean into them to create community.

Cody Cotton · Co-Director, IRL

"

There is no going back. I see things now and ask: why are we doing this punitive thing? Why do we need to know who's to blame? Can't we start with who's been harmed and what they need to heal?

Kathleen Call · Associate Director, IRL

Trusted By

Brooklyn Community Foundation· NYC Department of Education· Trinity Church Wall Street Foundation· Girls for Gender Equity· The Bronx Defenders· US Truth & Reconciliation Commission· IRL — Minnesota· NYC Mayor's Office — Gun Violence Prevention· Kings Against Violence Initiative· S.O.U.L. Sisters Leadership Collective· Children's Village· Tacoma Dept of Health· Eagles Nest Foundation· CCFY· OM in Africa Project· Uptown Youth Opportunity Hubs

If your organization is trying to move from believing something different to actually practicing something different — we should talk.

Engagements range from a single facilitated experience to multi-year implementation partnerships. The right starting place is an honest conversation.

Begin a Conversation →

Our Practice

Not a program.
A practice.

Restorative, transformative, and healing justice are not separate curricula that BREATHE delivers. They are lenses through which we plan, facilitate, lead, implement, learn, and make decisions together.

"We are not incorporating these practices as an exercise in alignment. We are returning to a practice tradition this work was built from and carrying it forward."

The Framework

Three lenses, one practice.

These are not sequential steps. They are simultaneous orientations that shape everything BREATHE holds — from planning to implementation to how we close a session. Select each lens to learn more.

RJ Restorative Justice

Restorative justice asks fundamentally different questions than the systems most of us inherited — questions that change the process, the outcome, and who gets to be part of the conversation. It is not merely a conflict resolution tool. It is a set of principles and a way of life.

Fania E. Davis — civil rights attorney, writer, scholar, and founding director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth — defines restorative justice as:

"A justice that seeks not to punish, but to heal. A justice, according to Kay Pranis, that is not about getting even, but about getting well. A justice that seeks to transform broken lives, relationships, and communities, rather than shatter them further. A justice that seeks reconciliation, rather than a deepening of conflict."

— Fania E. Davis

At its core, restorative justice is the practice of sawubona and ubuntu — the practice of being kin to each other. How do we look out for and show up for each other? How do we live in right relationship not only after harm has occurred, but as a daily practice of community?

In BREATHE's practice, RJ is not a program to install. It is a way of being — proactively building the relational trust, shared agreements, and belonging that make it possible to navigate conflict when it comes. Ashley's circle practice and RJ lineage are shaped by practitioners like Kay Pranis, Fania Davis, Cheryl Graves, and Pamela Purdie — rooted in the circle traditions of the Tlingit people and in African communitarian ways of being in community.

  • Who has been harmed?
  • What do they need?
  • Whose obligation is it to meet those needs?
  • What needs to happen to make this right?
  • How do we repair and remain in relationship?
  • What conditions gave rise to this harm?
  • How do we build the community we need — before harm tests us?
  • What does accountability look like when it seeks to heal, not punish?
TJ Transformative Justice

Transformative justice asks what restorative justice alone cannot fully answer: what are the conditions that produced the harm in the first place? What systems, structures, and arrangements of power are generating the problems that we keep trying to address one incident at a time?

Transformative justice does not only repair what happened. It works toward changing the conditions so that harm happens less — and with less severity — over time. It holds individual accountability alongside structural accountability, and community healing alongside systems change.

In BREATHE's work, TJ keeps the larger picture in view: who holds power, whose knowledge counts, whose experiences shape the decisions being made — and what it would actually take to build something different.

  • Conditions that produce harm — not only incidents
  • Power: who holds it, who bears the consequences
  • Community capacity to hold accountability
  • Changing structures — not only responding to events
  • Individual and structural accountability together
  • Imagining and building something genuinely different
  • Long-view orientation toward systems change
HJ Healing Justice

Healing justice is a political framework and strategy, defined by cultural strategist Cara Page and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. It identifies how communities can holistically respond to and intervene on intergenerational trauma and systemic violence — building collective care and safety practices that transform the consequences of oppression.

Healing justice is not wellness programming or individual self-care. It is a political commitment rooted in Black feminist traditions and radical Southern traditions, recovering ancestral and community-led practices of care used by survivors of systemic oppression. It asks: how do we build what is needed to sustain liberation work — and the people doing it — over the long term?

