Peace + Justice

Thanksgiving is a time when families connect and often feel more disconnected… because of the different perspectives that we can’t seem to bridge. The CoMetta gathering tomorrow offers us a chance to focus on gratitude and offers a practice for dialogue that can help us connect, listen, and understand more deeply. Join us and you might just bring your family closer this Thanksgiving!

A CoMetta Gathering for Gratitude

What is the role of gratitude in helping us face hardship? What is the role of community in dealing with isolation? What is the role of listening in a time of separation? At the next CoMetta convening, we’ll explore these themes not by way of theory but in practice. Join us as we use the practice of Conscious Dialogue developed by the Leadership Forum Community, the oldest in the US, to practice gratitude in this season of Thanksgiving.  Leadership coach, Sue Rose, will facilitate our session. All are welcome!  

November 21, 2023

Tuesday, 7 - 8:30 PM EST

Zoom

Register at: eventbrite.com/e/gratitude-a-cometta-convening-tickets-757385208547

Hi all,

Excited to see this group getting started! Thanks to the organizers for the work you've already put into it, and will continue to do so.

I'm a movement organizer, circle keeper, and peacebuilding trainer based in Minneapolis, MN, but also working internationally. I came into peacebuilding through religious work. Through years of working in vulnerable and disenfranchised urban communities, often with people with very different backgrounds and experiences than my own, my priorities and beliefs shifted from telling people about the heaven that might be waiting for them, to working with them to experience "heaven"—shalom, peace, and reconciliation—in our communities. That shifted my focus to community development, interfaith and intercultural dialogue, community organizing, and social justice activism.

In the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020 and the subsequent uprising in the Twin Cities, my local peacebuilding has focused on different aspects of racial healing and justice work. In my work with Peace Catalyst, I also spend time training people in peace and conflict skills while helping to cultivate a peacebuilding movement in faith communities and neighborhoods.

I'm attracted to the positive, constructive possibilities of conflict—leaning into conflict, welcoming conflict, sometimes even escalating conflict, because we believe there is something better on the other side of it. Conflict is not a problem but an opportunity.

Many traditions embrace this. Peace studies talks about positive and negative peace, the construction of good versus simply ending hostilities. Kingian Nonviolence talks about the Beloved Community, where conflict is present but is handled with love. My peace church traditions understand shalom, peace, as the creation of good in community. Other nonviolence traditions teach the embodied model of "two hands", with one hand extended in invitation, and the other hand held up to stop the harm.

This, I think, is the place where justice intersects with peace. Peace is not peace unless it is a just peace. The work of growing and building peace, of healing hearts and communities and societies, means struggling for justice, equity, and inclusion for everyone, even as we mend relationships and cultivate reconciliation.

Looking forward to connecting more!

I am beyond thrilled and honored to be a part of this incredible group of weavers. Reading everyone’s introduction was truly inspiring.  I am a relationship coach and actress and believe the five peace actions are as applicable to our personal relationships as they are to weaving in the world.  Our relationship with community and the world at large is after all a macrocosm of our experience in our personal relationships.  I am an ardent advocate of  a skills based approach both in my coaching and personal work and look forward to integrating The Five Peace Actions consciously into my practice.  

Though I have participated in several circles and led a few of them, my community weaving is lacking and that is one of the reasons I am here.  I want to learn how I can be more effective and impactful in a broader sense.

Thank you for inviting me, Kate!  And I look forward to connecting with and learning from all of you!

With gratitude,

Katya

Thank you to all who joined today for our session about the Living Room Conversations approach to dialogue around painful topics. Today, we centered our conversation on the Israel-HAMAS war.

We were grateful to be joined by David Munir Nabti, now living in Lebanon who supports social entrepreneurship in the Middle East.  David is part of the group Bloom, a peace and wellbeing group in the Middle East. He shared his experience of witnessing so closely the brutality and humanitarian crisis from this war.

I invite you to use the attached PowerPoint that @Darlene Cain and I developed for your work and the groups you facilitate. There are many effective approaches (or human technologies) for guiding strong dialogue. We like the Living Room Conversation approach because it is accessible, simple to follow, yet surfaces depth and context to difficult topics. We talked about grounding ourselves as we enter such a dialogue; allowing room to make acquaintance; offering guidelines; setting the tone for new perspectives to deepen our insight; and allowing time for group synthesis.

