The film carefully and truthfully focuses on the lives of a few teenagers living in adverse family situations, as well as the initiatives taken by them and their teachers to respond in a trauma-informed way to their learning challenges. The young people and their teachers together engage in learning about the Adverse Childhood Experience study. The school opens a free health clinic. Teachers and administrators look beyond the surface behaviors to try to work with students in deeply humane ways, honoring their dignity and humanity, engaging in loving rather than punitive responses to discipline issues.

The story of Lincoln High School’s success is not one that feels easy to replicate, and there are some missing pieces.

• At the school in Washington, one teacher takes into her family a student abandoned by her family. Others engage at all hours with students who are struggling. How do we ask of educators and caregivers the level of attention and commitment that those teachers and administrators showed? How does a school honor both the teachers’ needs for boundaries and the students’ needs for attention and care?
• All the adults in the film are European-heritage people, as are most (but not all) of the students. What would this initiative look like in a predominantly indigenous or African-American or immigrant community/school? It’s worth complementing Paper Tigers with the work of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, an African-American-led organization working in predominantly African-American schools in California. See made in 2013 describing their work with Restorative Circles in Schools.
• The ACE study itself was done with primarily white, middle-class people in California, asking about individual experiences of adversity but not looking at systematic dignity violations or cultural or identity-based trauma. What would it look like if it accounted for adverse experiences of racism or systematic discrimination?

For anyone interested in exploring more about how to deepen trauma-informed approaches to discipline/student support or apply restorative justice in educational settings, check out 91����Ƶ’s upcoming Restorative Justice in Education (RJE) Academy June 27-28, 2016, here. Key RJE presenters, schoolteachers and administrators who are working with restorative justice in schools will share their insights on developing RJE cultures in school settings. And we’re screening Paper Tigers!

Drawing upon theory from conflict transformation, expressive arts, and trauma and resilience studies, participants will explore in the 5-day course: How do we cultivate possibility by developing new patterns? Can we live in both safety and vulnerability? How do we reckon with cycles and open to non-dualistic existence? How do we spark our own creativity and resilience engaging body, mind and spirit?

Activities (all optional) will include spoken word and drawing, breathing exercises, walking, stretching, dancing and playing games. We will emphasize the ethos of “low skill, high sensitivity” as we engage in play and arts-based exploration, “investigating new ways of moving, breathing, and engaging” (see Van der Kolk, below). Of course, high-skill folks are also welcome, but there is no requirement that participants have pre-conceived notions of themselves as “artists” to join the course.

A central theoretical underpinning to this course emerges from Bessel Van der Kolk’s introduction to Peter Levine’s latest book, Trauma and Memory (2015):

‘Negative judgment of oneself or others causes minds and bodies to tense up, which renders learning impossible. In order to recover, people need to feel free to explore and learn new ways to move. Only then can nervous systems reorganize themselves and new patterns be formed. This can only be done by investigating new ways of moving, breathing, and engaging, and cannot be accomplished by prescribing specific actions geared at “fixing.”’ (pages xv-xvi)

Instructors Katia Ornelas and Katie Mansfield are eager to engage with you in a week of playful, transformative and restorative practices, drawing on the full resources of body and mind. Katia is an attorney and artist who studied restorative justice during her MA at the CJP and is currently working on violence prevention programs in her native Mexico. Katie is Director of the STAR program and working toward a PhD in Expressive Arts and Conflict Transformation. Click for an interview with them about the course and their experiences.

Doreen was determined to use what she had learned to help shape peace and justice work in Kenya and the wider region. She applied appreciative inquiry in research and evaluation projects in Karamoja. She developed a learning community entitled “Justice that Heals” in Kenya, bringing together people from ten different ethnic groups, diverse professional, geographic and religious origins (from informal settlements, rural and urban, educators, peacebuilders, church leaders, military, police, emergency responders, donors, Muslims and Christians). She wanted to shape a different kind of conversation about justice and possibilities for long-term peace in Kenya, and she led that with her own story, creativity and relationships.

She and her organization, Daima Initiatives for Peace and Development (DIPaD), both engaged in long-term projects and responded to various crises in Kenya, including the Westgate mall and Garissa attacks, by offering STAR-based learning opportunities for survivors and responders. Many of the participants “came to see her as a second mother,” reports Carol Makanda, one of Doreen’s close colleagues working with the students from Garissa.

