For Caitlin Morneau, the work of mobilizing the 20 percent of Americans who identify as Catholic began with cowriting a book foreword with 91����Ƶ’s Howard Zehr, an early translator of indigenous practices into the restorative justice movement.

The book, Redemption and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Restorative Justice (Liturgical Press, 2017), was a production of the Catholic Mobilizing Network (CMN), and Morneau, who is Catholic, was immediately drawn to the organization.

Just months later, in July 2017, she became its first director of restorative justice.

In her role, Morneau oversees RJ programming, the creation and publishing of educational materials, messaging and grassroots efforts for RJ advocacy. She also was the lead adapter for Harm, Healing and Human Dignity: A Catholic Encounter with Restorative Justice (Liturgical Press, 2019), a faith formation guide that introduces the topic in an “accessible and reflective” way, she said.

“Restorative justice values are consistent with Catholic principles including human dignity, solidarity and encounter,” said Morneau, who graduated this spring with a master’s degree in restorative justice from CJP. “They invite us into an entirely different way of thinking about justice itself, one that is healing and humanizing rather than vengeful and isolating.”

Based in Washington DC, CMN was founded a decade ago to embolden Catholics and others to advocate for the end of the death penalty and to promote restorative justice. The collaborative effort included the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, murder victim family members, Dead Man Walking author Sister Helen Prejean and her religious order, the Congregation of St. Joseph. CMN calls for the transformation of the U.S. criminal justice system and works to build social capacity for restorative practices.

The movements are “mutually beneficial,” said Morneau. “Efforts to educate, pray and advocate for an end to the death penalty open doorways for people to learn about restorative justice who may not have otherwise heard about it, and when we create a more restorative culture, the death penalty becomes obsolete and irrelevant.”

CMN recently launched a blog for the people implementing RJ practices in Catholic settings to share stories, wisdom and lessons learned. It is also hosting two-day workshops leading up to a fall circles training, and will host a national RJ conference in 2020.

For her CJP practicum, Morneau – a self-described “systems thinker” – primarily focused on the internal workings of CMN. She established an organizational steering committee to provide vision for growing CMN’s RJ programmatic reach and to advance the RJ movement and integration of RJ ethics in Catholic contexts and ministries.

Among the committee’s members are Chris Castillo, whose mother was murdered, and Felix Rosado, co-founder of Let’s Circle Up inside the Phoenix State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania, among a number of other experienced facilitators.

“If we are to be true to the movement, we need to create structures that allow us as an organization to be informed by the experiences of those doing the work in communities,” she said.

She has also worked on building strategic relationships with leaders and grassroots coalitions “in order to amplify prominent voices and mobilize the masses in calling for life and human dignity,” she said.

The Catholic church’s social teachings, while less widely known, are “a framework for peacebuilding, not something that’s separate from it.”

Morneau recognizes that a significant challenge in working closely with the Catholic community is the current clergy sexual abuse “reckoning.” As Catholics throughout the country are looking for responses to harm that uphold both healing and accountability, she is hopeful that a deeper understanding of restorative justice among Catholics will inform processes that center the voices of victim survivors and communities harmed while including individual and institutional accountability that facilitates amends and a new way forward.

The church’s extensive membership and structures are “capable of influencing great change,” she said. “We do this work because we believe that every human is made in the image and likeness of God, has inalienable human dignity, and deserves to be treated with dignity, no matter the harm that was suffered or caused. That drives everything that we do.”

CJP is a practice-oriented program, preparing students from diverse cultural and professional backgrounds to engage proactively and reflectively in complicated real-world settings of conflict and injustice.

But what does that mean in actuality? It means each CJP student doesn’t only read about and discuss core theories and skills of mediation and negotiation, facilitation and nonviolent mobilization for social change. And they also have the opportunity to apply learnings to a real situation with a client and then reflect, drawing on the wisdom of others – and the wisdom within – throughout the process.

The result is a transformative and challenging learning experience that contributes to both personal and professional growth, says Practice Director Amy Knorr MA ’09.

And, she adds, the process benefits the community. In recent years, as this outreach was emphasized by Knorr and faculty, CJP students have developed a strong reputation among local organizations as skillful communicators. Many organizations bring specific needs to CJP; Knorr helps to link these opportunities to coursework or as extracurricular volunteerism.

“The combination of the theory, the practice opportunity where skills are implemented, and the collaborative interaction with and feedback provided by classmates, faculty and staff here at CJP creates a potent learning situation,” Knorr said.