In BREATHE's practice, healing justice means that care, consent, rest, reflection, and sustainability are not afterthoughts. They are implementation infrastructure. The work cannot last if the people holding it cannot.

  • Political framework — not wellness programming
  • Collective well-being across emotional, physical, spiritual, and environmental dimensions
  • Rooted in Black feminist and radical Southern traditions
  • Ancestral and community-led care practices
  • Sustaining organizers and practitioners for long-term work
  • Intervening on intergenerational trauma and systemic violence
  • Healing as necessary infrastructure — not supplemental
  • Care and sustainability built into implementation — not added at the end
Young people seated in a restorative circle with a centerpiece

Sitting in circle does not erase institutional, racial, positional, or other forms of power. Power must still be named, designed for, and attended to deliberately. Circle is a practice, not a solution.

Circle as Embodied Practice

Circle is not
how meetings get run.
It is how these
commitments are lived.

Circle is not a facilitation format. It is not a seating arrangement. It is not an intervention reserved for moments of conflict. Circle is an embodied relational practice — and in BREATHE's work, it is a primary vehicle for how RJ, TJ, and HJ become real in a room.

  • Slows people down enough to actually hear one another
  • Changes how people listen, not just what they say
  • Builds trust before trust is tested
  • Makes room for truth, difference, and complexity
  • Strengthens belonging as a practice
  • Creates rehearsal for shared power
  • Helps communities practice the ways they want to be together

Five Practice Principles

How BREATHE
walks into the work.

01
Accompaniment
We walk with, not ahead of.

BREATHE does not arrive with answers. We build alongside people, remain in relationship through complexity, and support partners in strengthening what they know while building what they need. This is one of Ashley's foundational commitments — rooted directly in the Chicago Restorative Justice Hub tradition of radical hospitality, relentless engagement, and patient accompaniment.

02
Relationship Is the Practice
Not just the precondition for it.

Trust, belonging, relational capacity, shared understanding, and the ability to navigate difference are not simply built so that the "real work" can happen. They are the real work. BREATHE designs for relationship from the first moment — because the quality of relationship is what determines whether anything else holds.

03
Power Must Be Practiced Differently
Participation is not the same as power.

BREATHE asks: Who shapes decisions? Whose knowledge counts? Who holds authority, and who experiences the consequences? Can people see their influence reflected in what happens next? These are not rhetorical questions. They are design questions — ones that must be answered differently in every room BREATHE enters.

04
Care Makes Sustained Transformation Possible
Healing is implementation infrastructure.

Transformation should not require continuous depletion or extraction from the people holding it. BREATHE builds in healing, consent, reflection, preparation, care, and sustainability — not as an add-on, but as a core design requirement. The work cannot last if the people doing it cannot.

05
Sankofa
We return in order to move forward.

Innovation does not require abandoning what came before. BREATHE retrieves practices, wisdom, history, lineage, and community knowledge — and asks what they teach us about what needs to be built now. The past is not a constraint. It is a resource.

Lineage

Where this practice
comes from.

Circle is not a tool that restorative justice invented. The peacemaking circle as a restorative practice draws directly from the circle tradition of the Tlingit people — a living Indigenous practice of gathering, accountability, and community healing sustained for generations in Southeast Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Coast. And the relational, communal ethic at the heart of sawubona — we see you, in your full humanity, including your ancestors — and ubuntu — I am because we are — are among the ancestral foundations of the modern restorative justice movement, rooted in African communitarian values. These are not origins to borrow from. They are traditions to acknowledge, honor, and carry with care.

Ashley's own restorative justice practice is rooted in the Chicago Restorative Justice Hubs, where she trained under Cheryl Graves and Pamela Purdie. The practice commitments she carries — radical hospitality, accompaniment, relentless engagement, learning community, building relationships — were not adopted as a framework. They were absorbed as a way of being in the work. This lineage is not a credential. It is a responsibility.

Roots of Circle

Tlingit Peacemaking Circle

The peacemaking circle as a restorative practice draws directly from the circle tradition of the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Coast — a living practice of gathering, truth-telling, accountability, and community healing that has sustained communities for generations. This is not an origin to borrow from. It is a tradition to acknowledge, honor, and carry with deep care.

Sawubona · Ubuntu · African Indigenous Ways of Being

Sawubona

"Sawubona — a Zulu greeting in South Africa, means 'We see you.' It refers not just to the individuals meeting, but it includes our ancestors, our tribe, our village. The response is Yebo Sawubona, 'Yes we see you too.' It is an act of seeing and embracing each other in our full humanity, with all our quirks, our weaknesses, our strengths, and our potential in this life. It is a recognition of our shared humanity and interconnection. Seeing becomes an act of dialogue."

