IRIS DE LEÓN-HARTSHORN MA ’05 has served Mennonite Central Committee (1996-2007) and Mennonite Church USA (2007-present) in various leadership roles. Previously the church’s director of transformative peacemaking, the Portland, Oregon, resident is now its associate executive director for operations, a new position that encapsulates the roles of chief of staff and key advisor to the executive director. She has been a strong advocate for racial and gender justice in the church and its related institutions.

ON AUG. 18, GLEN GUYTON WAS INSTALLED AS THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF MENNONITE CHURCH USA. HE IS THE FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND NON-ETHNIC MENNONITE TO HOLD THE POSITION. CAN YOU SHARE SOME OF YOUR FEELINGS SURROUNDING HIS APPOINTMENT?

I am both excited and cautious. Glen is an exceptional human being who loves God and the church. He believes the church can be better in living out the Gospel and he wants to work with others, including the next generation, to help shape the church’s future. At the same time, I am cautious because racism is alive and well. People often can’t seem to see how it operates in the church. My hope and prayer is that Glen will have enough support to see him through some of the racism he will encounter.

WHAT MOTIVATES YOU TO CONTINUE YOUR WORK WITH MENNONITE AND ANABAPTIST-ROOTED INSTITUTIONS IN SEARCH OF CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION?

I was brought up Catholic and dabbled with the Presbyterians and Baptists, but found my home in the Anabaptist tradition. No church tradition is perfect because it’s filled with human beings. My experiences as a Latina ingrained a deep concern for justice, both in itself and as a way toward right relationships with God, humanity and creation. It’s been an honor to work with many in the Mennonite church with that same conviction and vision of transformation. Relationships within the church and outside provide motivation to continue God’s reconciling work.

WHAT STRATEGIES HAVE YOU UTILIZED TO CONNECT AND INTEGRATE COMMUNITIES OF PEOPLE OF COLOR IN CHURCH INSTITUTIONS?

Sometimes the work of transformation takes trial and error. Early on, the goal was educating about systemic racism and how it operated in our church institutions – a difficult lesson for many in the dominant culture who have the luxury to think in relational terms and be unaware of the systemic nature of racism and how it privileges white people. Real change has to happen at the systemic level, but there is an essential interpersonal piece rooted in being allies or agents of change in partnership with people of color (POC).

In recent years, Mennonite Church USA and related institutions have sponsored a yearly gathering called “Hope for the Future” – a wonderful, safe place for POC in leadership positions, including staff and board members, to forge relationships and determine what we need to work on within the church and what we need to publicly articulate. This space has been especially important in the current atmosphere that has given permission for people to openly act out their racism. We have tried to provide both respite and encouragement so that we POC can continue to be in the church.

YOU ONCE WROTE, “RECONCILIATION CAN’T HAPPEN WHEN PEOPLE LEAVE; IT HAPPENS WHEN WE CHOOSE TO STICK IT OUT TOGETHER.” THESE WORDS RESONATE BEYOND THE CHURCH CONTEXT INTO OTHER REALMS OF PEACEBUILDING. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT WHAT “STICKING IT OUT TOGETHER” MEANS?

Tom Yoder Neufeld [professor emeritus, Conrad Grebel University College] has talked about equating the Holy Spirit with the wind, which blows things together that don’t seem to go together. Tom says that as the church, we come together not because we necessarily belong together, but God has brought us together and now we need to figure out how we live together.

Finding ways to stick together can be painful but as followers of Christ, that is what we are called to do. That is the work of God’s reconciling mission for the world. It’s hard to work things out if one party leaves the conversation. When we have theological or ideological differences in how we see the church or our organization, we need to find ways to talk with and trust each other. If we can do that, we can find a way forward.

SINCE GRADUATING FROM CJP, IS THERE ONE PARTICULAR LEARNING THAT HAS BEEN OF PRACTICAL USE?

I learned so much at CJP. Most useful was the exercise of putting my experiences within a theoretical framework and then the permission to consider other options. The quote I use often from Jayne Docherty, “I am not married to one theory, but I date around.”

