…The Restorative Process that ensued altered the course of Ben’s life. He enrolled in facilitator training and went on to facilitate Restorative Justice cases for the same judge who had presided over his own case.
In 2009 the US State Department selected Ben as “one of America’s 24 emerging young peacemakers” sent to Northern Ireland to monitor the region’s fledgling peace process, ten years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
He has practiced victim-offender reconciliation in the favela’s of Brazil and restorative justice in New Zealand.
Ben has facilitated hundreds of restorative circles in American schools and served as special project manager to the Colorado State Council on Restorative Justice.
He holds a Master’s in Restorative Practices in Youth Counseling from the International Institute for Restorative Practices.
In 2013 Ben moved to Germany where he spent the next seven years coordinating crisis interventions for immigrant families flagged by the German Child Protection System. As an immigrant himself, navigating acute child endangerment cases in a foreign language, Ben grew increasingly troubled by the cultural blind spots in state-client relations; ultimately inspiring his “System Blindness” approach to organizational change efforts.
In 2020, he founded Frame Changers; working with school districts to bridge the gap between their stated values around relationship building and the realities on the ground. Because he is always looking for the next reason to facilitate Family Systems Constellations in groups he runs workshops on everything from parental boundaries and momtrepreneurship to peacemaking, digital detox and whole family improv theater. Ben and the family split their time between Dusseldorf, Germany and Cape Cod, USA.