. .DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION. .

An article by David Wick in the Ashland Daily Tidings (reprinted according to Creative Commons)

“My experience and research have convinced me that the world is on the verge of the greatest change in human history: The transition from the culture of war that we have had for tens of thousands of years to a new culture,” and that new development, states UNESCO Director David Adams, “is a culture of peace.”

A 1999 United Nation’s Culture of Peace resolution called for a transformation from a culture of war and violence to one of peace. Aligned with this and Margaret Mead’s notion that it’s only been small groups of thoughtful committed citizens that have changed the world, a group of eight inspired local thinkers collaborated for two years before creating a Culture of Peace Proclamation with the Ashland City Council in March 2015.

Click on photo to enlarge

The city’s proclamation, unanimously adopted by the council, says “(we) strongly encourage residents to work toward development of a Culture of Peace community, and pledge to lend appropriate encouragement and support to that effort.”

Soon an independent, community and citizen-based Ashland Culture of Peace Commission was created. Commission members were chosen to represent many aspects of Ashland’s culture: education, business, the arts, science, environment, religion, law and habitat. An active community support team was also formed. On Sept. 21, 2015, the UN International Day of Peace, the Ashland Culture of Peace Commission was launched in a community-wide celebration.

The commission and the community support team’s first actions have been to define the Ashland Culture of Peace as a community-wide movement dedicated to transforming our attitudes, behaviors, and institutions into ones that foster harmonious relationships with each other and the natural world.

Initial focus areas being developed are:

1. The Peace Ambassador Program — Training volunteers to be a positive presence in our community and on our streets, engaging in person-to-person dialogues and arranging peace forums on topics important to our community.

2. Peace Education — Offering exciting, skill-based and peace-focused learning experiences to schools in the Ashland School District.

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3. Community Resource Directory — Identifying, listing, and dialoguing with organizations and people in our community who are already contributing or want to contribute to a culture of peace for Ashland.

4. World Peace Flame Monument — Establishing the venue and financial support for Ashland to be the 12th site in the world for the World Peace Flame, a symbol of peace, unity, freedom and celebration that will draw visitors from around the world.

5. State of the Culture of Peace in Ashland Report — Writing an annual report that will be presented to the community and City Council to provide a view into how we are doing in co-creating a Culture of Peace in Ashland.

Cities are the real societal structural level where a Culture of Peace can take root. The individual person is always the essential component for building peace through his or her daily choices, but it is the city that has the reach, authority, responsibility and influence to set the positive tone and direction for so many. When the City Council and Mayor adopted the Culture of Peace Proclamation, they strongly encouraged residents “to work toward development of a Culture of Peace community” and pledged “to lend appropriate encouragement and support to that effort.”

With our unique approach, Ashland has the opportunity to become a model of this new culture for cities around the world. It is about shifting mindset and behavior in all aspects of our societies to embrace humanity’s interconnectedness as we move from force to reason, from discord and violence to dialogue and peace-building. For sustained change there must be a larger context, a vision that inspires and unifies citizens to move forward. This vision has launched the Ashland Culture of Peace.

This is the first of a regular series of articles by the ACPC on various aspects of creating a culture of peace, both here and elsewhere. Next time we’ll address the question, “What is a Culture of Peace?”

Current commissioners include: Amy Blossom, Ben Morgen, Bert Etling, Bill Kauth, Catherine McKiblin, David Wick, Eric Sirotkin, Greeley Wells, Jack Gibbs, Jeff Golden, Joanne Lescher, Joe Charter, Norma Burton, Pam Marsh, Patricia Sempowich, Richard Schaeff, Tighe O’Meara and Will Sears. The original developers included some of the current commissioners, plus Elinor Berman, Irene Kai and Kathleen Gamer.

Contact David Wick via email at ashlandcpc@gmail.com, or drop by the ACPC office at 33 First St., Suite 1, Ashland. The commission’s website is at www.ashlandcpc.org.

.. DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION ..

An article by John Dear in Common Dreams (reprinted according to provisions of Creative Commons)

Last year, I was invited to give a talk on peace in Carbondale, Illinois. I was surprised to discover that in recent years, activists from across Carbondale had come together with a broad vision of what their community could one day become—a nonviolent city. They wanted a new holistic approach to their work, with a positive vision for the future, so that over time their community would be transformed into a culture of nonviolence.