— Guided definition for BREATHE's practice

Ubuntu

"Ubuntu — a South African concept that was the underpinning of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It's a word that says 'I am human because you are.' It acknowledges that people are people through other people. Ubuntu is the principle of caring for each other, of being in solidarity. It is a spirit of mutual aid and mutual survival, meaning that our individual humanity is expressed through our relationship with another's humanity and our own humanity is affirmed in return."

— Guided definition for BREATHE's practice

"A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are."

— Desmond Tutu

Chicago Elders + Teachers · Practice Lineage

Cheryl Graves

Founder, Chicago RJ Hubs · Teacher

Pamela Purdie

Chicago RJ Hubs

Mashaun Ali

Trained by Cheryl · The first person Ashley ever sat in circle with

Peacemaking Circle Tradition

Kay Pranis

Circle keeper, author, practitioner — carrying forward Indigenous circle traditions in restorative justice contexts

Restorative + Healing Justice

Fania Davis

Co-founder, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth · author of The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice

"We are not incorporating these practices as an exercise in alignment. We are returning to a practice tradition this work was built from and carrying it forward."

Work With Us

Not a package.
A partnership.

BREATHE does not prescribe the same approach to everyone. What we hold together is shaped by where you are, what you're carrying, and what is actually needed — not by a fixed menu of services.

"Engagements may range from a single facilitated experience to multi-year implementation partnerships. The right entry point is an honest conversation about what is happening and what is needed."
Begin a Conversation →
01

Implementation + Organizational Transformation

For organizations that believe something different
and are ready to practice it.

Many organizations have aligned on restorative or healing justice values — and then discovered that values on paper and practice in relationships are very different things. This body of work is for organizations ready to close that gap.

BREATHE supports organizations in building the structures, relationships, leadership capacity, conflict response systems, and everyday cultural practices that allow transformation to actually take root and last. This is not a training. It is a long-view, relationship-centered partnership.

  • Implementation strategy and planning
  • Leadership coaching and accompaniment
  • Organizational assessment and learning
  • Conflict response system redesign
  • Restorative organizational design
  • Values and community agreements development
  • Long-term organizational partnership
  • Technical assistance
02

Practitioner Development + Learning

For organizations investing in the
people who hold the work.

The practitioners, facilitators, circle keepers, educators, advocates, and social workers who hold this work daily need more than a training. They need a practice — and a community in which to develop and sustain it.

BREATHE's practitioner development work is grounded in the insight behind Who Keeps the Keeper: that justice practices cannot remain sustainable when the people holding them are unsupported, isolated, or depleted. Building practitioner capacity means building practitioner care.

  • RJ, TJ + HJ training and implementation support
  • Coaching and individual accompaniment
  • Circle keeper development
  • Communities of practice
  • Leadership learning cohorts
  • Reflective practice
  • Practitioner care and sustainability
  • WKTK-inspired practitioner infrastructure
03

Facilitation + Relational Practice

For moments when a group needs to
gather, listen, decide, or repair.

Some of the most important work happens in a single gathering — if the right container is built, if the right conditions are held, if presence and rigor and care come with the person who holds the space.

BREATHE's facilitation work spans circles and community convenings, organizational dialogue and conflict transformation, retreats and repair processes, and complex conversations across difference and power. What all of it shares is a commitment to the quality of what happens in the room.

  • Peacemaking and restorative circles
  • Organizational and community dialogue
  • Retreats — organizational and practitioner
  • Community-system convenings
  • Conflict transformation and repair processes
  • Leadership spaces
  • Healing-centered gatherings
04

Strategy + Organizational Learning

For organizations trying to understand
what is shifting and what needs to change.

Strategy in BREATHE's hands is not a planning document. It is a relational process of understanding what is happening — in relationships, in structures, in culture — and deciding together what needs to shift.

This work often accompanies implementation — helping organizations learn, adapt, and build the internal capacity to sustain transformation beyond the initial partnership.

  • Implementation strategy and design
  • Technical assistance
  • Organizational learning and reflection systems
  • Stakeholder and relational mapping
  • Program design and redesign
  • Restorative organizational design
  • Adaptation and learning cycles

How We Engage

This is not
a service menu.