Personal impacts toward systemic change

The personal vulnerability and compassionate listening Doreen infused into her work brought new life to many participants who worked with her.

• One woman from Mt. Elgon who went through a STAR training with Doreen arrived with painful stories and imminent plans for a stomach surgery for her ulcers. By the end of the week, this woman was leading song and dance. We wondered how sustainable the change would be when she returned home. In the following months, she reported that she no longer needed the surgery. She explained that before she came to the training, she was planning revenge attacks and trading guns and bullets; in the months and years after the training, she was involved in assisting other women who had survived violence, no longer involved in the work of revenge.
• A young man who had been trapped in Westgate mall participated in DIPaD’s response to those attacks. He entered limping, due to the shrapnel still embedded in his leg. At the end of his week engaged in STAR with Doreen and other learners, he said, “I thought a few days ago that I have a limp… and today I can see that I have a new way of walking.”
• In the Justice that Heals learning community, Doreen’s skillful facilitation of a caring and connective environment made space for a relationship between youths from Korogocho, one of Nairobi’s informal settlements, and a police chaplain. In this time of police brutality and deeply rooted distrust between young people and police in so many of the world’s cities, their communication and embrace was at least surprising, if not miraculous.

Facilitating with Doreen, I witnessed a woman who could speak so many languages, not only Nandi, Swahili and English. She knew how to understand and make sense to people in the rural areas, how to resonate with highly educated, cosmopolitan urbanites, how to connect to urban youth who had not had access to education, how to bridge across cultures both local and international. She taught with her life, which traversed these many terrains – from the shamba (farm) to the city, from Kenya to the UK to the US, from quiet youths to high-ranking military and government officials.

She spoke and listened with her heart. She shaped spaces where people could encounter a healthy form of power, in her as facilitator and in themselves. She helped people understand the impacts of trauma and cultivate their resources for resilience. She started where she was, whether with her sons at home, with her team at the office, with loved ones in a foreign land, or participants in a healing circle.

Doreen passed away too soon on January 21, 2016. We dedicate this e-zine to her powerful memory, and we hope that the many seeds she planted may continue to bear nourishing fruit.

Following the SPI 2015 course in Strategies for Trauma-Informed Organizations, Barry and Mikhala embarked on a process to apply the course content and learning to our own educational environment. Together, they developed the following definition to represent “our working understanding of a trauma-informed organization.”

According to their definition, a trauma-informed organization: Read more…

• has staff that has received training in trauma and that knows how to identify signs of trauma. Staff incorporates a trauma-informed framework into their interactions with clients, meaning that they understand that people have stories and deserve to be treated with compassion and respect;
• creates structures so that staff can practice meaningful self-care;
• opens space for members of the organization, institution or business to speak about stress;
• fosters a sincerely relational environment where everyone’s dignity is respected;
• provides resources for getting help for those that need it.

Participants in their 2016 can look forward to exploring their own organizations with a trauma-informed lens and deepening exposure to how various organizations are working towards integrating trauma awareness into their work.

What does this mean for SPI? SPI is a container for naturally challenging process of transformational learning about chronic violence and injustices. In an increasingly trauma-informed environment, designated listeners and instructors will be tuned in to ways to follow up to participants encountering traumatic response to material. Part of trauma-informing SPI means addressing systemic violence and injustice within which we are operating; as an institution where the vast majority of faculty and staff is white, we have a lot of work to do.

