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During September, October and early November, Dr. Jantzi was part of a six-member Africa Listening Team. He interviewed 117 Canadians and Africans residing in Canada who were selected to participate in the project. The team was formed by the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) to gather data from African and North American MCC constituents to see how MCC can improve their contribution in Africa. The overall outcome of the project, as indicated by Africans, was that MCC's role in Africa is significant because of the Mennonite long-term commitment to peacebuilding. There are many other issues in Africa, such as HIV/AIDS, however there are also numerous resources to work with those issues. The African peacebuilding traditions work very well together with the Mennonite tradition. |
Following involvement in the MCC project, Dr. Jantzi traveled to New Zealand where he spent over eight months as Scholar in Residence at the Centre for Justice and Peace Development, Massey University-Albany, Auckland. During that time he conducted research on the conceptualization and practice of restorative justice in New Zealand. One person Dr. Jantzi met with, as he conducted his interview-based research, was Fr. Jim Consedine, a long-time promoter, leader and author in the field of restorative justice. Besides being a parish priest, he is also coordinator of the New Zealand National Movement for Habilitation Centres and Restorative Justice. Dr. Jantzi has summarized his research in a report entitled, "Restorative Justice in New Zealand: Current Practise, Future Possibilities."
Janice Jenner
Janice Jenner facilitated the Oklahoma City/Nairobi bombing survivor exchange program in June and July of 2000.
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In June, Ms. Jenner, Barry Hart (IJP) and Tammy Krause (CTP '99, IJP) met in Oklahoma City with survivors of the Oklahoma bombing and their families, as well as six survivors of the Nairobi Embassy bombing. This event was followed the next month by a more structured time of workshops in Nairobi. Sixty survivors participated in workshops over a 3-day period, followed by an open day of workshops that were attended by another 400 people. Four survivors from the Oklahoma bombing were able to participate. Barry Hart and Krista Rigalo (CTP '00) were also involved. These events provided opportunities for people to exchange caring, support, and to recognize shared experiences. (see article: Bridges of Healing) |
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Everyday Ghandis is a project being conducted in conjunction with Questions of Balance in Santa Barbara, California to develop training videos and documentary films, featuring community level peacebuilders. Ms. Jenner visited Kenya to initiate contacts and has been serving as a consultant.
Reflecting on Peace Practice is a project of the Life and Peace Institute of Uppsala, Sweden and the Collaborative for Development Action in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ms. Jenner served on the steering group and was responsible for researching and writing a case study on peace work in Kenya.
When you are the Peacebuilder is the name of a book of reflections on peacebuilding in Africa that Ms Jenner co-wrote and recently published with Babu Ayindo of Kenya and Sam Doe of Ghana. The book is spiral-bound and available in hardcopy and on CD for maximum availability to grassroots-level peacebuilders. This project was funded by the United States Institute of Peace.
Tammy Krause
Tammy Krause conducted the first 5-day Defense-Based Victim Outreach Training Seminar at EMU last year. This year, a second seminar was held. Twenty practitioners from all over the U.S. have now been trained in this new field. Her first capital case was with the Tim McVeigh defense team. She has since worked on a dozen capital cases.
To begin with, Ms. Krause envisioned defense-based victim outreach as reaching out to and building relationships with victims. Since her initial case, the approach has evolved as she has learned from victims more about how to apply restorative justice principles. The emphasis now is on actively meeting victims' or survivors' judicial needs and encouraging offender accountability - actually helping to bridge the gap between the victims and the defense team.
In addition to conducting these seminars and her regular practice, Ms. Krause frequently is invited to participate in conferences as a plenary speaker and to conduct seminars and workshops. Recent conferences she has spoken at include the Federal Defenders of Eastern Washington and Idaho Conference where her talk was entitled, "Restorative Justice: Understanding and working with victims of violent crimes." She also spoke at the First Annual Texas Capital Defense Conference on "Working with victims." The organization Murder Victim Families for Reconciliation (MVFR) conducted a conference called Healing the Wounds of Murder at which Ms. Krause presented "Reaching out to murder victims." She also spoke at the Federal Capital Defense Seminar/Life in the Balance Conference on "Victims and Survivors.
The Indiana Public Defenders held a conference called Defending Against the Death Penalty. Ms. Krause was invited to conduct a workshop for them which she titled "Approaching Victim's Families."
Ron Kraybill
Ron Kraybill and his family returned from a 10-month leave of absence in India last summer. Dr. Kraybill served under the sponsorship of Mennonite Central Committee at Henry Martin Institute. He conducted workshops, meetings, evaluations, consultations and staff training events in India and Thailand with governmental and non-governmental organizations. (see article: Challenges)
Dr. Kraybill has been serving as training advisor to a project of the United Nations Development Program on Capacity-Building in Conflict Management in Africa. In 2000 and 2001 he met with a group of international trainers in various African locations to design and test four workshops in conflict resolution for African leaders.