Most impactful, though, was the encouragement and push to see myself as a capable academic. In high school, I was told Mexicans don’t go to college – a message that has plagued me most of my life. Halfway through the first meeting of a theory class, I walked out and cried in the hallway telling myself there was no way I could pass. [Academic Programs Director] Jayne Docherty came outside, listened, then pushed back and challenged me. I owe Jayne much gratitude in helping that message to stop playing in my head. She was a mentor and is still a friend.

IN EARLY FEBRUARY 2018, 20 scholars from five leading Iraqi universities and a representative from Iraq’s Ministry of Education gathered in Beirut, Lebanon, for a five-day training on conflict analysis. The diverse group – which included both men and women representing Sunni, Shia and Assyrian Christian faiths – would lay the foundation for their eventual development of a peace education curriculum for Iraqi university students.

“They were passionate in jointly exploring systemic dynamics of conflicts in Iraq. This was a first for most, given the divides in recent decades,” said Catherine Barnes, a CJP professor who has taught and facilitated peacebuilding processes in more than 30 countries.

The training was part of a multi-phase, multi-year peacebuilding project with youth and academics in Iraq that has involved several CJP faculty and alumni. The $1.3-million initiative, funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), was jointly implemented by CJP, Kufa University and two NGOs, the Iraqi Al-Amal Association and the Imam Al-Khoei Foundation.

SUPPORTING PROJECTS IN IRAQ

The project’s second phase with youth concluded in April 2018, having provided five total trainings since beginning in fall 2017. Seventy-five youth, selected in a competitive application process, were supported in the creation and implementation of interfaith peace projects in communities across Iraq.

The academic trainings involved 46 scholars and educators, with the goal of creating a common peacebuilding curriculum to be taught in five Iraqi universities.

As key stakeholders in Iraqi social fabric, youth and academics are “seen as instrumental in strengthening social cohesion and promoting civil society initiatives and dialogue between various ethnic and religious groups,” according to the project grant.

“We estimate that the trainings and youth peace projects touched hundreds of lives and will have exponential benefits to the region in the future,” said Daryl Byler, CJP’s executive director. “Both the young people and the academics are empowered to continue their work, and to adapt their learnings in meaningful and sustainable ways.”

LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR PEACE EDUCATION IN IRAQ

The academic trainings support the promotion of a peace education framework for reconciliation.

Participants included professors of the humanities, political science and law from universities of Anbar, Baghdad, Karbala, Kufa and Tikrit.

“An initial goal of the project was to help equip educators to teach the subject of peacebuilding and conflict resolution in their university classrooms and to support them to serve as resources for the development of peace education in Iraq,” said Alma Abdul-Hadi Jadallah, a consultant and professor who regularly teaches at CJP’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

Participants showed determination to initiate change and valued an approach that was respectful of cultural traditions and knowledge, she added.

Jadallah, who is also president and managing director of the Fairfax, Virginia-based firm Kommon Denominator, has been involved in all phases of the project since it began in October 2016. She has conducted six youth workshops and four workshops for academics.

CONFLICT: ‘AN INTRINSIC HUMAN PHENOMENON’

Barnes’ agenda for the recent workshop included theories and models of conflict analysis, conflict perceptions and relationship lenses, conflicts as systems, and political economy. Participants collaboratively constructed a 100-year timeline of Iraq, leading to an illuminating dialogue on underlying issues, patterns and turning points in their shared history. They also jointly analyzed current conflict “drivers” and the political economy system in Iraq. A final day highlighted the psychosocial dimensions of conflict, including discussions of dignity, trauma and the cycle of violence.

“One important conceptual foundation that we discussed was that conflict is an intrinsic human phenomena that crosses scale barriers, and needs a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to understand and work with it,” Barnes said. “That’s why it was really beneficial to have humanities professors in the room with political science professors, and to use interactive exercises and dialogical discussions, instead of a lecture model, to build participants’ analytic skills regarding an understanding of conflict.”

Aala Ali MA ‘14, UNDP development officer, was one of the “visionaries” of this project, according to Byler. Contributors included Myriam Aziz MA ‘17, of Lebanon; Cynthia Nassif MA ‘14, of Lebanon; and Najla El Mangoush MA ‘15 of Libya (Nassif and El Mangoush are doctoral students at George Mason University); Ahmed Tarik MA ‘16, of Iraq; and Professor Carl Stauffer MA ‘02. Professor Jayne Docherty was also involved in early curriculum development.