1. Bridge Builders– January, 1996 – headquartered in London, serving churches throughout the United Kingdom.
2. JustaPaz – Fall of 1996 – headquartered in Maputo, Mozambique, mainly serving that country, yet also hosting participants from other Portuguese-speaking countries.
3. West Africa Peacebuilding Institute (WAPI) under the West African Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) – 1998 – headquartered in Accra, Ghana, with staff working in 15 countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, The Gambia and Togo.
4. Henry Martyn Institute’s (HMI) Peacebuilder Training Program – 1999-2000 – headquartered in Hyderabad, India, but serving all of India, with a special focus on ethnic minority regions in the far northeast of India.
5. Africa Peacebuilding Institute (API) – 2000 – headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa (originally in Kitwe, Zambia), serving the whole continent, but particularly southern and eastern Africa.
6. Mindanao Peacebuilding Institute (MPI) – 2000 – headquartered in Davao, Philippines, attracting participants widely, but especially serving southeast Asia.
7. The Peacebuilding and Development Institute at American University – summer of 2001 (closed after 2013 summer session by university administrators) – Washington D.C.
8. Just Peace Initiatives – 2005 – headquartered in Peshawar, Pakistan, serving all of Pakistan, with a particular focus on the northwest region where violent conflicts have a regional impact extending into Afghanistan.
9. The Peace Academy in Sarajevo – 2007 – based in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzogovina (has not offered intensive trainings since 2012, but hopes are for resumption in 2016), serving post-Yugoslavia populations emerging from violent conflict.
10. Pacific Centre for Peacebuilding – 2007 – headquartered in Suva, Fiji, but with wide focus on all South Pacific islands.
11. Northeast Asia Regional Peacebuilding – 2008 – headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, but with summer peacebuilding sessions that rotate among South Korea, Japan, China and Mongolia. A sister group, the Korea Peacebuilding Institute, emerged in 2012.
12. Canadian School For Peacebuilding – 2009 – in Winnipeg, Canada, attracting participants widely, but especially serving western

Most of these training centers call to mind SPI in its early years – attracting practitioners in the field who hunger for more training and not necessarily credit toward a graduate degree. By conservative estimate, the centers collectively train more than 2,000 people annually in mediation, restorative justice, trauma healing, healthy organizational leadership, and other approaches to conflict transformation. And, of course, these trainees spread peacebuilding techniques to others. (We’ll explore the impacts of each of the centers in their individual stories.)

All 12 of the training centers have adopted materials and educational approaches that are reminiscent and evocative of SPI, the oldest peacebuilding institute of its kind – which makes sense, given the regular exchanges of instructors, who typically have long-standing connections to SPI’s umbrella institution, the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP).

Of the 26 instructors teaching at SPI 2015, for example, 18 have taught at one of the other dozen peacebuilding centers listed above and 13 are alumni of CJP.^[2]

Reflecting with pleasure on the emergence of SPI-inspired peacebuilding centers around the world since the 1990s, CJP founding director John Paul Lederach says that CJP and SPI can act as “incubators,” birthing ever-better peacebuilding theory and practices.

While many of the other centers are working in situations where they must be highly sensitive to their immediate context and thus focused close to the ground, Lederach believes CJP can serve as a “place of safety” and as a “convener” of conversations necessary for cross-fertilization, learning and growth.

CJP can also walk alongside those who are just starting out, he says, helping them to connect to the worldwide network of practitioners and to learn from their predecessors committed to building justice and peace.

Caveats in crediting CJP

Tracing the proliferation of peacebuilding training centers around the world to their origins is a bit like trying to determine which spring, stream or river contributed which molecules of water to the bay of an ocean.

The hunger for peace amid violent conflict, the desire to learn peacebuilding skills, and the efforts of peacemakers from every walk of life and tradition – these know no boundaries. They extend across all religions.

Yet our focus in this Peacebuilder is necessarily narrow, mainly limited to how the Mennonite “peace church” tradition has given rise to practices and terminology that are transforming conflict around the world. That’s not to say that other traditions have not made major contributions, or that Mennonites have acted on their own (far from it, as you’ll see in these pages).

But when the world seems bleak and hopelessness begs at one’s door, it helps to stop and reflect on how much has been accomplished by Mennonite initiatives in the last 20 years, relying mainly on dedicated people rather than other resources.

A brief history of CJP

The journey to founding CJP began in the 1980s, when two men from staunch Mennonite families, Lederach and Ron Kraybill, became successively the first two leaders of Mennonite

Conciliation Service. In 1985, Kraybill organized the service’s first summer training institute for 20 Mennonite attendees. Kraybill’s first hand-outs on how to mediate were printed on cheap blue paper and distributed in a manila folder.

