Creating a Culture of Peace

So you joined a protest?

Now what?

"We need to train to be effective activists, just as we trained to be effective soldiers. CCP nonviolence training was the foundation for my work. It was critical in preparing me to be an effective activist for justice and to end war.”
--Elliott Adams, VFP Past President,
CCP Board President & CCP Trainer

GET GROUNDED!

CCP Nonviolence Training

* $1000 grants for VFP Chapters
* exercises
* skill practice
* analysis
* group solidarity
* action planning
* 2-day trainings
* call: 847-790-4227
* email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

The latest CCP Basic Training took place over a May weekend in Stroudsburg, PA. Participants in the 20-hour 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 at www.peacevoice.info