SUMINA KARKI

Sumina Karki, 29, is a program officer working primarily in community mediation and dialogue with The Asia Foundation. A founding member of the Nepalese feminist group Chaukath, she came to peacebuilding three years ago after working as a journalist and researcher.

SPI provided Karki with new skills – she took courses in faith-based peacebuilding, conflict coaching, and truth-telling, reconciliation and restorative justice – but also time to “refuel and reflect,” she said. “Working along with local facilitators to bring stakeholders to dialogue and working with them, filling them with positivity and optimism, encouraging them – all of that takes a lot of mental, spiritual and physical energy.”

At SPI, “there is so much to learn and you come to realize that you are not the only one, that there are people around the world who are working in really difficult situations and still hopeful that change can happen,” she said. “I have derived much positive energy from that.”

Karki calls dialogue processes a “preventive and more proactive way of managing conflicts,” even in a country with caste, class, gender and ethnic divides. The Asia Foundation is widely regarded in Nepal for efforts in training communities about mediation and dialogue as a tool for conflict transformation and peacebuilding. This is an especially important tool for citizens in remote areas who cannot easily access judicial systems.

Despite having a female president and around 30 percent female parliamentarians, Nepal is highly patriarchal. Out of 7,000 mediators, The Asia Foundation has trained more than 2,000 female mediators – an important step towards inclusion and equity at the community level, Karki says.

THERESA “TESSY” GUSIM-NDASULE

Everyone leaves loved ones behind to come to SPI. However, gender-focused interfaith peacebuilder Theresa “Tessy” Gusim-Ndasule left an especially curious six-year-old son back in Nigeria who clearly intended to hold his mother accountable.

“Every day, we talk and he says, ‘Mom, how are your classmates today?’ and I say, ‘They are fine,’ and then he says, ‘Mom, what did you learn about peace today?” And then she gives a full report.

She also missed her daughter’s second birthday. But Gusim-Ndasule says her daughter will forgive her. “She’ll be happy when she grows up that I missed her second birthday because I was working in the pursuit of peace.”

Gusim-Ndasule experienced interfaith violence as a child and on several other occasions in her life, which has provided motivation to address this topic as a program officer with the Baptist Church and the Women’s Missionary Union in Kaduna.

Gusim-Ndasule hopes to train Christian and Muslim women together in conflict transformation skills and form a group to visit rural communities and Internally Displaced Persons camps. The sight of women of different faiths coming together to promote a culture of peace “will send a strong message to the women in the camps who are nursing grievances and holding onto grudges for what has been done to them.”

Participating in SPI has been “a blessing,” she says. “I’ve seen how the community here lives and nobody looks at you by who you are or where you come from. It’s the humanity that matters. That is something I am taking in and taking with me. You see a light in everyone, no matter your race, your gender, your faith.”

Although the roughly two dozen Kenyan women in the room worked in diverse contexts across the country, they had much in common. All of them had studied at 91����Ƶ – primarily through the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program (WPLP) – and they all shared a belief that their peacebuilding work offered hope for the future. To strengthen that hope, at an October 2016 conference funded by USAID in Nairobi, they formed the Daima Amani Women’s Network (DAWN). Daima Amani means “everlasting peace” in Swahili.

“Our vision is to contribute to the peace in Kenya through our collective peacebuilding skills and experiences,” said Shamsa Sheikh GC ‘17, DAWN’s program coordinator and a WPLP alumna. “[We] saw a gap, in that there were many women in Kenya doing peacebuilding and had either gone through the WPLP program or were Center for Justice and Peacebuilding alumni, but we did not know much about each other’s work.”

Since DAWN’s founding, Sheikh said, its members have been working on everything from organizational logistics to social media engagement and brainstorming ideas for campaigns related to women’s issues and peacebuilding in Kenya. She said the group also hopes to help implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which includes among its objectives increased participation by women in peacebuilding and political processes, and the reduction of gender-based violence during armed conflict.

“Each of the members are doing peacebuilding in their own area of practice,” said Esther Bett, GC ’15, DAWN treasurer and another alumna of WPLP. “We participate in public forums and use any opportunity we get to preach peace.”

