Organizers, including CJP founding director John PaulĚýLederach, sociology professor Vernon Jantzi, and ±áľ±łú°ěľ±˛ą˛őĚýAssefa, a mediator in conflicts around the world, invited friends and colleagues to talk and think about the cutting edges of practice and theory in international peace work. Some uncertainty surrounded the launch of CJP itself, Jantzi recalls, and the organizers of the Frontiers conference didn’t have any particular plans to make it an annual event.

And they surely didn’t imagine that 20 years later it would be thriving, would have brought 2,800 people from 121 countries to EMU’s campus and would have directly inspired the creation of at least 10 other short-term peacebuilding institutes in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific and North America. Nor could Lederach, Jantzi and Assefa have imagined that they would remain involved to varying degrees ever since, though Assefa is the only one has taught every year at the summer institute.

“There was so much energy generated,” Jantzi recalls, of the first conference. “People were so eager to share their experiences.”

Participants found that simply being together at a week-long peacebuilding conference was tremendously beneficial and inspiring for their work, and the response was enthusiastic. During the following academic year, CJP received its accreditation, had three students in the master’s program and admitted a dozen more to begin in the fall of 1995, and had hired its first full-time administrative staff member, Ruth Zimmerman. Things were heading in a good direction, and CJP organized a second Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conference in the summer of 1995.

Conference becomes “SPI”

For its third year, CJP gave its one-week peacebuilding conference a new name: the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, or SPI. Word was spreading, interest was growing, and SPI was about to begin growing quickly in size, scope and length. By 2002, SPI attracted around 150 participants from about 50 countries and offered 20 classes over a two-month period.

One of the major early emphases at SPI – and CJP more generally – was grounding the academic curriculum and classroom instruction in practical, on-the-ground application of peacebuilding and conflict resolution. Early in SPI’s history, outside funders helped bring participants from different sides of several major conflicts around the world, including groups of Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland and members of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups from Rwanda and Burundi.

This created a rich and challenging environment at SPI, adding a heavy dose of real-life experience from difficult, violent conflicts – sometimes involving opposing sides of the same conflict – to complement the theory-based aspects of the curriculum.

“In the classroom, that was pretty powerful,” says Tim Ruebke, who attended four years of SPI before earning his master’s degree from CJP in 1999.

Rich experiences outside classroom

Many report that the most powerful moments at SPI, though, occurred during informal, social times away from the classroom. Ruebke recalls an evening gathering at a home in Harrisonburg where participants from Northern Ireland shared stories, songs and dancing with each other and the rest of their classmates.

While the daily sessions focus on the cerebral, “head” aspects of peacebuilding, these informal, social times in the evenings get at its emotional “heart.” This aspect of SPI, Ruebke says, mirrors the reality of many real-life peace negotiations, where the hard work of compromise, connection and understanding between parties often occurs in relaxed, social settings before being finalized at the formal negotiating table.

“A lot of stuff that happens here is informal and relational,” says Jantzi. “We think it’s very significant.”

And as SPI participants often discover, the emotional aspects of peacebuilding aren’t always happy times of singing and dancing. One of the early SPI sessions included visitors from the former Soviet republic of Georgia as well as Abkhazia, a disputed region within Georgia over which a civil war was fought in the 1990s. One evening, an SPI professor had planned a discussion about this conflict and began by displaying a map of the region.

Ruebke was in the audience, and remembers that one of the parties was upset in some way by what was (or perhaps, what wasn’t) portrayed on the map. This immediately and badly derailed the session, and by the time things had been patched up and discussion about the conflict was able to proceed, the importance of the “felt” aspect of peacebuilding had been brought home to Ruebke in a memorable way.

“Even though we were a peacebuilding program, people brought their stuff with them,” remembers Ruth Zimmerman, who says that these sorts of conflicts would periodically flare up between participants. “We had a great learning ground for using some of those [conflict resolution] skill sets over the years.”

At the very beginning, the Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conferences and SPI were simply opportunities for professional development and learning. Before long, however, participants and graduate students in CJP began lobbying for an academic credit component to SPI. Though hesitant to accept the constraints of a pre-planned curriculum, CJP added a credit component to provide students with more flexibility in earning degrees through the program.

Some core courses have been offered year after year, including ones dealing with conflict analysis, restorative justice and trauma healing, and others that focus on practical peacebuilding skills like negotiation and reconciliation. Yet SPI stays true to its roots by exploring the field’s frontiers and updating its course offerings to reflect emerging themes in peacebuilding. Examples of new courses in 2014 include ones on media and societal transformation, playback theater, trauma-sensitive peacebuilding, mindfulness, and architecture as a peacebuilding tool.