As we spoke together about how the war recalibrates our understanding of peace and the work it requires, we affirmed:

• the importance of respect for one another's experience;
• the value of hearing one another's stories;
• being present to one another for this long journey;
• celebrating each other's growth; and
• creating a space that allows us to voice how we really feel with a learning mindset - even though our view may be unpopular.

@Frances Kraft, our Community Manager, reminds us that Weave's free Learning Center offers another module to guide us through planning and facilitating conversations - discussing what to do when those conversations get hard. The module, created in partnership with @K Scarry at The People's Supper, is available at this link: https://learning.weavers.org/g...g/group-facilitation.

As in our session, I'll leave you with a reflection from author/theologian Thomas Merton:

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

We look forward to seeing you again on Wed.,  Dec. 6th from 11:00am to 12:30pm Central for our zoom session on Conscious Leadership.

Yours in peaceful weaving,

@Kate Towle

One of the intentions of the Peace + Justice network is to share knowledge and helpful resources. The Leadership Forum Community (the oldest living leadership network in the US) is building a collaborative and shared repository of Conscious Leadership tools, practices, and resources. This session will offer an opportunity for us to offer a practice that we use that has an impact and to glean useful resources from others. Feel free to invite others from your networks to the session.

Wednesday, December 6⋅12:00 – 1:30pm ET

Zoom Joining information: https://aspeninstitute.zoom.us/j/97692712528

Meeting ID: 976 9271 2528

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Mindfulness helps cultivate peace within yourself and others. Everyone experiences strong feelings, emotions, stress and uncertainty. That's why we need strategies to pause, self-regulate and become more aware within ourselves. Noticing what is happening inside of us is called mindfulness. Checkout this video for more guidance!

⏸️ Pause
🫁 Breath
🔍 Notice
🎬 Act

Practice intentionally throughout the day. The more stressed you feel, the more you need to PBNA! Keep in mind that sometimes 'Act' is inaction or stopping, changing, resting.

New to the PBNA strategy?  This strategy is great for all ages, start with Pause/Breath and expand. Set the duration for your needs (e.g. 20 second to 20 min).

On my website you can download for free  an emotion identification & regulation lesson plan and digital slides (for children/youth), as well as a printable anchor chart (for all ages).

Join us at our next Community #Leadership Conversation led by Joel Wright and Lyndon Rego.

We will reconvene to build on the conversation and discussions on the implications of #consciousleadership, review topics and insights on creating the Conscious Leadership Tree that we began last month.

This #session will mostly small group conversations followed by sharing with the larger group. Come eager to #share with others, #learn from others, and #explore how we can advance conscious leadership in our work world and #communities.

You do not have to attend last month to join us this month. We are offering two sessions at different dates and times to accommodate everyone!

- Thursday, 26 Oct at 7PM EST: https://lnkd.in/eizea2aX
- Friday, 27 Oct at 12PM EST: https://lnkd.in/eJVAs3SX

From David Brooks in the NYT on seeing people and dialogue...

We sometimes think that really great people perform the sorts of epic acts of altruism that might earn them Nobel Peace Prizes. But the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch argued that the essential moral skill is being considerate to others in the complex circumstances of everyday life. Morality is about how we interact with each other minute by minute.

...People want to connect. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their faces with love and acceptance. The issue is that we lack practical knowledge about how to give one another the attention we crave. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.

The art of conversation.
If you want to know how the people around you see the world, you have to ask them. Here are a few tips I’ve collected from experts on how to become a better conversationalist:

Be a loud listener. When another person is talking, you want to be listening so actively you’re burning calories. I have a friend named Andy Crouch who listens as if he were a congregant in a charismatic church. He’s continually responding to my comments with encouraging affirmations, with “amen”s, “aha”s and “yes!”es. I love talking to that guy.

Storify whenever possible. I no longer ask people: What do you think about that? Instead, I ask: How did you come to believe that? That gets them talking about the people and experiences that shaped their values. People are much more revealing and personal when they are telling stories. And the conversation is going to be warmer and more fun.

Do the looping, especially with adolescents. People are not as clear as they think they are, and we’re not as good at listening as we think we are. If you tell me something important and then I paraphrase it back to you, what psychologists call “looping,” we can correct any misimpressions that may exist between us.