Other DAWN leaders include Chairperson Carol Makanda GC ’15 (WPLP) and Secretary Vincent Kiplagat.

Kiplagat is on the staff of the Daima Initiatives for Peace and Development (DiPaD), an organization founded and led by Doreen Ruto, MA ’06, until her death in 2016. DiPaD – WPLP’s local partner in Kenya – now serves as DAWN’s organizational home, offering advice, logistical support and other assistance to the recently formed network.

According to WPLP Director Leda Werner, the newly formed group has potential to have significant impact in Kenya.

“They are in the middle level civil society space, so they can transmit messages of peace to the grassroots and work on community-based peacebuilding initiatives there, and they can also reach up to the policy level and be a stakeholder in national conversations, thereby bringing a peacebuilding perspective into government policies and playing a role in shaping those conversations,” Werner said.

One of DAWN’s early focuses was on the August 2017 presidential elections in Kenya, which many feared could result in a return of the widespread election violence that occurred a decade ago and resulted in more than 1,000 deaths. To help prevent that, DAWN sent letters to all candidates urging them to do everything they can to maintain peace in the country.

As of this publication, several weeks after the election, Sheikh said Kenyan peacebuilders continue to appeal for calm and restraint. Tensions remain high as the losing candidate is disputing the outcome, and the country has seen isolated violence at demonstrations and some attempts to incite ethnic violence on social media

“This is a time for us to call for political tolerance, cohesion and harmony in the country so that we do not see the political violence we saw in 2007-2008 [after the election],” Sheikh said. “I hope civil society will use this opportunity to preach peace all over the country, as we have done in the pre-election period.”

Representatives from six police departments across the country attended a law enforcement retreat on restorative justice in November 2016 near Harrisonburg, Virginia. The retreat was co-hosted by the Harrisonburg (Virginia) Police Department and the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice.

Agencies from California, Illinois, Massachusetts and Virginia were represented by executive leadership, who have led or continued to lead implementation of restorative justice practices in their respective jurisdictions.

Lieutenant Kurt Boshart, who founded and directed Harrisonburg Police Department’s restorative justice program, organized the event. Boshart has since retired from a 28-year career.

The goal of the retreat was to build networks, share resources and gain insights. Topics of discussion included personnel training, program sustainability, collaboration with faith-based and other community groups, funding, and use of restorative justice in crisis situations.

Participants agreed that utilizing restorative justice principles – being proactive, using good communication skills, building relationships and social capital by empowering and including community members –called for a holistic culture shift from “the top down and back up,” from new recruits to administration, said Chief Joe Garza, Reedley (Calif.) Police Department. At the same time, they agreed that many police departments, and individual officers, are already doing this kind of outreach, though perhaps under a different name.

What would be optimal, however, is systemic buy-in and a nationwide professional commitment to this different kind of accountability, they said.

“One model does not fit each and every community,” said Bedford (Mass.) Chief Robert Bongiorno, who partners with 14 other police departments through the non-profit Communities for Restorative Justice (C4RJ). [Jennifer Larson Sawin MA ’04, former executive director of C4RJ, is still involved with the organization as an advisor. She attended the retreat as well.]

The traditional penal system causes irreparable harm to communities, participants said, while restorative justice processes, if done correctly, reduce the frequency and severity of future offences by keeping the offender in the community (in employment, in school and with family) and involving stakeholders in repairing the damages.

The process is sometimes called “restorative justice diversion,” because the pre-charge referral and subsequent voluntary participation agreement from the offender shifts the case out of the traditional legal system. Youth and adults complete an accountability process that is “much tougher than going to prison,” Bongiorno says.

Several retreat participants reported being initially distrustful of this process, only to share transformative experiences when observing the benefits.

“Six years ago, I would have said everyone in this room is crazy, but now I say, ‘Why didn’t we figure this out 25 years ago?’” said Garza. He was accompanied by Officer Marc Ediger and former police officer John Swenning, now a restorative justice facilitator with West Coast Mennonite Central Committee. The three men collaborate as part of an initiative called the Reedley Peace Building Initiative.