BREATHE does not arrive with a fixed package. Every engagement begins with an honest conversation about context, capacity, and what the moment actually requires. What comes next is designed from that — not from a catalog.

Engagements may be short or long. Local or national. Virtual, in-person, or hybrid. They may begin with a single circle and grow into a years-long implementation partnership. Or they may be exactly what they need to be in one day.

What BREATHE brings in any engagement is the same: presence, rigor, care, a commitment to relationship, and a long view toward what you're trying to build.

Begin a Conversation →

Ready?

Tell us what you're trying
to build, shift, repair, or practice.

The right starting place is an honest conversation — about where you are, what you're carrying, and whether this is the right fit.

Begin a Conversation →

Selected Work

What sustained
implementation looks like.

These are not case studies with fabricated metrics. They are relationships — and what was built, held, and learned within them.

Interdisciplinary Research Leaders

From RJ Process to Whole-Organization Practice

A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation leadership program. 2.5-year organizational partnership.

Implementation Organizational Culture Conflict Transformation Leadership

What began as a last-minute invitation to speak on a webinar became a 2.5-year organizational partnership. Ashley came in as a guest speaker — not knowing exactly what IRL was, not expecting what would unfold. By the end of that first conversation, people were asking: what would it look like to bring restorative justice into the fellowship not just as a training, but as a practice? The deeper Ashley looked, the more she recognized that what IRL needed went further than what had been named.

What followed was a sustained process of conflict response redesign, organizational values and community agreements, structural and accountability reflection, leadership coaching, dialogue, learning experiences, and culture change. Not as separate interventions — as interwoven aspects of how the organization was learning to hold itself.

"

Usually there would be this frenetic urgency to deal with this and deal with that. But Cody and I just stepped away, looked at each other, and said: we got this. We can calmly discuss this. We don't have to do something right now. It was a pause — and leadership feels completely different from that space.

Zinzi Bailey · Director, IRL

"

It felt like a reset. Learning information we always had. It felt original — an opportunity to find our common values and lean into them to create community.

Cody Cotton · Co-Director, IRL

"

I knew that there were people who needed to be healed and heard — and the restorative justice process allows that to happen. I was part of the group that needed to be heard and healed.

Ms. Bobby Simpson · Senior Advisor, IRL

"

We don't only have to step into this paradigm when conflict or harm happens. We should always be in a constant and consistent practice of strengthening and building and being in community.

J. Robin Moon · Associate Director, IRL

"

There is no going back. I see things now and ask: why are we doing this punitive thing? Why do we need to know who's to blame? Can't we start with who's been harmed and what they need to heal?

Kathleen Call · Associate Director, IRL

Featured Documentary

Re-storied

A storytelling-based restorative justice documentary produced as IRL reached the close of its journey. Shot through a storytelling circle and in-depth interviews, it captures the voices of scholars, leaders, and community partners who carried RJ forward. Ceremony and archive — a healing-centered closing ritual and a record of what sustained transformation looks like from the inside.

Directed by Ashley Ellis · Interdisciplinary Research Leaders · University of Minnesota + Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Promising Practices for Health Equity — IRL Podcast, Season 3

Ashley Ellis in conversation with Luis Ortega (Storytellers for Change) and the IRL team — on restorative justice, narrative, mental models, and how storytelling and RJ work together to shift the systems we create.

Who Keeps the Keeper · Trinity Church Wall Street

Building Practitioner Ecosystem, Not Just Programs

Multi-year community of practice for restorative, transformative, and healing justice practitioners.

Practitioner Development Community of Practice Circle Healing Justice
House of BREATHE — WKTK cohort members holding BREATHE certificates

The animating question behind Who Keeps the Keeper is simple: who takes care of the people who hold this work? Practitioners, circle keepers, facilitators, advocates — people who pour out daily — rarely have the community, the reflection, or the care infrastructure they need to sustain what they're carrying.

WKTK was built to address that. In partnership with Trinity Church Wall Street, BREATHE developed a multi-year community of practice grounded in circle, ongoing learning, coaching, reflection, and genuine practitioner care. Not a one-time training. Not a seminar. A sustained learning community that invests in the whole person doing the whole work.

Justice practices cannot remain sustainable if the people holding them are unsupported, isolated, or depleted. WKTK is the practice infrastructure that addresses that directly.

The insight from WKTK has shaped how BREATHE thinks about practitioner development across all of its work: that building practitioner capacity and building practitioner care are not separate activities. They are the same activity.