By 1988, his handouts had gradually been enlarged into a spiral-bound manual, with additions from Lederach, David Brubaker (now a CJP faculty member), Jim Stutzman, Carolyn Schrock-Shenk and others. (Brubaker gets the credit for deciding that 40 pages of handouts would work better in a loose-leaf binder.) Contributors to the manuals were all leading trainings on their own, sometimes in conjunction with the Lombard Peace Mennonite Center near Chicago, which had been established by Richard Blackburn in 1984 to address congregational conflict.

In 1989, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) published the first edition of what is now in its 5th edition, updated in 2008 under the title Conflict Transformation and Restorative Justice Manual: Foundations and Skills for Mediation and Facilitation. (The 2000 edition was titled Mediation and Facilitation Training Manual: Foundations and Skills for Constructive Conflict Transformation.)

In the early 1990s, Kraybill and Lederach began talking about the need to systematically address conflict – particularly the need to prepare others for working in the field – rather than continue the Lone Ranger approach.

Meanwhile at 91����Ƶ, other field-experienced academics were having similar thoughts. Early in 1990, Joseph Lapp, then president of 91����Ƶ, received a letter from Richard (“Rick”) Yoder, professor of business and economics. Yoder was on leave from 91����Ƶ at the time and working in Kenya with the Kenya Rural Enterprise Program.

His letter started by citing the need for Eastern Mennonite College (the “university” title did not come into use until 1994) to have a unique identity, one that would fill a serious gap in the world. “I think that EMC ought to be known as that peace college in Virginia,” wrote Yoder. He told this story to illustrate the need for Mennonite colleges to think seriously about offering peace studies:

I spent a couple days in rural Kenya with a U.S. congressional staffer from the House Foreign Affairs Committee and asked her questions as to how the U.S. is responding to all these, largely non-violent, political and economic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Her response was, ‘We really don’t know what to do; we don’t have the people or the tools to help us think in different paradigms!’ How sad, I thought; what do the Mennonites have to offer?^[3]

In mid-1994, Kraybill and Lederach joined Hizkias Assefa, an Ethiopian scholar-peace practitioner based in Kenya, and Vernon Jantzi to teach conflict transformation skills to 40 participants at 91����Ƶ’s “Frontiers of International Peacebuilding” workshop. The event was successful enough to be repeated in 1995, the same year that 91����Ƶ admitted its first full class of master’s degree students in conflict transformation within a program directed by Lederach.

Soon after, in 1996, CJP deepened its justice focus by recruiting to its faculty Howard Zehr, an expert in restorative justice.

By 1996, the Frontiers workshop had evolved into a series of intensive classes under a name that has endured to this day – the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, or simply SPI.

In those early years, the Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conferences and SPI were simply opportunities for professional development and learning. But participants and graduate students in CJP began lobbying for SPI to offer the option of taking a course for academic credit. Today, not-for-credit trainees and graduate students share classes at SPI, though the latter must do more out-of-classroom coursework to earn their credits.

In 2014, SPI enrolled a total of 184 people from 36 countries. Over the years, SPI has attracted 2,800 people from 121 countries to 91����Ƶ’s campus.

Upon his departure to the University of Notre Dame in 1999, Lederach was followed as director by Jantzi, then jointly Howard Zehr and Ruth Zimmerman, then Lynn Roth, and now J. Daryl Byler – all of whom came with extensive international experience in conflict zones.

For a more thorough look at the history and functioning of SPI, see the summer 2014 Peacebuilder.^[4]

Footnotes

1. One caveat to this list of 12: Reasonable definitional arguments could be made for taking a few off this list and adding a number of other initiatives around the world. For example, the Nairobi Peace Initiative-Africa (NPI-Africa) was founded in 1984 by Harold and Annetta Miller, both early ‘60s grads of 91����Ƶ who were working with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). NPI has an annual peacebuilding institute that has tapped CJP-trained alumni, such as John Katunga Murhula, MA ’05. The Great Lakes Peacebuilding Institute, founded in 2004 with seed money from MCC, serves Francophone peace practitioners with month-long trainings each October. Fidele Lumeya, MA ’00, and Krista Rigalo, MA ’00, have taught there, as has Mulanda Jimmy Juma, formerly MCC’s regional peace coordinator for southern Africa, who is teaching at SPI 2015.
2. Other examples of cross-fertilization: (1) Kenyan Babu Ayindo, MA ’98, has taught at SPI repeatedly and at SPI-like peacebuilding initiatives in seven other locations. (2) Sriprakash Mayasandra, a native of India who is MCC’s Asia Peace Coordinator, attended SPI in 2011 and 2013. He served on HMI’s governing board from 2008 to 2014 and has been a guiding hand for other peacebuilding initiatives, notably MPI, NARPI, and the Caux Scholars Program, Asia Plateau.
3. The Rick Yoder story was extracted from a history of CJP published in the 2005 inaugural issue of Peacebuilder, pages 3-7.
4. All back articles and issues of Peacebuilder are accessible online at .

