Subsequent legs in her journey:

• Three years with in Kenya, where she did STAR work with Doreen Ruto, a from 91����Ƶ (91����Ƶ).
• Four years with the for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she studied under and then apprenticed with John Paul Lederach, founding director of .
• Beginning a PhD in expressive arts and conflict transformation from the .

It began here

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Mansfield was on the 18th floor of an office building in lower Manhattan when she noticed scraps of paper floating by her window. She and her colleagues evacuated the building and began walking rapidly northward to get away. She heard and then saw the collapse of the twin towers. Dozens of people from her home suburb of Garden City died in the attack.

“For over a year I couldn’t plan more than five days out,” Mansfield recalls. “A Somali friend later told me, ‘Now you know how we feel every day.’” Ultimately she quit her job at Goldman Sachs, traveled for a year, and found her way to teachers and mentors working in peace education and conflict transformation.

One of these teachers was , who co-facilitated Mansfield’s STAR cohort in 2010. Now they are working as a team, together with program associate and trainer . Zook Barge’s focus is on curriculum development and training; Mansfield’s is on administering the program, developing the STAR network (“learning community”), and producing communications.

STAR’s birth

In late 2001, STAR was born as a partnership between CJP-91����Ƶ and to provide resources for responding to trauma in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

“What began as a program to provide tools to pastors working with traumatized congregations in New York City and Washington,” says CJP executive director , “has blossomed into a valuable resource for peacebuilders from East Africa to the Middle East to Central America.”

STAR has trained over 5,000 people from 62 countries on five continents. The program has been a springboard for: , which deals with the wounds of racism; , addressing veterans’ re-entry; and , emerging from post-Hurricane Katrina work with teenagers.

“STAR is proof that even out of the most dreadful violence it is possible to grow life-giving and peace-supporting responses,” says , CJP’s program director.

Becoming the director

Mansfield was named director of STAR in early 2015, a position she will hold while continuing to pursue her doctoral studies focused on dance-based and movement-based healing, restorative justice and transforming the wounds of trauma. She succeeded Zook Barge, who had led the program as both its top administrator and chief instructor for eight years, until her requests for splitting the duties bore fruit.

Mansfield’s first job after earning a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1996 was at Goldman Sachs. She started as an analyst, then became an associate and finally a vice president in the investment management division. She spent four years in New York City and four years in London.

In STAR trainings, participants create a drawing called the “river of life.” Reflecting on the flow of her river, Mansfield says the powerlessness she experienced immediately after 9/11 set her on the path – and helped prepare her – for her new role with STAR.

You’ll also see a picture, right at the top, of American and British soldiers teaching their Sierra Leonean counterparts how to use a mortar. It’s a worth-a-thousand-words example of what’s wrong with the predominant approach to security reform around the world, according , research professor at the of 91����Ƶ.

“Often, military personnel are taught how to use weapons and how to target ‘enemies’ but they are not taught about civil society, how to protect civilians or basic social skills for interacting with people,” she said. “More and more experts are realizing that more training is needed to help security forces understand how they should be relating to civilians.”

Schirch argues that the institutions of civil society – religious groups, universities, media, community organizations, etc. – are the foundation of stable, peaceful communities. True security sector reform, then, should assist security forces to protect and empower civil society as it builds and sustains peace. The train-and-equip model that prevails now, however, often results in civilians “perceiving the military or police as predators, not as protectors,” she said.

Re-orienting soldiers, police officers, to civil society

Addressing that problem lies at the heart of Schirch’s latest undertaking – a three-year process to develop a curriculum for teaching soldiers and police officers the “soft” skills of relating to civil society. The project, called “,” is a partnership between (where Schirch also serves as director of human security), the at the University of Notre Dame, and .

As part of the ongoing curriculum development, Schirch and her colleagues are meeting with civil society groups and security forces around the world to gather input, collect case studies, and develop teaching strategies and materials. By 2015, the work will result in the publication of a training handbook and a series of online courses designed to improve the ways that security forces and civil society groups communicate and interact.