WKTK is now in its fourth cohort and continues to evolve.

WKTK Testimonial

"

I'm leaving this retreat having made my peace, full of joy, and overwhelmed and excited to be able to share that joy with others — in the hopes that they also will find their joy and make their peace.

WKTK Participant · Who Keeps the Keeper

"

This is the 21st century and we need to redefine revolution. This planet needs a people's revolution — a humanist revolution. Not about bloodshed. The fundamental goal must be peace. We need to be weapons of mass construction. Weapons of mass love.

WKTK Participant · Who Keeps the Keeper

"

Thank you so much to BREATHE. Thank you to Trinity Philanthropies for making this opportunity possible. We need to be weapons of mass construction. Weapons of mass love.

WKTK Participant · Who Keeps the Keeper

Community Connections for Youth

A Decade of Relationship: Youth Justice, Credible Messenger Practice, and Restorative Implementation

Long-term relationship spanning youth advocacy, organizational leadership, and ongoing consulting partnership.

Youth Justice Credible Messenger Alternatives to Incarceration Restorative Implementation

Ashley's relationship with Community Connections for Youth is one of the defining through-lines of her practice. It began when she was a youth advocate through the Youth Advocate Programs, working alongside CCFY in the South Bronx and Harlem. It grew into a deeper organizational role — Director of Restorative Justice — where she led efforts to build a culture of restorative justice within CCFY and beyond.

As Director, Ashley developed and implemented restorative justice training for staff and community partners, facilitated peacemaking circles, designed train-the-trainer practices, and oversaw school-wide restorative implementation. CCFY's Restorative Justice Training Institute grew from that work.

CCFY was BREATHE's first consulting client — a relationship that grew from the inside out, and that continues to evolve through ongoing technical assistance and circle-based practice.

This partnership demonstrates youth justice alternatives to incarceration, credible messenger implementation, community-system collaboration, and what long-term restorative implementation actually requires when it is built from genuine relationship rather than contracted service.

NYC Department of Education

School-Based Restorative Practice: Beyond the Training

Implementation support across approximately 18 New York City schools.

School Implementation Training + TA Culture Change Youth

The most common mistake in school-based restorative justice implementation is treating it as a training event. Someone comes in, delivers content, and leaves. Nothing in the actual culture, leadership, conflict response system, or relational structure of the school changes. When the next conflict happens, the school reverts to what it has always known.

BREATHE's NYC DOE work was explicitly designed to resist that pattern. Across approximately 18 schools, the work involved training and technical assistance — but also implementation support, leadership engagement, and the kind of sustained relational presence that allows a school to actually begin practicing something different.

Moving restorative practice from a single training into school relationships, culture, leadership, and conflict response is not a program. It is a shift in how people understand what school is for and how they are together within it.

What BREATHE supported in these schools was not compliance with a restorative framework. It was the beginning of a genuine cultural orientation — toward belonging, accountability, and repair as ways of being in a building together.

More From BREATHE

Ashley in conversation.

Who Are You? — Ashley Ellis on Restorative Justice

This Restorative Justice Life — Episode 3

Restorative Practices in Action — Panel Discussion · The Restorative Justice Initiative

Restorative Justice + Racially Just Schools — Brooklyn Restorative Justice Project · Brooklyn Community Foundation + NYC DOE

Ashley Ellis, Founder of BREATHE Circles
Ashley Ellis
Founder, BREATHE Circles · Restorative Justice Practitioner
Circle Keeper · Strategist · Facilitator · Storytellers for Change

About Ashley

Practitioner.
Strategist.
Circle Keeper.

"Who Are You? — Ashley Ellis on Restorative Justice"

Practice Lineage

The arc of
a practice.

Born and raised on the West Side of Chicago, Ashley's restorative and healing justice practice was not built in a classroom. It was built in relationship — first with communities navigating harm and transformation, and then with organizations trying to build something different.

For over a decade, she has walked alongside young people, practitioners, schools, organizations, and communities navigating healing, belonging, accountability, and transformation. Her practice is relational, emergent, and honest — shaped by what a moment, team, or community is actually asking for.

Chicago
Chicago Restorative Justice Hubs

Training under Cheryl Graves and Pamela Purdie. Absorbing the practice commitments that have shaped everything since: radical hospitality, accompaniment, relentless engagement, building relationships, learning community.