When Jarem Sawatsky wanted to bring trauma coursework to the Canadian School of Peacebuilding (CSOP), he turned to two experts he knew well: Vernon Jantzi, who had taught Sawatsky when he was a CJP student a dozen years earlier, and fellow CJP alumnus Elaine Zook Barge.

As CJP’s lead instructors for Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR), Zook Barge and Jantzi are in high demand around the world, but they said they couldn’t refuse a request from Sawatsky, who co-founded CSOP in 2009. They accepted it even before they learned that the 2014 session of the school would be Sawatsky’s last as co-director, due to his declining health. (CJP restorative justice expert Howard Zehr also agreed to teach at CSOP 2014).

From the first minutes of the opening ceremony of CSOP, Zook Barge and Jantzi felt on familiar ground. Similar to SPI, CSOP began with a group ritual and introductions. But the ritual was one they hadn’t seen at SPI, and they loved it.
“We all put some grass seeds into soil within a former oil barrel,” said Jantzi. “We were told that we were helping to transform this soil into something productive and nurturing.”

At the closing ceremony that wrapped up the week, everyone could see shoots of grass poking through the soil. “It felt like the opening and closing rituals were bookends,” Jantzi said. “It was a moving experience.”

STAR was popular at CSOP, capped at 24 participants in the class. The two dozen enrollees were predominately female, and their age range was wide, 19 to 85 years. Undergraduates comprised more than half of those enrolled, which is unusual compared to other STAR trainings.

The undergrads were taking the course for college credit, requiring them to produce two papers. “We spent a whole lot of time grading papers,” Zook Barge said with a shake of her head, as if “never again.” She quickly added, though: “A lot of really good personal stuff came out of the papers that wasn’t shared in class.”

The young adults didn’t have the life experiences that STAR participants usually bring to the trainings, making it difficult for them to connect what they were learning with happenings in broader society, said Jantzi. “But it was good to see the way they became reflective about their life experiences to date.”

Jantzi, whose memories of SPI date to its founding years, said the lean staffing at CSOP reminded him of SPI two decades ago, when a tiny group of dedicated people were stretched to their maximum. “As far as I could see, [co-director] Valerie Smith and two student interns handled almost everything themselves – registration, food, snacks, taking photographs.”

91����Ƶ 200 people attended CSOP at some point during its two five-day sessions. The structure of the day was similar to SPI, with coffee breaks that gathered people from all the classes, except that CSOP didn’t restrict these to morning breaks. They had a group break in the afternoon too.

One other difference: CSOP holds classes for five straight days; almost all of SPI’s classes last for seven days, broken by a weekend.

“We copied the opening ceremonies, coffee breaks and group photographs from 91����Ƶ,” Sawatsky told his 91����Ƶ friends with a smile. His friends smiled back: that meant SPI was doing its job well, if its tried-and-true model fit other places and peoples too.

In late May, 2014, 35 people from 11 countries gathered on campus to discuss their ongoing work with 91����Ƶ’s Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program.

It was the first in a new series of practitioner-focused consultations and conferences that will be held each year during the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI).

“We wanted to gather the folks who have been using STAR around the world to get their feedback on who’s using it, what’s working, and why, and make adjustments as needed,” said
J. Daryl Byler, executive director of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). “We’re trying to set up a process of learning from our alumni and to update our curriculum based on what they’re learning as they put these things into practice.”

The event also helped to strengthen the network of alumni from around the world who have been trained in STAR since it was first offered in 2001.

Doing so will benefit both the university and STAR practitioners, as CJP plans to use this alumni network to implement upcoming contract work, Byler said.