Schirch describes the effort as a culmination of the work she’s done over the past decade to help American foreign policy support – rather than counteract– peace, security and democracy in other countries. Among her inspirations for this was a 2005 visit to Iraq to lead a peacebuilding training, during which Iraqis asked her what she was doing to teach her own government and military how to build peace.

Keynote speaker at Intercollegiate Peace Fellowship

During her keynote address at the hosted at 91����Ƶ Jan. 31 through Feb. 2, 2014, Schirch described how she subsequently began “knocking on doors” in Washington D.C. and at the Pentagon, with no clear idea of what she wanted to do other than to begin talking with military leaders about . (To beat swords into plowshares, she noted, you have to get in touch with the people holding the swords.) As a result, she now receives regular invitations from the military to appear on panels, teach courses, and speak at conferences about peacebuilding and security. This is a reflection, she said, of an enormous hunger in the military to learn more about these issues.

Also during her remarks at the recent conference, Schirch outlined a series of 50-year goals she has for the security curriculum project and ensuing work. Among these is her hope that the military will become an institution focused on peacekeeping, disaster response and protection of civilians, rather than destruction of enemies, and that all soldiers will be trained peacebuilders whose primary role is to protect civilians. She also hopes that nonlethal weapons will be used during violent crises to prevent further violence, and that perpetrators of that violence will be brought to justice before the International Criminal Court and other legal institutions.

Schirch points to a number of examples where better relationships between civil society groups and the military have already improved security and built peace around the world. In the Philippines, she said, classes at the – founded by graduates of – have taught conflict management and peacebuilding to soldiers. These soldiers’ new skills and relationships to civil society groups, as resulted from the classes, have allowed the military to “de-escalate very tense situations with armed groups,” Schirch said.

New book: Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Planning

Civil society leaders, with the support of security forces, have also stopped post-election violence in both Ghana and Kenya by acting on previously established plans for addressing conflict, she said.

This summer, Schirch will be teaching a course at SPI based on her latest book, . The book, listed atop the reading list for 2014, concludes that effective peacebuilding requires coordinated planning between the military, government and civil society groups. The curriculum project Schirch is now developing will include lessons on conflict assessment and methods described in the book.

“Instead of just demonizing the military, we need to engage them as human beings and provide training so they have tools other than guns to build peace,” Schirch said when speaking to the audience of young peacebuilders at the recent 91����Ƶ conference. “We have a lot of work to do, so it’s good that we have a lot of good people working on this.”

John Paul Lederach

John Paul Lederach, the co-founding director of the Conflict Transformation Program at 91����Ƶ, now the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), will speak at 7 p.m. in Martin Chapel of the seminary building on “The Poetics of Peacebuilding.”

“Peacebuilding requires an eternal belief in the creative act, the building and coaxing of imagination itself,” Dr. Lederach has stated. He will elaborate in his presentation.

Lederach is currently professor of international peacebuilding at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame University. He received the Reinhold Niebuhr Award from Notre Dame on May 19, 2009, given annually to a Notre Dame student, faculty member or administrator whose life and writings promote or exemplify social justice.

Lederach was named a “distinguished scholar” on the faculty of 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and returns to teach in CJP’s annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI).

He has authored and co-edited 15 books and manuals in English and Spanish, including The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005), The Journey Toward Reconciliation (Herald Press, 1999), Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (Syracuse University Press, 1995), Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (USIP, 1997) and The Little Book of Conflict Transformation (Good Books, 2003).

Lederach received his PhD in sociology with a concentration in the Social Conflict Program from the University of Colorado. He and his wife, Wendy, have two children, Angie and Josh.

Admission to the program is free. A reception with refreshments will follow at 8:30 p.m.

For more information, call Phoebe Kilby, 540-432-4581 or email: phoebe.kilby@emu.edu.