(Image: Nonviolent Carbondale/Facebook)

They created a coalition, a movement, and a city-wide week of action and called it, “Nonviolent Carbondale.” They set up a new website, www.nonviolentcarbondale.org, established a steering committee, set up monthly meetings, and launched “Nonviolent Carbondale” as a positive way to promote peace and justice locally. In doing so, they gave everyone in Carbondale a new vision of what their community could become.

From the start, the Carbondale activists held their local organizing meetings occasionally before city council meetings, which they then attended together as a group. At city council meetings, they started suggesting and lobbying ways their city could become more nonviolent. Their movement eventually became based out of the main Carbondale Library. Over the years, they have done positive work with their police department, local schools and the school system, religious communities, the library system, and local non-profits. As grassroots activists, they have lifted up a positive vision of their community and brought it into the mainstream.

Over the years, they put their energies into their “11 Days” program – 11 days in March filled with scores of actions and events for all ages across the city. Twice their 11 days focused on peace; twice on compassion, and last year the focus was on food. One of the outcomes from last year’s 11 Days, for example, was a new organic food market started in the poorest neighborhood in town.

“Nonviolent Carbondale” offers a model for activists, movements, and cities across the country. With their example in mind, the group I work with, Campaign Nonviolence, [www.campaignnonviolence.org] is launching the “Nonviolent Cities” project using “Nonviolent Carbondale” as an organizing model for other cities.

Taking the lead from friends and activists in Carbondale, Campaign Nonviolence invites citizens across the U.S. to organize a similar grassroots movement in their city, to put the word “nonviolent” in front of their city, and to help others envision, organize and work for a nonviolent local community. As far as we can tell, this organizing tool has never been formally tried anywhere in the U.S., except in Carbondale. This movement is a new next step in the visionary, organizing nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Perhaps the key aspect of “Nonviolent Cities” is that each city will be summoned to address its violence in all its aspects, structures, and systems; to connect the dots between its violence; and to pursue a more holistic, creative, city-wide nonviolence, where everyone together is trying to practice nonviolence, promote nonviolence, teach nonviolence and institutionalize nonviolence on the local level, to really build a new nonviolent community for itself and others. We want not just to undermine the local and regional culture of violence, and end all the killings, but to transform it into a culture of nonviolence.

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This means that “Nonviolent Cities” organizers would promote the vision, teach nonviolence, and inspire people at every level in their community to work together for a new nonviolent community and a new nonviolent future. That would include everyone from the mayor and city council members to the police chief and police officers, to all religious and civic leaders, to all educators and healthcare workers, to housing authorities, to news reporters and local media; to youth and grassroots activists, to the poor and marginalized, children and the elderly. Together, they would address all the issues of violence and pursue all the angles and possibilities of nonviolence for their city’s transformation into a more nonviolent community. The first goal would be a rapid reduction in violence and an end to killing.

Nonviolent cities would work to end racism, poverty, homelessness, and violence at every level and in every form; dismantle housing segregation and pursue racial, social and economic integration; end police violence and institutionalize police nonviolence; organize to end domestic violence and teach nonviolence between spouses, and nonviolence toward all children; work to end gang violence and teach nonviolence to gang members; teach nonviolence in every school; pursue more nonviolent immigration programs and policies; get religious leaders and communities to promote nonviolence and the vision of a new nonviolent city; reform local jails and prisons so they are more nonviolent and educate guards and prisoners in nonviolence; move from retributive to restorative justice in the entire criminal justice system; address local environmental destruction, climate change, and environmental racism, pursue clean water, solar and wind power, and a 100 percent green community; and in general, do everything possible to help their local community become more disarmed, more reconciled, more just, more welcoming, more inclusive, and more nonviolent.

If Carbondale, Illinois can seek to become a nonviolent city, any city can seek to become a nonviolent city. This is an idea whose time has come. This is an organizing strategy that should be tried around the nation and the world. The only way it can happen is through bottom-up, grassroots organizing, that reaches out to include everyone in the community, and eventually becomes widely accepted, even by the government, media, and police.

Two international groups pursue a similar vision–International Cities for Peace (www.internationalcitiesforpeace.org) and Mayors for Peace (www.mayorsforpeace.org, which has 6965 cities committed in 161 countries)—but, as far as I can tell, no U.S. group has ever attempted to invite local communities to pursue a vision of holistic city-wide nonviolence or organize a grassroots movements of nonviolent cities.

On our website, www.campaignnonviolence.org, we have posted “Ten Steps Toward a Nonviolent City,” a basic initial list of organizing tasks for local activists which includes: creating a local steering committee; finding a mainstream institution that can serve as a base; organizing a series of public meetings and forums; studying violence in the community; meeting with the mayor and the city council; and organizing a city-wide launch.

