Creating a Culture of Peace

Over a May weekend in Stroudsburg, PA, participants in a 20-hour CCP basic training worked hard, laughed a lot, practiced skills, and analyzed the stages of building a nonviolent movement as well as how to ensure community solidarity to make it happen.

Here are the projects the break-out groups designed as part of the last module in the training:

• • Grow it, Eat it, Poop it (teaching young children nutrition through gardening, food preparation, and health lessons)

• De-escalation of Conflict – Dos and Don'ts (designing a program using jujitsu and other techniques)

• Letters of Hope to Prisoners (organizing a group for letter writing)

• Westend Feed the Homeless (creating a van delivery system for 200 in the rural area)

And at the end, they received their basic training certificates!

The sponsors of the training were the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem, PA, and CCP.

CCP trainers who facilitated the weekend were Janet Chisholm and Daniel Petersen-Snyder.

Watch this excellent talk by Erica Chenoweth, giving essential details from her research on the effectiveness of nonviolent campaigns. She finds that from 1900-2005, nonviolent people's movements had a 46% success rate, compared with 26% for violent campaigns:

I teach and write in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies, with a special focus on strategic nonviolence. It is a rich field, growing in its scholarship and its widespread usage. I'm so enthused by this--the more we wage our conflicts with nonviolence the lower the costs.

Counting the costs of conflict, we normally think of blood and treasure, of casualties and expense. We are slowly beginning to also count other costs, including our environment, our relationships, our civil rights, our human rights, our metrics of democracy, and more. Nonviolence is superior to violence in every way if we read the research and consider all the costs. ...continue to full article on www.peacevoice.info