.. 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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How can culture of peace be developed at the municipal level?

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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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How can culture of peace be developed at the municipal level?

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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.”

. DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION .

Excerpt from the website of Pacem in Terris, Wilmington, Deleware

Pacem in Terris and other non-profits in the Wilmington area (Wilmington Peacekeepers, One Village Alliance, DE Coalition Against Gun Violence, etc.) want to develop a strategic vision, plan and resource document that will bring peace to Wilmington. The plan will deal with the actions needed to transform a culture of violence to a culture of peace. The plan would include input from civic groups, city and state governments and agencies, churches, students, the elderly, and general public.

Video of March for a Culture of Peace

Building on the very successful September 2014 March for a Culture of Peace (and Rally and Call to Action) that we organized (45 co-sponsors, 400+ participants), and subsequent public forum events every month since then, we see the need and opportunity for a Wilmington Peace Plan that presents a clear vision of our desired goal, and the means for achieving it. The strategic plan would include needed actions by city and state legislators, divisions of the city, county and state government, neighborhoods, families, churches, schools, businesses, non-profit organizations and individuals.

The accompanying resource document would be printed as well as available on the web and via smartphone app. It would include organizations throughout our region that are engaged in what we call “building a culture of peace”, and include resources and information on a wide variety of topics– from anti-bullying strategies, civic engagement, domestic violence prevention, school to prison changes, financial literacy, management and violence, gun violence reduction,, gangs and violent street groups, safe havens for youth, juvenile justice system, mental health providers, mentoring, restorative justice, support groups for ex-offenders, service organizations, street level outreach, dating violence, workplace violence prevention and other topics.

Together, the Wilmington Peace strategic plan and Wilmington Peace Resources document will present a clear vision of a possible and attractive peace-filled future; the actions and means for getting there, and the resources needed to achieve the vision and implement the plan.

Click here for Tom Davis’ recap of the December 2014 event and click here for a video of the event. Also, on December 28th, Wilmington Friends Meetinghouse had a Memorial to the Lost. Click here for the video.

How can culture of peace be developed at the municipal level?