“We don’t become police officers so that we can incarcerate people,” said Vanessa Westley, a 25-year veteran of the Chicago Police Force.

Participants planned to work towards formalizing their association, actively promoting their successful restorative justice programs, and networking more broadly among colleagues to share resources and encourage implementation of new programs.

In the late 1990s, Brazilian judge Isabel Lima traveled to a conference in New Zealand to talk about her work with juvenile offenders. After her presentation, an audience member asked if Lima was using something called “restorative justice.” It was the first time she’d heard the term.

Conversations ensued, connections were made, and Lima flew back home with the feeling that something important had just happened. “It was a definitive moment,” she recalls. “I felt that restorative justice would be my path.”

It’s a path that eventually brought her to become a visiting scholar at CJP in spring 2017 and a participant at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

What first excited Lima about restorative justice was the way in which its principles aligned with the holistic, community-centered approach to the law that she’d been developing as a judge. This mindset was inspired by her long commitment to Catholic-affiliated human rights movements and her previous career as a nurse. The “top-down” way in which the law treated individual offenders and the broader community particularly bothered her.

Lima has kept working in restorative justice since her retirement, including a two-year period in Timor-Leste, where she helped draft the country’s first juvenile justice law. She has also been a professor at the Catholic University of Salvador in Bahia, Brazil, for 18 years.

Along the way, Lima grew to admire 91����Ƶ’s leadership in the fields of restorative justice and peacebuilding, and visited the university’s Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice for a week in 2016.

While at CJP last spring and summer, Lima has been laying the groundwork for a week-long conference and retreat from Oct. 23-27. The 25 to 30 expected participants, representing Brazil’s legal system, academia and civil society, will meet with Zehr Institute co-directors Howard Zehr and Carl Stauffer, CJP professor Johonna Turner, and leaders of local organizations working with restorative justice.

Among Lima’s colleagues who plan to attend is Leoberto Brancher, a juvenile court judge in Caxias do Sul. Brancher plays a key role in the coordination of several public service centers dedicated to conflict resolution and prevention as well as community-building. Established in 2010, the program has been managed by the city government since 2014. The city also has peace commissions working in its jails, healthcare system and its most violent neighborhood, and a “peace volunteers” program that has trained nearly 1,000 people in the use of circle processes. Of those, nearly 100 have received additional training to become certified to resolve conflicts in their communities.

Brazil is “one of the most dynamic venues for restorative justice development these days,” says Zehr, who has been invited to lecture in Brazil several times. “We at CJP are honored to have been asked to further assist these exciting developments.”

Lima hopes to see a steering committee formed in the fall that can continue to coordinate collaboration between restorative justice practitioners in Brazil and CJP.

“We are very motivated and very committed to restorative justice,” Lima said. “At this event, we will be able to strategize together, learn from those at CJP who are really grounded in this work, and look forward to a sustainable future for this movement.”

LENORE BAJARE-DUKES AND SAMANTHA LAWLER, then-MA candidates, spent their spring 2017 semester practicum with Richmond-based social justice theater company The Conciliation Project. For both women, the experience of learning about truth-telling practices with an accomplished troupe of actors and practitioners was deeply moving.

Bajare-Dukes also contextualized her learnings by aiding in a mapping project of truth-telling, memorialization and reparations organizations around the country (fellow graduate student Jennifer Chi Lee also contributed). Jodie Geddes MA ’16, a community organizer with Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY), supervised the research, with help from other graduate students from University of California, Berkeley, and University of Notre Dame. The work was jointly supported by RJOY and CJP, with funding provided by the Telemachus Foundation.

The mapping project aims to generate synergy, cross-pollination, momentum and movement-building through the connection of many local and regional efforts. “We want to document these community-based participatory initiatives and bring them together into a network, ultimately to host a national convening or create a center that would act as a resource and hub for the multiple local processes going on around the nation,” said Fania Davis, executive director of RJOY, while presenting on the topic to a Summer Peacebuilding Institute class.

One focus of the mapping is to foster and honor the collective wisdom already working on this challenging process within specific local contexts. “There’s a lot of wisdom in communities to say what does truth and reconciliation look like? What does racial healing look like?” Geddes said. “We are looking at what communities are doing, what they name as their needs, and how we can begin to support them?”