New York City
Youth Advocate Programs + CCFY

Youth advocacy work in the South Bronx and Harlem through Youth Advocate Programs, in partnership with Community Connections for Youth. Building practice from the ground up alongside young people navigating systems.

Organizational Leadership
Director of Restorative Justice, CCFY + School for Democracy and Leadership

Leading restorative justice implementation across Community Connections for Youth — staff development, accountability, conflict response, training, circle practice, and the RJ Training Institute. Also serving as RJ Director at the School for Democracy and Leadership, a partner school in the Brooklyn Restorative Justice Project with Brooklyn Community Foundation and NYC DOE — a four-year initiative to develop a sustainable model for school discipline reform and dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

Consulting + Implementation
BREATHE Circles

Founding BREATHE Circles as a consulting and implementation practice. CCFY becomes the first consulting client. The practice grows to include organizational implementation, practitioner development, facilitation, and strategy across 22+ organizations nationally.

Today
Practitioner-Strategist

Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of The BREATHE Collective. Author of the forthcoming book Who Keeps the Keeper. Continuing to hold the work at the intersection of relationship, power, practice, healing, accountability, implementation, and community.

What Ashley Holds

Rooted in African-centered
knowing, womanist
tradition, collective care.

Ashley's practice is grounded in African-centered ways of knowing, womanist tradition, collective care, and a spirit-centered approach to healing and liberation. She shows up as a practitioner, a circle keeper, a strategist, a facilitator, a storycatcher, and a bridge builder.

She is capable of speaking both community and institution — and of holding the tension between them without flattening either.

Storytellers for Change

Story as part
of the practice.

Ashley is a practitioner of Storytellers for Change — a methodology developed by Luis Ortega, founder and director of Storytellers for Change and a close colleague and partner. It is part of Ashley's practitioner toolkit, supporting reflection, meaning-making, connection, and intentional story-crafting in community and organizational settings.

As the IRL team described it: stories told over and over become narratives; narratives spread over time become mental models; and mental models become the foundation of the systems we create. If we want to shift systems, storytelling has to be part of the process. Ashley's work with Storytellers for Change lives at exactly that intersection.

Storytellers for Change is not synonymous with advocacy, communications, or public relations. It is a practice of making meaning — one that Ashley integrates into her broader approach to facilitation, accompaniment, and organizational learning.

Where appropriate, Luis may partner or co-facilitate select Storytellers for Change experiences with Ashley.

Ashley Ellis speaking at a podium, BREATHE shirt, brick wall behind her

B.R.E.A.T.H.E.

BREATHE as
a verb.

BREATHE is not simply a name. It is a commitment — a set of orientations toward the work and toward each other.

B
Balance
R
Restore
E
Expand
A
Affirm
T
Transform
H
Heal
E
Embody

Expand, not Empower — because Empower was something done to people. Expand is what happens between us.

The Work, in Numbers

These numbers are secondary evidence — context for the relationships and practices described throughout this site.

22+
Organizations supported through technical assistance and implementation
~18
Schools supported through restorative practice implementation in NYC
100+
Practitioners trained, coached, and accompanied in their practice
500+
Young people engaged through restorative experiences

Ashley in Conversation

Hear the practice
in her own words.

This Restorative Justice Life — Episode 3

Restorative Practices in Action — Panel Discussion · The Restorative Justice Initiative

Begin a Conversation

Tell us what you're
trying to build, shift,
repair, or practice.

This is not a discovery call form. It is an invitation to begin a real conversation about what is happening in your organization or community — and whether BREATHE is the right partner to walk alongside you.

Email
ashley@thebreathecollective.org
Phone
(347) 220-7119
Connection Call
Schedule 30 minutes →
The BREATHE Collective
thebreathecollective.org →

This work is carried out on land that has always belonged to Indigenous peoples. That matters, and I hold it.

We read every message. We will respond within a few business days.

BREATHE Circles + The BREATHE Collective

Part of a larger
ecosystem.

BREATHE Circles is the consulting and practice arm of the broader BREATHE ecosystem. The organizational and implementation work you see here is held by BREATHE Circles.

The BREATHE Collective holds the broader community, programmatic, and movement ecosystem — including Who Keeps the Keeper as a community-facing initiative, and the larger healing justice work that BREATHE is rooted in.

Visit The BREATHE Collective →

"BREATHE Circles is the consulting and practice arm of the broader BREATHE ecosystem — rooted in the same commitments, oriented toward organizational and community transformation."