As an example, take Professor Catherine Barnes and her spring 2019 facilitation class. To her teaching, Barnes brings decades of experience designing and implementing deliberative dialogue processes in more than 30 countries. That lends credibility to one of her goals stated in the syllabus: Participants will become familiar with a variety of methods and techniques to achieve process goals, with groups ranging in size from three to 3,000.

During the class, students pair up to design a deliberative process for a client, then implement that process, receive constructive feedback from their partner, the client and Knorr. Barnes meets with the students in a final coaching session.

“We want to support the development of ethical, self-aware practitioners,” Barnes said, “who not only know how to use appropriate techniques but who also understand the deeper underpinnings of processes for working in complex contexts, with a lifelong habit of continually learning from experience for increasing effectiveness in the most challenging environments.”

Your partner in such an exercise could be a seasoned diplomat like Jim Herman, who served for a time as consul general of the largest U.S. consulate in the world in Frankfurt, Germany. He’ll retire soon, after a career that includes service in six other countries and Washington D.C.

Or it might be someone like Dawn Curtis-Thames, a hospice nurse whose years of experience working with patients and families in the liminal spaces of life and death brought her to more intensive study of peace and conflict.

Herman, who plans to start a coaching and teaching firm rooted in RJ principles with his wife of 27 years, says that the way in which Barnes carefully designed her facilitation course to “create safe space” for the sharing of different perspectives “enriched our interactions.” Not only was his own learning deepened in the classroom, but he was reminded through his practice partnership with classmate Kate Smucker that “two people with such different backgrounds can come together and complement each other’s skill set.”

Interviewed a few short weeks after the semester’s end, Herman said he’d already used several new facilitation methods in his current work. Polarity management helped his team explore a touchy issue and the eventual “recognition of the interdependence of two seemingly different ideas.” Several other techniques helped to “defuse office conflicts, which were negatively affecting morale, customer service and productivity.” As a result, communications improved and colleagues began to rebuild morale.

Growth in knowledge and skills is one obvious benefit of practical application. Another is networking, building connections through which students hone skills and deepen their self awareness and confidence as practitioners.

That was the case for Curtis-Thames, who worked with Our Community Place, a Harrisonburg-based nonprofit focused on meeting the needs of homeless people. She and classmate Ed Hagan, an attorney and mediation expert, facilitated a listening session with the organization’s clients, utilizing the world café method to learn more about daily concerns of both individuals and the group as a whole.

“Hospitality is a core value of this organization and the world café facilitation strategy shared that value. I was so pleased and energized by the engagement of the clients. We were really in their zone, which is how it should be,” Curtis-Thames said. “Facilitation is about offering the leadership to hold the space open and keep communication real, making a good space for meaningful and purposeful conversation that leads to social change.”

As with many practice opportunities, student-facilitators are often engaged beyond the initial exercise. Later, Curtis-Thames and her partner were asked to present the results at a city council meeting.

In the coming year, Curtis-Thames will return to the organization for her practicum and capstone. She’s excited to continue the learning experience.

“I learned so much from watching the organization staff and clients interact with each other,” she said. “I learned probably as much in that as I did in the whole process.”

91����Ƶ professor Carolyn Stauffer is leading the development of a new Strategies for Trauma and Resilience (STAR) curriculum focused on sexual harms.

The “Changing the Narrative on Sexual Harms” (CTN) project, which is funded by a JustPax Fund grant, is housed in the STAR program under the leadership of trainer Katie Mansfield and program director Hannah Kelley. Project contributors include Richmond Public Schools manager of school climate and culture Ram Bhagat GC ‘19 and neuroscientist and practitioner Joy Kreider. 91����Ƶ’s Title IX coordinator Rachel Roth Sawatsky and the Collins Center crisis response coordinator Rhoda Miller, a CJP grad student, are also key contributors.

STAR has facilitated trauma and resilience trainings with thousands of participants from more than 60 countries. The curriculum will deepen the program’s work addressing sexual trauma specifically and will engage all affected parties – from individuals to institutions – in proactive, preventative and restorative approaches.

“Worldwide there is a growing admission that the topic of sexual harms is quickly moving from invisible peripheries to conspicuous center stage,” Stauffer said. “The CTN project provides a viable way to be visibly present at a critical time in this important conversation. This proactive approach frames the paradigm shift opportunity offered by CTN.”

