An Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) Basics workshop was held at the Network of Religious Communities (NRC) April 19 – 21. A Team of AVP Facilitators that is supported by Buffalo Monthly Meeting has been hosting a range of AVP workshops at the NRC since 2022. These workshops follow the agenda of activities used across the world, but our local focus is to build skills among people doing justice and peace work in their personal lives and vocations.
This particular workshop was a flourishing learning experience for 17 adults ranging in age from 19 to 89, and coming from Houston, Kansas City, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Syracuse, and Western New York.
AVP was created in the mid-1970s by a group of incarcerated men at New York’s Greenwood Correctional Facility in collaboration with a group of civil rights activists, education reformers, and Quakers. Over the decades is has grown to be a free nonviolence training experience across the U.S. and in many nations around the world. Ironically this nonviolence workshop is mostly held in prisons in the U.S. whereas in the rest of the world it is held mostly in communities. We want to make it much more available in the community in our region.
All AVP workshops are free and led by volunteer facilitators. This workshop’s facilitation team was made of up of three apprentices and a certified AVP Facilitator under the mentorship of lead facilitator Nadine Hoover. Our team to working to grow the number of certified facilitators to allow us to offer workshops more often.
Additional AVP Basics workshops are planned for August and November this year. Participants often comment about how a sense of community and trusting relationship is built in three days, and that they have grown in self-awareness of their feelings and strengthened skills that enable them to develop relationships with people from very different background than their own. My own goals for our AVP work are to build bridges through authentic relationships in Western New York to transcend thesegregation that is so common in our region, and to enable us to find new ways to foster greater equity, social justice, and peace foreveryone. I encourage Friends who have never attended an AVP workshop or haven’t done one in a long time to considerparticipating with us in the future.