Dr. Kraybill worked in a number of organizational conflicts in 2000 and 2001. Particularly interesting and meaningful was a conflict in the Religion and Theology Department of a well-known college. Differing styles of leadership and decision making and poor communication blended with theological conflicts in raising tensions to a point that many faculty considered leaving. In a series of meetings, sufficient progress was made that the professors are now working through remaining differences under the leadership of a fellow faculty member.Dr. Kraybill was keynote speaker at a Nashville conference in March, 2001, for Justpeace, a new Methodist initiative for responding to conflicts. Dr. Kraybill expressed gratitude for the inspiration and encouragement given to Mennonites in the late 1970s by two Methodists, Dr. James Laue and Rev. John Adams. Noting that Laue and Adams were pioneers in the field of conflict resolution in its early days, Dr. Kraybill recalled that they had inspired several Mennonites with ideas that eventually led to the establishment of the Mennonite Conciliation Service. Dr. Kraybill pointed out that his presence to assist in the establishment of a similar Methodist effort completes a circle begun over 20 years ago.
John Paul Lederach
John Paul Lederach has been making three to four trips a year to Bogota, Colombia to work with JustaPaz, a 10-year-old justice and peace organization of the Mennonite Church. He conducts training workshops with civil society and Colombian peace movement leaders, including the National Assembly for Peace. This has also involved facilitating strategic planning and consortium building across these movements for greater impact on the peace process.
In February 2000, Dr. Lederach was involved with two initiatives in conjunction with the Life and Peace Institute (LPI). LPI is an international and ecumenical center in Uppsala, Sweden founded in 1985 by the Swedish Ecumenical Council. Their aim is to further the causes of justice, peace, and reconciliation through research, seminars and publications. Dr. Lederach served as a consultant-advisor to Peacebuilding Design Initiative in Congo.
Also in conjunction with LPI, Dr. Lederach conducted a training seminar in Ethiopia on reconciliation, peacebuilding and mediation for national church leaders of the Mekane Yesus denomination. This has also involved discussion and support for church related mediation and peace efforts, including early discussion of Eritrean and Ethiopian initiatives. Norwegian Church Aid was also involved.
Dr. Lederach held a follow up workshop in March 2001 with the El Doret team from the National Council of Churches in Kenya. This team has been working in the Rift Valley ethnic clash areas. The topics covered were the lessons they had learned and developing greater capacity for strategic and responsive evaluation. The workshops were a cooperative effort with the Nairobi Peace Initiative team.
Pat Hostetter Martin
At the request of Prisoner Visitation and Support (PVS), a non-profit organization providing volunteer visitors to federal and military prisoners, Pat Martin and Howard Zehr, in fall of 1999, carried out an evaluation of the progress made by PVS to recruit and train more multicultural visitors. They each attended a PVS regional workshop, interviewing multicultural visitors and PVS staff persons. In an evaluation report, they summarized the comments heard and suggested ways to make the organization more friendly to multicultural visitors.
Ms. Martin serves on the advisory boards of several Mennonite-related organizations, including Mennonite Conciliation Service and Christian Peacemaker Teams, appreciating the value of cross-fertilization of ideas and efforts at justpeacebuilding. In addition, at the request of Mennonite Central Committee, Ms. Martin, teamed with Janice Jenner and Nathan Zook Barge, developed a set of questions to help MCC workers use peacebuilding as a lens for program planning. "A Peacebuilding Guide," completed in early 2001, is a tool to help build relationships of peace and dialogue across the divides of community, national and international levels.
Lisa Schirch
Lisa Schirch spent a month in 2001 visiting Fiji as a research and training consultant. The Fiji Council of Churches Research Group and the Inter-Faith Council of Fiji invited her to participate in "Peace Research: Toward a Culture of Dialogue".