The grant includes funding for assembling focus groups in local and international settings, interviewing global practice leaders, and accessing expertise at institutions such as Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

The project is collecting input from survivors across diverse communities, thereby ensuring the inclusion of voices from marginalized and underrepresented communities. In addition to the harmful impacts of sexual violence on individuals, the curriculum will address how power disequilibria can foster cultures of violence in communities and organizations.

“Many organizations do not have processes in place to support individuals in a trauma-sensitive manner nor the impetus to push for proactive policies that prevent sexual violence in the first place,” Stauffer wrote. “Daily we hear of ‘sexual misconduct’ that gains notoriety precisely because institutions are non-compliant with current legislation and ignorant of trauma-sensitive intervention protocols. Such gaps not only compound the profound harms already done to victims, but they also put the integrity, legality and legitimacy of organizations at risk.”

The JustPax Fund focuses on individuals and organizations working for effective change through innovative approaches to societal challenges relating to gender, environmental and/or economic justice. It is administered by Everence Charitable Services through the Everence affiliate Mennonite Foundation.

“This project is the heart of what JustPax is all about,” said Teresa Boshart Yoder, managing director for Everence in Harrisonburg. “We want to reach out to the underserved or vulnerable and begin programs that will bring about effective change.”

This $6,600 grant is the second Stauffer has received from JustPax. A 2016 grant of $10,200 supported a project called “Silent Violence,” which studied strategies of resilience among domestic violence survivors from within communities of homeless women, undocumented Latinas, and Mennonite women from Old Order or conservative church communities.

Like many citizens, retired music professor Marge Maust and her partner Sandy Bahr have been dismayed and disheartened by accounts of increasing violence in communities and schools.

Their conversations on the topic eventually centered around two questions: Who to help? How to help?

In our conversations, we came to the consensus that we need to reach the children in our communities to teach and practice another way of dealing with our differences and disagreements. And who better to do that than our teachers who in many cases spend more quality time with students? If teachers could model and teach a way of working together to solve problems with patience, mutual respect, trust and connection, these children could then incorporate those skills in the professions and relationships in which they choose to be involved as adults.

This theory of change led them to CJP.

Brainstorming opportunities and possibilities with CJP Development Director Lindsay Martin and former executive director Daryl Byler eventually led to a beneficial result.

The couple funded 30 SPI Community Day scholarships to help introduce local educators to peacebuilding and restorative justice concepts. They also sponsored 20 local educators to attend 91����Ƶ’s Restorative Justice in Education Conference and a special extra day of training to work on individual implementation plans. In its fourth year, the summertime event for novice and experienced practitioners brings in more than 100 educators from around Virginia and other states to learn from and be inspired by each other to make change in their classrooms.

While many donors wait to gift money in their wills, Maust and Bahr have decided they want to contribute to a better world today. After all, if just one of those teachers returns to the classroom and helps one child to learn more peaceful ways of interaction, the impact is immediate and beneficial. “We figured that if we assisted our teachers now rather than later,” Maust said, “those same children they are teaching can pass it forward that much sooner.”

The same philosophy – “getting the ball rolling while we are still living” – drives a few of their other philanthropic efforts at CJP. “It gives us great hope to know that we are contributing to the lives of persons who are committed to making the world a more peaceful and just place” Maust said.

Get Started!

Decide the areas you’d like to help impact. Make an appointment to meet with 91����Ƶ’s Development Office. Get creative and brainstorm opportunities. See your donation make a difference!

At SPI 2019, our US students were disappointed that they had fewer classmates from other countries. The cross-border learning is a highlight of the CJP experience. We just enrolled a new class with only two new students arriving on a student visa. Clearly, this challenges our ability to sustain our mission. And, ironically, this is happening just as we have grown our capacity to offer more scholarships to international students.

I firmly believe that when our plans and activities are radically disrupted, we are being called to rethink our assumptions and recognize problems we have not yet noticed that need our attention.

More than 70 million people have been displaced by decades of war, climate change and natural disasters. In spite of current limitations on refugee resettlement, many families from war zones have migrated to the U.S. Their communities need assistance with internal conflicts, trauma and broken relationships. Like Bishop Andudu (page 13), many members of those communities continue to lead peace efforts in their home countries. By expanding our understanding of an international student, we can continue supporting peacebuilders working on conflicts around the world.