One example is a USAID contract with CJP to provide STAR training to 150 staff in Juba, South Sudan. Five STAR alumni will carry out that training, along with two 91����Ƶ professors.

Byler said CJP plans to begin three-year cycles of on-campus events around several practice areas, beginning with a consultation and followed by a practitioner conference and a writing and research conference in subsequent years.

In 2015, CJP will host a STAR conference as well as restorative justice consultation, beginning a similar three-year cycle for that field. Discussions are ongoing about other potential focus areas for these events in the future.

In addition to helping CJP to improve its academic curriculum and bolster alumni networks, Byler said the conferences and consultations will encourage more writing and research in these areas where CJP has special expertise.

Holding these new events in conjunction with SPI also will add to the learning environment there, as many participants in the consultations and conferences are expected to also enroll in SPI classes, Byler said. He credited CJP program director Jayne Docherty with the vision to launch the new series of events. — Andrew Jenner

In recent years, the citizens of Sierra Leone have gathered in village compounds around bonfires, spoken openly of brutalities inflicted on them during their 11 years of civil war, and heard apologies by some of those who did the brutalizing.

To the amazement of growing numbers of observers from around the world,��the result has been forgiveness and reconciliation and rebuilding, village by village, on a scale never before achieved.

These heartfelt conversations have been nurtured under a program called Fambul Tok (Krio for “family talk”), led by John Caulker, a human rights activist in Sierra Leone.

Fambul Tok began in the summer and fall of 2007, when John Caulker received the backing of Libby Hoffman and her Maine-based foundation Catalyst for Peace to develop a grassroots answer to the high-level, highly expensive UN-backed Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone.

Caulker, who had lobbied for the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was deeply disappointed in how little it accomplished, after it spent more than $300 million on highly publicized trials of nine men. In contrast, Caulker wanted to help heal the lives of the average person in often-rural communities where neighbors looked suspiciously at neighbors, and even family members were divided by what some had done during wartime.

Hoffman caught the spirit of Caulker’s vision and worked with him – and with a few people at 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, where she had attended SPI 1996 and returned for a course in 2000 – to design core elements, objectives and operating principles for Fambul Tok. Amy Potter Czajkowski, MA ’02, and Robert Roche, MA ’08, were program officers for Fambul Tok during its formative stages.

On June 11, 2013, Caulker was the Frontier Luncheon speaker at SPI. He treated his audience to an inspiring account of how a small ripple can, when patiently fanned, grow into a rising tide across the nation.

At SPI 2014, two rising leaders in Fambul Tok – women’s leader Michaela Ashwood and former pastor Emmanuel Mansaray – studied conflict analysis, psychosocial trauma, and organizational leadership. They are being prepared to step up as Caulker transitions from leading Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone to playing a wider peacebuilding role under the auspices of the African Union.

“From the very word go, we’ve made Fambul Tok a community-owned and community-led process,” said Ashwood, who has worked with Caulker for seven years. “We only support. They’ve heard about Fambul Tok on the radio, so they already know something about us. We may provide a bag of rice [for the community gathering], but they provide the goat or fish and fresh vegetables.”

Mansarary added, “We work at the level of the man in the village whose neighbor might have been the one who burned down his house, amputated his son and raped his wife.”

Everyone is longing for the opportunity to tell their stories, said Mansaray. “The victims have stories they want to tell, and so do the perpetrators,” who often talk of being drugged or otherwise forced to do horrible things when they ask for forgiveness.

Fambul Tok now has groups of women, called Peace Mothers (led by Ashwood), who are active in election campaigns and in schools, doing education and dousing sparks of conflicts before they become raging fires. This represents a change in Sierra Leone’s culture, where traditionally women had no voice.

Future plans include spreading peacebuilding principles through Sierra Leone’s schools to address violence that seems to be growing among the young – who lack a memory of the horrific civil war endured by their elders – and to lay the groundwork for enduring cooperation in future generations.

In 2013-14 Fambul Tok was operating in six out of the country’s 14 districts. In each of the six districts they have an office staffed by four, plus a security person. At its national headquarters there are 18 staffers. Catalyst for Peace remains the main funder for Fambul Tok, including funding Ashwood’s and Mansaray’s studies at SPI 2014. ��

Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, move over. Ditto for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. CJP has its own version of a “power couple” – but the two truly represent “power for suffering people.”