Gandhi once remarked that we are constantly being astonished by the advances in violence, but if we try, if we organize, if we can commit ourselves, he declared, we can make even more astonishing new discoveries and advances in nonviolence. With the example of “Nonviolent Carbondale” before us, we have a way to organize every local community and city in the nation, a way to envision how we can all one day live together in peace with justice, and the possibility of new hope. If we follow the example of Nonviolent Carbondale, we can help transform our culture of violence into something completely new—a culture of nonviolence. That should always be our goal.

. .DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION. .

An article by Aliyya Swaby, New Haven Independent (reprinted by permission)

The public schools “restorative justice” plan and the resettling of refugees in town strengthened New Haven’s “culture of peace” this past year, according to a new report.

Almost 200 “pink out” for Planned Parenthood (Photo by Lucy Gellman, New Haven Independent).

Compiled by the New Haven Peace Commission, the third annual report — “The State of the Culture of Peace in New Haven” — incorporates anonymous statements from 15 local activists on the ways that the city is improving or stagnating in eight different categories.

The conclusion: New Haven is moving toward peace. But slowly.

The report judges peace in New Haven by eight categories based on the United Nations Culture of Peace initiative launched in 1989. Each category was developed as a contrast to a characteristic of the culture of war: sustainable and equitable development, democratic participation, equality of women, tolerance and solidarity, disarmament and security, education for peace, free flow of information, and human rights.

Report author David Adams was at UNESCO until 2001, where he worked on the “Culture of Peace Programme” for promoting peace efforts nationwide. Nations, Adams said, operate under cultures of war, dominated by armament, propaganda, economic inequality and authoritarian control. But cities need cultures of peace to be successful.

“Cities don’t have enemies. Countries have enemies,” he said. “If we want to change the world and make peace, we should work at the level of the city and not at the level of the state.”

The full report can be read here.

The activists spoke anonymously, so that they spoke honestly, Adams said. “What you see is that it’s not perfect, but the city does work for the culture of peace.” The adoption of restorative justice in New Haven Public Schools, allowing kids to work through their problems instead of suspending them for disciplinary issues, is a major step forward in promoting peace, he said.

The Peace Commission is working to set up meetings with the chairs of Board of Alders education and youth committees in order to push for permanent funding for the restorative justice program. “Restorative justice addresses fundamental problems in the culture of peace. If we can do it in the schools, we can do it in society as a whole,” he said.

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New Haven’s Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS) jumped into the national media in November for welcoming a family of Syrian refugees after the governor of Indiana refused to accept them into the state. This is an example of a “solidarity program” promoting community despite inequality in the city, according to the report.

The report also tracks programs that have not lived up to expectations from past years. Though the first peace report in 2013 lauded jobs program New Haven Works when it was first created to address unemployment and under-employment, this year’s report calls those early hopes “largely unfulfilled.”

New Haven Works has found jobs for 500 people in 18 months. That number is a “drop in the bucket,” the report quotes an activist saying.

Another major area of stagnation in creating a culture of peace in the city, according to Adams, is lack of sustainable, equitable development. Though thousands of new apartments are being developed, many are luxury units, “far beyond the reach of those who are being forced out of Church Street South, not to mention families and individuals already homeless or in over-crowded housing,” the report reads.

The prominence of women in politics this year—including Mayor Toni Harp’s reelection and Board of Alder President Tyisha Walker’s election by fellow alders—is a good model for woman’s equality, according to the report.

And New Haven supported Planned Parenthood at a rally on the Green against nationwide attacks attempting to cut sexual health services for women, the report says.

But women are largely heads of their households among the urban poor and often employed part-time or for low wages without benefits, the report said. Many have husbands or boyfriends in prison or who cannot find jobs because of a record.

The first report in 2013 said it was too early to judge whether community policing would be effective in New Haven. The new report characterizes it as still a work in progress.

“It takes a while to change the police force,” Adams said. “Developing trust takes years … Hopefully it will continue to move forward.” In other cities, the police are seen as an “occupying army, not as the fabric of the city.”

Earlier this week, the Peace Commission met to discuss the report and consider issues to address next year. Adams said it will continue pushing for a permanent restorative justice program and will need to come to consensus on another task.

A half dozen people sit on the commission. “The problem is when a lot of people think of peace, they think of business between countries. But when you talk about a culture of peace and define it this way, it becomes clear that it’s something people can do in their daily lives,” Adams said. “It brings peace home.”