Turn your partner into a narrator. People don’t go into enough detail when they tell you a story. If you ask specific follow-up questions — Was your boss screaming or irritated when she said that to you? What was her tone of voice? — then they will revisit the moment in a more concrete way and tell a richer story.

Don’t be a topper. If somebody tells you he is having trouble with his teenager, don’t turn around and say, “I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my own Susan.” You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself.

If you're like me, you're horrified by the outbreak of large-scale conflict and widespread polarization in the world. From my work in two dozen countries and most recently in Portugal, I find a shared pattern that creates the path to peace. Here are some thoughts on what we can do to change things for real:

https://spiritualsushi.com/ins...ce-at-a-time-of-war/

Peace Through Action USA , a Weave Community member, invites weavers focused on increasing social cohesion and peace in their neighborhoods, towns, and cities, to add their initiatives and organizations as prospective AmeriCorps member service sites to Peace Through Action’s upcoming application for federal AmeriCorps national service funding.

Peace Through Action has a current federal grant to plan Peace Through Action AmeriCorps. Place-based dialogue, peaceful skills training, and peace through action planning are among the activities included in the program’s design. Peace Through Action is accepting applications from prospective service sites through Friday, December, 8, 2023. Go to the Peace Through
Action AmeriCorps service sites webpage for the online application and instructions, a presentation and FAQ about this opportunity, and a schedule of orientation calls. Peace Through Action welcomes weavers and the communities they support to join our future national
service corps for peace!

A peace-building organization I know named Courage of Care is offering facilitator training. They work internationally. I am sharing for those who may be interested.

https://courageofcare.org/relational-facilitators/

We welcome all folks with facilitation experience—including trainers, mediators, DEI professionals, community organizers, educators, NGO leaders, coaches and healers—who are both grounded in healing-centered and counter-oppressive practice and are already embedded in communities and/or organizations in which they can bring this work forward in meaningful and impactful ways. We recognize that not all facilitators are formally recognized as such, and we encourage folks doing the often invisible work of relational culture building to join us!

There are a few reduced tuition Solidarity Fellowships left for facilitators from the Global South,

Sharing this Braver Angels workshop in case some folks are interested:

DEPOLARIZING WITHIN WORKSHOP
OCTOBER 5, 2023, 10AM - 1PM EASTERN

Much of today’s polarization is driven by how we talk with like-minded people about those on the other side. Too often, we stereotype, dismiss, or ridicule our fellow citizens who support the other political party, its leaders, and its policies.

This free three-hour workshop teaches participants:

How to be more aware of their own “inner polarizer”
How to be critical without demonizing, dismissing or stereotyping large swaths of the population
Strategies for intervening constructively in social conversations with like-minded peers when these conversations veer into contempt and ridicule for people who hold other political views.
Who can come? Anyone interested in examining their own inner polarization and learning strategies to disagree without condemning or ridiculing others.

This workshop is a free event brought to you by Braver Angels as part of our mission to depolarize America. Braver Angels is a 501(c)(3) non-profit. We invite you to consider a gift to Braver Angels; all donations are tax deductible. Your support will allow us to offer more workshops and debates with the ultimate goal of uniting America.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/d...tration-690999156077

In our September Peace + Justice gathering  @Kate Towle powerfully facilitated the protocol from Humans Systems Dynamics Institute: INQUIRY IS THE ANSWER.  Our wicked question: How does capitalist society unhook itself from the bottomless quest for more - in exchange for a more peaceful and just society?

Here are the other questions generated from there:

• How do we encourage people to use time as real money?
• What role does education play in ‘unhooking’ capitalism?
• What examples are there of societies who have unhooked themselves?
• How can neighborhoods become a more sustainable environment to combat crime?
• Can we make UBI work (universal basic income)?
• How do we get violent games to change or out of hands of youth, give gifts instead (guns)?
• How do we bring emotional education into the school system in the same way we teach academics?
• Are there contexts where our society is showing peace & justice in an equitable way - where is this occurring, how is it successful and how can we duplicate that?
• What practices or structures can we bring to our schools & classrooms to start our day with genuine connection, reflection on the day/end of day.

As we debriefed after, we could visualize converting these questions into a mind map.  We talked about leaning into the messiness of the process and what's generated vs framing of questions that are somewhat veiled solutions... opening up more from why, to how, to what's the reason.