Four hundred years after the first enslaved Africans arrived at Point Comfort in Virginia, it is long past time to reckon with the legacy of slavery and its aftermath as well as the genocide and displacement of the indigenous peoples of North America. Students like Talibah Aquil (page 14) challenge us to continue expanding our work on racial justice in the U.S. while others push us to address the violence that is woven into our criminal justice system (Caitlin Morneau, page 18). We are grateful for the many ways we continue to learn from people who are, in the words of John Paul Lederach, “colleagues masquerading as students.”

I invite you to join us on the journey to whatever is next for CJP. The world might change, but it will always need leaders committed to building peace rooted in authentic justice, human dignity and right relations among people.

Jayne S. Docherty
Executive Director

South Korean Educator Eunkyung Ahn MA ‘19 began her CJP studies with an intensive short course about trauma and resilience – and she knew she wanted to pass the skills and values she learned to others.

“My key learning at CJP is the importance of embodied learning in peacebuilding, which is new to peacebuilding education here but also in Korea,” she said.

In February 2019, Ahn did just that – hosting a five-day course at 91����Ƶ on “Building Resilience for Body, Mind and Spirit” for 18 visiting South Korean K-12 educators.

“This arts-based, expressive experience was designed to revitalize creativity for working in nonviolent social transformation and to exercise creative muscles, a critical foundational practice for challenging violence,” said course creator Katie Mansfield, the lead trainer of the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program.

Offered in past years at CJP’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute, the course was tailored for this group by Ahn and Mansfield. Goals included an understanding of how systemic and cultural violence affects individual trauma; building resilience in body, mind, and spirit through arts-based, embodied learning; and empowerment for making social change, Ahn said.

Participants engaged in visual artistry, music making, movement exploration, poetry and short story development, and final presentations. A session with visiting co-facilitator and experienced public schools peace educator Ram Bhagat GC ’19 involved drumming and contemplative practices.

Mansfield appreciated the group’s engagement: “I was so impressed at how deeply and directly the educators connected the various expressive arts exercises to the challenges they face as educators, restorative justice practitioners and citizens of South Korea.”

The educators are members of the Center for Restorative Justice in Education, an affiliate of the Movement for Good Teachers, a grassroots Christian teachers association in South Korea. Formed in 2011 in response to a rise in school bullying, the teacher-members work to promote nonviolence and peace in the school environment.

Course participants Inki Hong, Eunji Park and Byeongjoo Lee are senior teachers at schools in urban neighborhoods near Seoul. All learned about circle processes and restorative justice in different ways in Korea, including teacher academies and international workshops, some involving Jae-Young Lee MA ’03, founder of the Korea Peacebuilding Institute.

Before learning about restorative justice, Hong says he played the role of a judge with his students. “Before, when children fight, I would have to decide who is wrong and who is right,” he said. “Now, I don’t decide. I help you figure out what happened and how to make things right. The circle makes equal power and equal power is not usually found in classrooms.”

Children in Korea “do not know how to express themselves,” said Park. “In the circle, they know how. It really develops metacognitive skills.”

Lee, who teaches middle and high school English, said he has appreciated “how the philosophy of RJ can be shaped into many circle styles.”

All three educators work with newcomer teachers in their home settings and plan to share their learnings in hopes of contributing to cultural and systemic change in the educational environment.

After graduation in May, Ahn took STAR II and visited spirituality-based peacebuilding communities before returning to her teaching position in South Korea. “I am so passionate about growing as an educator and helping to educate others about valuing our whole beings,” she said. “It is so important to live with our true selves in our individual and communal lives, and I hope to share that with my students and their parents and other educators in the future.”

SHORT-TERM GROUP TRAININGS MEET SPECIFIC NEEDS

Interested in a group training or workshop on restorative justice, conflict analysis or trauma and resilience? CJP has hosted a growing number of U.S. and international groups for short-term trainings, including judges from Nepal, educators from South Korea and the United States, and two cohorts of restorative justice practitioners from Brazil.

Building on years of experience facilitating trainings around the world, CJP faculty and staff from various programs help group leaders co-create innovative, beneficial educational experiences to meet each group’s specific goals.

“More and more, we see groups looking for creative, culturally-relevant and sensitive approaches to conflict analysis, restorative justice and trauma awareness and resilience,” said CJP Executive Director Jayne Docherty. “Our goal is to support change-makers in recognizing their own strengths and growing their toolkit for response in their professional and cultural context. Our strengths-based pedagogical practices tap into personal experiences, build relationships and engage different learning styles in a safe space.”