The man is 38-year-old Ashok Gladston, dean of 23 departments comprising 350 teachers at one of the most prestigious universities in India, Loyola College in Chennai. Based on assessments by India’s national accrediting agency and the media outlet India Today, Loyola-Chennai – founded in 1925 by the Jesuits (just eight years after 91����Ƶ opened) – ranks among the top three of 35,000 liberal arts colleges in India.

In a normal day, running 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Gladston says he meets with about 70 people, always maintaining an open-door policy. He supervises 160 post-graduate students, plus seven full-time doctoral students. His egalitarian philosophy: “There’s no time to hate, no time to hurt, only time to work and love.” He also believes in practicing what one teaches – in getting his hands dirty, as he puts it.

The woman is Florina Benoit, chief zonal officer (CZO) for Churches Auxiliary for Social Action (CASA), for which she oversees CASA’s work in the four southern states of India, comprising 50 staffers in 10 offices addressing needs in 1,000 villages, encompassing 7 to 10 million people. At age 40, she is the youngest CZO ever employed by CASA.

“CASA’s focus is on poverty alleviation and political awareness and empowerment of the oppressed classes, particularly the dalits, tribals, women and backward castes,” Benoit says. She is on the road about two-thirds of the month. CASA also organizes emergency and disaster responses, often being the first organization to step in after crises like major floods and landslides.

Gladston and Benoit knew each other before coming to CJP, but they were not married and had no marriage plans when each applied separately for a Fulbright scholarship to study conflict transformation at CJP. That each beat countless competitors to be Fulbright Scholars testifies to their respective abilities and accomplishments. Just before arriving at CJP in the fall of 2002, they married and became a couple of dynamos for the next two years in Harrisonburg.

They presented street theater to CJP and embraced additional techniques offered by playback theater. They were in the first group to do fundraising field trips on behalf of CJP to Pennsylvania, where they helped cook an Indian banquet and where they posed in Amish garb borrowed at an Amish-themed museum. They could be counted on to attend any peace-themed talks or conferences on 91����Ƶ’s schedule. They did everything required for academic excellence, and then more.

As soon as they returned to southern India, they plunged into advocating for, and doing trainings with, suffering minority groups in their own region around Chennai as well as in nearby Sri Lanka. Applying themselves seven days a week, sunup to bedtime, they both also managed to earn PhDs – he in social work from Loyola and she in social work from Osmania University in Hyderabad, India.

Ten highlights from their lives since 2004:

1. Benoit and Gladston arrived back in southern India on January 1, 2005, soon after an undersea earthquake that precipitated a tsunami that ranks as one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. By the following day, Gladston was organizing a state-level survey to be conducted by 1,500 social work students of the affected areas.

2. Over the next several years, both Gladston and Benoit worked frequently in devastated regions of Sri Lanka and in refugee camps in India among people who had fled from both the tsunami and civil war in Sri Lanka. They published results of studies of social needs gleaned from 178 sites, while simultaneously doing hands-on trainings, usually under the auspices of Organization for Eelam Refugee Rehabilitation.

3. Their trainings covered conflict transformation, dialogue for peacebuilding, trauma resiliency, community development, relief and rehabilitation, advocacy for justice, and women’s empowerment. Their system was to train trainers – dozens at a time – to prepare the trainers to go further into the field and cover as many regions as possible, training hundreds of field staff. The field staff then extended the trainings to the grassroots. Thus Gladston and Benoit were able to reach tens of thousands of affected people with information and skills helpful for improving their situations. (Part of this work was funded by Mennonite Central Committee.)

4. Meanwhile both held “day jobs” –��Gladston as a senior faculty member in social work at Loyola College-Chennai, Benoit as the associate director in charge of practice at the Henry Martyn Institute: International Center for Research, Interfaith Relations and Reconciliation.

5. For three years, they were based at institutions 400 miles apart, until Benoit finished her PhD in 2008 in Hyderabad and resigned from the Henry Martyn Institute to return to Chennai. (At the time, both posted online remarks about missing each other when apart and relishing being in the same location again as a happily married couple.)