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Dr. Schirch assisted in the design of a peace research process with local Fiji leaders and worked on developing training curriculum for national reconciliation workshops. Closer to home, before the Fiji trip, Dr. Schirch was involved in developing a modified consensus decision-making system for university-wide issues at Eastern Mennonite University. This system involves web dialogue, face-to-face dialogue, voting procedures and facilitation training. |
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In early February 2001, Dr. Schirch was invited to give the keynote address at the JustPeace in the Balkans Conference in Columbus, Ohio. Later that month she also spoke on "Mennonite Contributions to JustPeaceBuilding" at the Women's Peace Conference, which was convened by the World Bank. She was an invited speaker at the Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution's annual meeting in Richmond, Virginia in March. Her topic was "Ritual and Mediation." In June, Dr. Schirch gave a presentation on "Coordinating JustPeacebuilding" at the National Conference on Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution in Washington, D.C. In addition to these activities, Dr. Schirch wrote two articles for Conciliation Quarterly's Winter 2000 issue: "10 Principles of Identity for Peacebuilders" and "Transforming Identity through Ritual." She also contributed "Theories of Gender, Conflict, and Peacebuilding" to the Mennonite Conciliation Service's Mediation and Facilitation Training Manual. Most recently, Dr. Schirch wrote "Ritual Reconciliation: Transforming Identity/Reframing Conflict," a chapter in Reconciliation, Coexistence, and Justice in Interethnic Conflicts: Theory and Practice, edited by Mohammed Abu-Nimer.
Dr. Schirch is currently writing a book called Mapping Justpeace that synthesizes and maps restorative justice, nonviolent activism, conflict transformation, human rights, relief and development, and other social change activities.
Nancy Good Sider
Ms. Sider has been involved as a facilitator/instructor in the first two summer sessions of the Mindanao Peacebuilding Institute (MPI) in Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines. During the 2001 session of MPI about 200 participants from eight Southeast Asian countries gathered to participate.
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This was the second MPI jointly sponsored and organized by the Mennonite Central Committee and the Catholic Relief Services. Eight co-facilitated courses were offered in the 2-week institute. Other than Ms. Sider and Mohammed Abu-Nimer, a regular instructor at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI), all instructors were previous CTP or SPI participants. |
Since 1999, Ms. Sider has been facilitating monthly, daylong workshops for the city of Roanoke, Virginia as part of their Building Community by Welcoming Diversity program. This has entailed leading groups of about 60 diverse city employees in dialogue on controversial diversity issues. These workshops have been part of an ongoing citywide conversation to increase understanding and the ability to dialogue on differences. About 2000 employees have attended Ms. Sider's dialogue sessions, including various departments such as city manager, social services, firefighters, and streetworkers.
In late 1999, Ms. Sider traveled to Bamenda, Cameroon to work with Norbert Kenne (see tribute), former CTP student and director of the Ecumenical Service for Peace, a Christian, ecumenical, and interreligious association. Founded on Christian principles, the association aims to set up a society of participation based on justice and peace with a mission of nonviolent social transformation. Ms. Sider participated in training 25 non-governmental organization leaders in nonviolent conflict resolution. Participants included traditional leaders, social workers, human rights promoters, pastors and teachers.
Howard Zehr
Recently, Dr. Zehr conducted an interview and photographic project, focusing on the experiences and reflections of people who had personally undergone severe violence. With funding provided by the Open Society Institute's Center on Crime, Communities and Culture, the Showalter Foundation and release time from EMU, he conducted intensive interviews with and made photographic portraits of over 40 victims of crime. This has now been released as a book, Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims (Good Books, 2001); a gallery version is also being prepared for the Washington Post cameraworks.com website.
This project dovetailed with another initiative administered by the Institute for Justice and Peace (IJP), a "Listening Project", designed to explore the fault line between restorative justice and victim service communities. Restorative justice claims to be victim-centered, but is it really so in practice? Many victim advocates have had concerns. Through a grant from the Open Society Institutes Center on Crime, Communities and Culture, teams made up of one restorative justice advocate and one victim advocate visited 7 states to listen to the ideas and concerns of victims and victim service providers. Later, representatives from each of these sites was invited to EMU to hear the findings and make recommendations for addressing concerns. A final report is expected shortly. Dr. Zehr was one of the initiators and overseers of this project, which was administered by IJP associate, Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz, and now IJP director, Janice Jenner.
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During this period, through a USAID grant initiated by the Public Center for Legal and Judicial Reform in Moscow, Institute staff and associates assisted in setting up and training a number of restorative justice programs in Russia. Dr. Zehr made two trips in conjunction with this, culminating in a Moscow conference, which brought together representatives of 6-8 new restorative justice programs in Russia. These trips were combined with speaking and training trips to several cities in the Ukraine. After giving a keynote speech at an international restorative justice conference in Winchester, UK, Dr. Zehr was asked to address restorative justice practitioners and senior management of the Thames Valley Police. There, he was awarded a helmet making him an "honorary bobby." [use photo of him from Crossroads] |
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Hope in the Cities is a national program that grew from Moral Re-Armament, an international network devoted to reconciliation and building communities. Lisa Schirch, Nancy Good Sider, Barry Hart and Ron Kraybill have been participating as facilitators in Richmond, Virginia to address barriers related to race relations, economics andjurisdiction. Principles of conflict transformation are being used in this work with a vision to create "A new American community, where a commitment to reconciliation and justice transcends our divisions."
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