Visit emu.edu/cjp for more information or to inquire.

For human rights and constitutional law attorney Diego Dall ’Agnol Maia, attending the 2019 Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) alongside more than 50 of his fellow Brazilian restorative justice (RJ) practitioners and advocates was transformative.

“We don’t need to be lawyers, prosecutors, judges or social workers here,” he said. “We just need to be humans and talk about our experience, to change the world and make peace.”

Maia helped organize the group of 54, the largest of any one nationality to attend SPI at one time. It included people who are judges, RJ promoters, officials of the judiciary, lawyers, university professors and municipal guards. Dozens more were on a waiting list.

The Brazilian judicial system has shown growing interest in RJ, said SPI director Bill Goldberg MA ‘01, and for years 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding has been developing a relationship with people there. Director Emeritus of the Zehr Institute Howard Zehr and circle processes trainer Kay Pranis have each traveled there to provide training. Brazilians have also come to 91����Ƶ for SPI in previous years, and 25 came to campus in 2017 for a weeklong series of RJ lectures and training.

Most participants this year took courses on Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) and victim-offender conferencing.

The SPI courses, Maia said, provided tools that will broaden how RJ is used in Brazil, where current guidelines proposed by the national council of judges focus on the use of circle processes.

“Here at 91����Ƶ, we are learning that RJ is not what the law says, but what the community and people feel about the justice,” he said. “It has given me a new lens, and prepared me and other people in the group to talk more about restorative justice, and be ready in our spirits to go back to Brazil and talk about how these theories and practices are important to the community and not only to judges, prosecutors and lawyers.”

TRAUMA-INFORMED JUSTICE

RJ, which is grounded in repairing the harm of crime in processes that engage individuals and other community members, is well served by trauma training, said second-time SPI participant Mayara Carvalho. She has practiced RJ in the Brazil juvenile justice system, schools and university settings, and she earned her PhD researching restorative practices in communities. She is also laying the groundwork for an RJ center.

Carvalho incorporated the STAR training she received at last year’s SPI into her work with a young boy in Brazil who had been convicted of murder and drug dealing, but who had also suffered poor health and bullying.

“When I put trauma and resilience together on the table, we could see him as a person,” she said – and “he started to think about himself as a person, not as a victim or as an offender.”

In addition to her book Justiça Restaurativa na Comunidade, about using RJ in communities, Carvalho has written a guide titled “Programa NÓS – Belo Horizonte” for using restorative practices in schools. Brazilian schools, she said, are often “a kind of door to criminalization” because of how they respond to students with problematic behavior.

“We’re trying to develop nonviolent communication, restorative practices and circle processes inside schools,” she said, “to work on conflicts in a better way.”

CHANGING THE CONVERSATION

The SPI experience has shaped the Brazilian conversation about RJ, said Maia, and prompted the group to think about “what we’re doing in Brazil and what needs to be changed to do better, to expand this restorative understanding, and then to [bring] this powerful tool to the community for transformation.”

It’s not only about law, he said: It’s also about a social theory of justice.

“In Brazil we just see what the law says, and apply this in cases,” he said. “Now, we are starting to think, ‘Is this justice, to resolve the case only by law? Or is justice to give people the chance to heal their trauma?’”

Tentative plans are for another group of 25-50 to attend SPI 2020, with the current group returning the following year to take STAR II and an RJ course that has a dual focus of RJ in education and RJ in the legal system, Goldberg said.

Tecla Namachanja Wanjala MA ‘03 was honored as the 2019 Peacebuilder of the Year in May during the Summer Peacebuilding Institute. She accepted the award on behalf of her family, several of whom were present, but also “on behalf of Kenya, and not just Kenya, but Africa.”

“I don’t want to think that this is just my honor,” she said, adding thanks to 91����Ƶ and to her fellow CJP alumni working together in Africa on peacebuilding initiatives.

Over nearly 30 years, Wanjala has worked in many countries, including Sri Lanka, Cambodia, South Sudan, Burundi, Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda, in various aspects of peacebuilding, from arbitration and mediation to reconciliation and trauma healing. Currently the board chair for the Green String Network, she has served as commissioner and acting chair of Kenya’s Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission and in other roles with organizations such as PeaceNet and Pact International.