6. In early 2009, as the Sri Lankan government grimly and bloodily brought the rebel force known as LTTE to its knees, Gladston and Benoit were alarmed at the situation of 250,000 people trapped with the LTTE. “The government in the name of surgical strikes is shelling the civilians,” wrote Gladston. “There are no words to describe the situation of the civilians,” adding: “We keep crying out loud so that the world’s attention will be attracted.”

7. When the war was officially over, the suffering was not. For the last five years the twosome has devoted their weekends and vacations to volunteer work among the displaced peoples. Early in their work, Gladston wrote:

I am filled with a lot of uncertainties and concerns: All the materials are in English and the training is in Tamil. How do I contextualize what I learned? How do I adapt the training methods to this situation? How do I include the indigenous ideas and methods of conflict transformation? I am braving the effort of going ahead with the workshop and will learn lessons from it. I hope to consider this as an extension of CJP.

8. In addition to the manuals and printed training materials typical of peacebuilding workshops, Benoit and Gladston frequently organize experiential activities designed to reduce conflict – interactive dramas, sports across conflict lines, cooperatively run preschools, and shared activities like basketmaking and gardening. In one mixed Tamil-Sinhalese village in Sri Lanka where the couple had been working, says Gladston, Sinhalese families hid their newly made Tamil friends when government forces came searching for Tamils to arrest.

9. Responding to widespread requests for help – especially by fellow CJP alumni – both Benoit and Gladston have done consultations in three dozen other countries in the last 10 years.

10. In the spirit of SPI, Benoit used to run an annual peacebuilding workshop at the end of October and beginning of November at the Henry Martyn Institute.
— Bonnie Price Lofton

Long a pioneer in the field of restorative justice, 91����Ƶ will become the first in the country to offer restorative justice programs housed within a graduate education program. Beginning this fall, students in the MA in education program will be able to pursue an interdisciplinary concentration in restorative justice in education (RJE) by taking courses through the education department as well as 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

The education department will also begin offering a 15-hour graduate certificate in RJE for students who aren’t pursuing a master’s degree.

“Restorative justice offers a completely different model of addressing classroom discipline problems that focuses on building effective relationships both between teachers and students, and among students,” said Kathy Evans, an 91����Ƶ education professor who has led the development of the new RJE programs.

While the theories of restorative justice were originally developed as an alternative approach to criminal justice, they have increasingly been embraced by teachers looking for more creative ways to address classroom behavior and create better learning environments, said Evans, who anticipates wide interest in 91����Ƶ’s new programs.

“People are hungry for good instruction about what restorative justice looks like in schools, and how they can be better prepared to be restorative justice educators,” she said.

To make the RJE programs more accessible to students from out of the area, some courses will be offered online or in other alternative formats such as on weekends or as week-long, intensive summer courses.

A successful example of restorative justice in schools was featured in a recent cover story in YES! Magazine by Fania Davis, a past instructor at 91����Ƶ’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute. The executive director of Restorative Justice for Oakland (Calif.) Youth, Davis writes that restorative justice programs in some schools have been so successful at reducing suspension rates – by 74% in one case – that the school board has endorsed use of restorative justice throughout the city school system.

In January 2014, the federal departments of education and justice also threw their weight behind restorative justice in the country’s schools. The agencies issued a joint letter telling teachers and administrators to address the disproportionate rates at which minority and economically disadvantaged students are suspended – suggesting, among other things, the use of restorative justice practices to address discipline problems and create healthy learning environments. With that mandate will come even more opportunity for graduates of 91����Ƶ’s new RJE concentration or certificate programs, Evans said.

“The new programs in restorative justice in education are an excellent example of the mission of our graduate programs, which is to meet needs in the world with our unique combination of expertise, perspective, and values,” said graduate studies dean Jim Smucker. “This concentration is a result of two graduate programs working together to offer something that is quite unique to the field of education, and something only 91����Ƶ’s combination of expertise and values can provide to the world.”

Over the next several years, faculty from the MA in education program and the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding will begin developing new courses, with the goal of eventually creating a full MA in RJE program, Evans added.

For more information on the new programs, contact Evans at kathy.evans@emu.edu or 540-432-4590. — Andrew Jenner