Both women urged that the hard work of naming historical and institutionalized violence against African Americans needs to begin now. [Their presentation occurred before the events of Charlottesville in August 2017.]

“There is an African proverb that says a finger pointing also has three fingers pointing back at you,” Geddes says. “We live in a post-genocidal and post-slavery land and we have done nothing in all of these centuries to repair that harm. We insist that other countries do that work. A process that is done well names the power and privilege and violence that exists and has existed. We need to name the violence that perpetuates against the people of this nation.”

Stay tuned for more coverage of this project and CJP’s involvement with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation enterprise on the CJP website.

By the time Fulbright Scholar Myriam Aziz arrived from Lebanon to start her master’s degree at CJP in fall 2015, the U.S. presidential primary was already underway. Aziz was dismayed to hear some Republican candidates wanted to make the vetting process of Syrian refugees even more rigorous and restrictive.

“I had experienced firsthand who these refugees are and the journeys they had been on,” says Aziz, who spent two years working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, as a registration assistant and a senior resettlement assistant with the UNHCR, a refugee agency.

After an ineffectual lobbying visit to a local politician, she began thinking about other ways by which she might more effectively introduce Syrian refugees to an American public that often misunderstands them.

With a grant from CJP, Aziz returned to Lebanon in December 2016, where she filmed interviews with Syrian refugees and created a 25-minute documentary.

“When you think of Syrians, you think of us as terrorists, as burdens,” says one young man in the film. “We are fleeing war. We are attempting to start new lives. Why would we create more problems for ourselves?”

Aziz is now pursuing a number of ways to make sure the documentary is seen, including possible showings with congressional staff in Washington D.C., in hopes of increasing the number of Syrian refugees settled in the U.S. “They need us more than ever, because they’re unable to be here to talk themselves,” she said. “If anyone in the United States would like to collaborate or use this documentary, please don’t hesitate to contact me.”

As that work continues, Aziz has returned to campus to become CJP’s first-ever teaching fellow. During a one-year fellowship, Aziz will teach in the undergraduate peacebuilding and development program, assist with graduate-level CJP courses, and help peacebuilding and conflict studies professor Gloria Rhodes to develop a training program on conflict resolution in the workplace.

“Like many of our students, Myriam arrived at CJP with a good deal of field experience,” said Jayne Seminare Docherty, CJP academic programs director. “In working with Gloria Rhodes as a teaching assistant, she found she had a gift for teaching as well as a passion for it. Myriam also proved herself to be an able scholar with a flair for reflecting on the realities of working in the field.”

The arrangement will offer benefits to all involved, added Docherty, with Aziz gaining experience as an instructor, undergraduates learning from a recent CJP grad with distinctive field experience, and CJP receiving assistance developing the new training program.

“If this works well, we would like to create a yearly Teaching Fellow position for a recent CJP graduate,” Docherty said.

After finishing the teaching fellowship at 91����Ƶ, Aziz plans to eventually pursue a PhD and then, a career in the Lebanese Foreign Service.

CJP innovates. Co-founding director John Paul Lederach challenged conflict resolution advocates to focus on relationships. Howard Zehr pioneered restorative justice. Barry Hart connected trauma healing to peacebuilding. Lisa Schirch centered ritual as a tool for transforming conflicts. I challenged the efficacy of “getting to yes” for complex conflicts. Gloria Rhodes is connecting personal awareness with skill-building to foster conflict competency. Carl Stauffer is promoting restorative justice as a social movement. Amy Potter Czajkowski and David Anderson Hooker used the Strategies for Trauma and Resilience framework to write a manual on transforming historical harms.

But all these great innovations did not help in Charlottesville. We can no longer turn away from the challenge of transforming a culture that promotes violence and refuses to address historical harms.

Fortunately, CJP hired the next generation of innovators two years ago. Johonna Turner and Tim Seidel will start teaching Foundations of Justice and Peacebuilding II in spring 2018. We expect their blend of cultural studies, restorative justice, community organizing, nonviolent resistance, and policy advocacy to yield the next CJP practice innovations.

HOW DOES CJP CREATE A LIBERATING LEARNING SPACE?