Wanjala’s peacebuilding work began with Somali refugees in 1991, encountering “trauma when we didn’t know what trauma was.”  She came to 91����Ƶ after meeting Jan Jenner MA ‘99, then a co-country representative with Mennonite Central Committee in Kenya. (Jenner ultimately became the first director of CJP’s Practice and Training Institute and then of the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program.)

“Jan is the one who identified me in a small village and saw my potential,” said Wanjala, who was working with Catholic Relief Services on resettlement issues. “She brought me on the national level, encouraged me to come to 91����Ƶ. I looked for funding and she said come by faith.”

At 91����Ƶ, Wanjala took five courses in trauma, including Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) trainings. She created an independent study to synthesize concepts, “to think about how we do this in Africa.”

Later, she collaborated with colleagues from the Green String Network who also were familiar with STAR materials: “We communicate best through folklore, stories and images, and so we took the STAR material, translated it into Kiswahili and developed images for each session. This is how Kumekucha was born.”

The Kumekucha program – Kiswahili for “It’s a new dawn” – empowers local leaders to create “space for people to talk, to cry, to affirm each other” in dealing with the country’s historic and current trauma, Wanjala said. The social healing program has expanded from communities to police and prison wardens.

Wanjala was among six Kenyans and three internationals selected as commissioners to the Kenya Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, established to investigate human rights violations and other historical injustices in Kenya between 1963 and 2008. She eventually became acting chair, leading efforts to record and witness testimony.

Though implementation of the commission’s recommendations has not been fulfilled, she says that is not a reason to give up on the hope of reconciliation and the creation of healing spaces in communities. It is important to be ready to see “windows of opportunity” and to gain supporters who agree in the approach and importance of the work.

“Start small, people will hear and join the river along the way,” she said.

As the story of murdered United Nations armed group expert Michael J. Sharp continues to spread around the world, the endowed scholarship set up in his name by friends and family to support Congolese peacebuilders at CJP grows as well. Sharp was a 2005 graduate of 91����Ƶ.

David Nyiringabo, the first recipient of the scholarship, enters his second year of graduate studies in conflict transformation at CJP this fall.

One reason Sharp’s legacy continues to grow is a March 2019 trek up Kilimanjaro in Tanzania that helped to raise more than $136,000 and garnered international publicity. Climbing the mountain was always something the United Nations armed group expert had planned to do, but his work kept him from the goal. At the summit, MJ’s father John scattered his son’s ashes.

The 8-day effort earned the attention of former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki R. Haley and Nobel laureates Leymah Gbowee MA ’07 and Dr. Denis Mukwege, each of whom sent video greetings and encouragement to the hikers as they made the ascent. Actress and activist Jane Fonda also posted a message of support on her blog.

In the months following, more donors have been inspired by his story to help Congolese peacebuilders. Recent donors include a group of Amish youth, a former Central Intelligence Agency official who had worked in the region, and two couples who matched each other’s gifts.

Donate to the M.J. Sharp Scholarship: Visit emu.edu/dream-hike

Bishop Andudu Adam Elnail MA ‘18, a Sudanese Episcopal bishop in exile, advocated for his people at the U.S. State Department in Washington D.C. this summer. His graduation from CJP more than a year ago has freed his time to fully concentrate on his role as bishop of the Diocese of Kadugli of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan. He works from the United States and a liaison office in Juba, South Sudan, to pastor his dispersed congregation, many of whom are in refugee camps in six African countries.

The people of the Nuba Mountains, along with areas of Abyei, Blue Nile and Darfur, are caught between the governments of North and South Sudan and suffer from raids, bombing and starvation. More than 50,000 refugees live in the United States. To minister to them, Andudu has traveled to 35 states.

Before he completed his degree, he developed a powerful and promising model to help the Sudanese refugee community to learn more about trauma and resilience and restorative justice. With the help of co-instructors such as Kajungu Maturi MA ’18, of Tanzania, Andudu organized and facilitated a series of educational workshops in diaspora communities in Dallas, Texas; Richmond, Virginia; and Denver, Colorado.

Andudu hopes to work with CJP to host more workshops and to encourage Sudanese and south Sudanese community leaders to gain more training at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute. “This is the right place for Sudanese and south Sudanese,” he said. “This is a place where we can heal.”

The same blessing might be said of his own work. “You are like an apostle moving in the world,” said Professor Carl Stauffer. “You model deep commitment to your family and the needs of your church and your nation. Your work is valuable to the Sudanese and South Sudanese community and to the Anglican Church. We are honored to accompany you in this work, because you are helping us all.”