Thanks for being there! @Katya Jadwick @Darlene Cain @Lyndon Rego @Andrea Pope @Roger Balson @Maria Oah @Caren Stelson @Tom Short @Elizabeth Hartford @Joyce Bonafield-Pierce and Barry Koen

The Leadership Forum (ta 105-year leadership community in the US) is hosting a gathering on conscious leadership which we believe is critical to our times.  Free to attend. You'll find kindred spirits there.

You can download the Forum's exploration of conscious leadership here.
Click here to download and read the position paper today

Peace + Justice Weavers,

We strive to co-create this group... Please take a few minutes to complete this form and provide your feedback about the future of the group and our gathering focuses.

Thank you,

Julie, Caren, Kate, Darlene and Lyndon

Reposting an invitation that may be of interest to the group

As you may know, in 2015 all members of the United Nations agreed on 17 goals to build a world of peace, dignity and prosperity on a healthy planet, commonly known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be achieved by 2030.

As you are aware, progress to date has been disappointing. It became clear that to achieve the external goals, we need to develop inner capabilities that will enable us to attain them. This was the starting point for Inner Development Goals, “IDG”, a not for profit open source initiative to develop transformational skills for sustainable development.

IDG wants the global community to help determine what these skills should be. It has developed a “one question survey”:

What qualities, abilities or skills do we need to develop to build a sustainable future for people and planet?

The goal is to obtain 2 million respondents from 200 countries in over 50 languages, to be sure the answers are inclusive of all perspectives. The official launch of the survey is September 19th.

Please take the time to answer the IDG Global Survey in the next week. You can answer it in your own preferred language; you’ll find access to the various languages on the site. You can also access the site by using the IDG Global Survey link.

Let's see how many ideas we can generate and share ...

How can (do) we promote peace and justice in our virtual and/or local communities?

Peace and Justice Builders,

It was a sacred moment to spend time deepening our practice and understanding of each other at our first session on Wednesday, August 2nd!

In addition to a beautiful centering exercise by @Caren Stelson, through which we visited our shadows and brought them into bright sunlight, we shared impromptu reflections of meaningful objects that we have in our spaces - and what they tell about us.

In 1:1 breakouts that allowed time for connection, we talked about what peace means to us - and how it interacts with justice. I was blessed to have @Andrea Pope as my partner, and we had a sparkling conversation about the importance of seeing and validating one another as an act of peace and justice. Andrea talked about cultural patterns that create shame by demanding us to give up ourselves to conform - how when we do that we feel violated and are prone to rebel or "self-eliminate." (David Hawkings). So, one aspect of peace and justice is creating spaces where we can be ourselves and bring our full gifts to community.

We talked about how our systems are broken - in part, because they are created by us, as humans, with our own flaws and brokenness, but also our gifts. To break through with justice, we need to maximize the strengths (whether from culture or neuro-diversity) of each individual - and the collective strengths in the "system." Andrea and I shared personal stories of how we sought to integrate body, mind and soul in our own lives!

In our full circle, I shared Mark Nepo's poem, This Takes Time  from his new book, "The Half-Life of Angels":

What you drop, I pick up. We don't even have to be in the same place to benefit each other.

As an apple draws life from the sun before it lands in the mouth of a skinny deer,

The Unnamable Spirit sets the laughter of a child in the path of someone's misfortune.

They say when painters squint, the threads of light become more visible. Just so.

As we let go our definitions, what holds the Universe together shows itself.

Our co-lead Julie shared an opportunity for the interactive online session, (Seeking Peace) Be the Change to experience breath and meditation exercises and interactive dialogue to promote peace on Saturday, August 12th, 10:00am Central.

We're excited to spend time with you again for our Wednesday, September 6th Peace & Justice meeting from 11:00am to 12:30pm Central!

May you be (at) peace,

“When we are training in the art of peace, we are not given any promises that because of our noble intentions everything will be okay. In fact, there are no promises of fruition at all. Instead, we are encouraged to simply look deeply at joy and sorrow, at laughing and crying, at hoping and fearing, at all that lives and dies.  We learn that what truly heals is gratitude and tenderness.”

Pema Chodron

If a video tutorial about posting and navigating in the group would be helpful for you, please review!