Many graduates rave about the experience of CJP as an authentic community. The faculty and staff embrace and work with the whole person for a reason. A peacebuilder who is not grounded, centered and self-aware is likely to do more harm than good.

Our students are not heads on a stick, all brain with no body, emotions or spirit. In seeing our students as whole people, we also can’t ignore the trauma they bring into the classroom. And we can’t just talk about topics like injustice, violence, war, rape and racism without recognizing the trauma this can induce.

For the first time this fall, Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program director Katie Mansfield spent a day of student orientation teaching everyone to recognize the ways that trauma responses can show up in the classroom. The faculty and students concluded the training by making some agreements about ways that everyone can do their part to create a learning community that cares and learns together.

—Jayne Seminare Docherty, Academic Programs Director

Belief in the mission. “Education is key to changing the world. And when you educate people in peacebuilding, they can change the world wherever they are … whether it’s in the United States or around the world, working in schools, small communities, cities or nations.”

Big impact. “One of my most important mentors said, ‘Facilitate the edges and back of the room. That is where the wisdom resides.’ I figure I should look at where I invest my money for real change in the world the same way. CJP is small in size and resides on the margins of the Washington D.C. power center. But the program and its graduates are mighty in wisdom and powerful in their impact on the world. A great investment of my resources.”

Transformational experience at CJP. “I am who I am today because of CJP. The courses were both practical and inspiring, the professors were so dedicated to walking with me, and my classmates shared their journeys and wisdom. I am so grateful for the education and the values that CJP gave me.”

To honor an inspirational peacebuilder. “I know personally or have been acquainted with several individuals, including the late Tom Fox, who have studied at or otherwise been associated with CJP. I tremendously admire and respect their personal life commitment to on-the-ground peacemaking and reconciliation and feel it is important that I support in a tangible way what the CJP is doing to empower people like Tom.”

To walk the talk. “I think of the phrase ‘put your money where your mouth is.’ We talk peacebuilding, we try to act as peacemakers, but are we also willing to put our dollars into making it happen? Every day our tax dollars go to support war and violence. Can we send a different kind of message with contributions toward peacebuilding around the world?”

Motivated by faith. “The lyrics to this hymn speak to me: ‘In Christ there is no East or West/ In Him no South or North/ But one great fellowship of love,/ Throughout the whole wide earth.’ My contribution to CJP is my contribution to loving the whole wide earth. CJP has the potential to grow people who become the hands and feet of Jesus around the world.”

Does one or more of these reasons resonate with you? If so, I invite you to join our community of supporters and make a gift today. Thank you!

THANKS TO OUR GENEROUS DONORS!
FOR FISCAL YEAR 2016-17, ENDING JUNE 30, 2017

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DONORS TO OTHER CJP FUNDS OF $1,000+

Anonymous (2)
Richard Alper & Kate Herrod
Alper Family Foundation Inc.
Daryl & Cynthia Byler
Klingstein Foundation
Shorsh Mustafa
Rodney & Miriam Nafziger
James & Marian Payne
Norm Rittenhouse
Feryl & Connie Souder
Kris Stoesz
Telemachus Foundation
The Austin E. Knowlton Foundation
Jay & Nancy Yoder
Howard & Ruby Zehr

IN MEMORY OF MJ SHARP ‘05

Michael J. (M.J.) Sharp ‘05 took to heart 91����Ƶ’s mission to serve and lead in a global context. His work with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and the United Nations took him all over the world, building bridges between people in conflict. On March 12, 2017, M.J. was ambushed and murdered by unknown assailants in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As a UN expert on armed groups, he was on his way to meet with leaders of a new militia group in central DRC. M.J. had previously worked for MCC as Eastern Congo coordinator, collaborating with the Congolese Protestant Council of Churches’ peace and reconciliation program to convince rebel fighters to lay down their weapons and return home.

The M.J. Sharp Endowed Scholarship Fund will honor M.J.’s memory by providing need-based aid to CJP graduate students with priority given to students from the Democratic Republic of Congo. We welcome your contributions to this scholarship at emu.edu/giving/endow/mjsharp.

Lindsay Martin

CJP associate director of development

(540) 432-4581

lindsay.e.martin@emu.edu