Things ran on the skinniest of shoestring budgets in the very first years of SPI, when CJP professors opened their homes to participants after the day’s sessions had ended, while their spouses pitched in to help with meals. Volunteers filled many support roles. This contributed to the organic, intimate atmosphere that remains an important aspect of SPI to this day. But it was an exhausting and, in the long run, unsustainable way to run the event that itself led to conflicts between overworked staff members.

“It was so much work,” recalls Zimmerman, who filled leadership roles at CJP from 1995 to 2007. “I used to put in 70-hour weeks.”

Huge logistics behind SPI

In addition to planning courses and lining up faculty to teach them, coordinating the many moving parts of the growing SPI program presented huge logistical challenges. Once, a participant booked a flight to the Dallas, Texas, airport rather than Washington, D.C.’s Dulles Airport. Another one hopped in a taxi and directed the driver to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 185 miles north of Harrisonburg, Virginia.

In 1998, just after she became one of CJP’s earliest master’s program graduates, Pat Hostetter Martin (also a participant in the very first Frontiers in International Peacemaking conference) joined SPI to help relieve the growing crisis of stress and exhaustion the workload was placing on other staff. The following year, Martin became SPI’s co-director with Patricia Spaulding, and then sole director from 2004 until 2008.

In 2000, William Goldberg – a 2001 master’s program graduate of CJP – joined the SPI staff as the transportation coordinator. He later served as an associate director, co-director and, as of 2013, the director of SPI, which now has two full-time staff members and employs about 10 temporary staff each summer. (Other SPI leaders: Gloria Rhodes in the ’90s, Sue Williams, 2008-’11; Valerie Helbert, 2011-’13.)

As the first Jewish program administrator at EMU, Goldberg embodies one of the ways that SPI has affected EMU as a whole by bringing such wide cultural and religious diversity to campus. From the very first Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conferences, CJP leaders wanted faculty to reflect the religious and cultural diversity of the participants – a desire at odds with EMU’s requirement that all faculty profess a Christian faith. After some discussion, CJP was able to negotiate exceptions to EMU’s hiring practices and hire non-Christian faculty members during the summer, which Jantzi points to as an example of the strong support SPI has generally enjoyed from university administrators since its beginning.

EMU’s hospitable community

Support from the university extended well beyond the administration, remembers Jantzi. Cafeteria staff embraced the opportunity, rather than resented the hassle, of serving participants with a variety of religious and cultural dietary preferences, while the physical plant staff went to great lengths to ensure everyone stayed comfortable during their time on campus. Together, the welcoming atmosphere the entire university created at SPI for visitors from around the world became an important part of its success.

As employees and departments outside of SPI pitched in to help it succeed, SPI also tried to build closer ties to the broader university community by making events like the opening ceremonies and the periodic SPI luncheons open to anyone on campus and in the surrounding community. And when these general open invitations didn’t attract large audiences, Martin found greater success when she started targeting specific people and departments with invitations and paying for their lunches.

SPI staff have also made similar efforts to share the diversity present on campus each summer with the broader community in and around Harrisonburg. As SPI’s community relations coordinator for about a decade, Margaret Foth worked to connect participants with families, churches and civic groups in the area. She helped form a particularly strong relationship with the Rotary Club of Rockingham County, which hosts a speaker from SPI each year and has helped underwrite an SPI trip to Washington D.C. A close relationship also developed between SPI and Park View Mennonite Church, just down the road from EMU, which has welcomed numerous international visitors in Sunday School classes and as participants in worship services.

“We wanted [participants] to know that it was an area that was welcoming and hospitable,” says Foth. “They weren’t just coming for an academic session. They were coming for relationships in a welcoming community.”

From 2000 to 2010, vanloads of SPI participants made connections farther from campus when they attended a peacebuilding conference held each summer by a group of churches in Knoxville, Tennessee, 360 miles southwest of Harrisonburg. (The minister who organized this conference, Jim Foster, is a graduate of Eastern Mennonite Seminary.) By staying with host families, the visitors enjoyed a more immersive experience in American culture; Foth says she could always count on enthusiastic reviews the following Monday, after participants returned to campus.

One year, a Vietnamese-American lawyer from California made the 12-hour round trip to Knoxville, and ended up staying in the home of a Mennonite pastor who, decades earlier, had fought in the Vietnam War. After they stayed up one night talking about their experience of that conflict, the lawyer returned to SPI and told Foth it had been a moment of great healing.

“I can still see him running across campus to give me a hug and say it was the best thing to have happened to him,” she recalls.

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Akin to heaven on earth?

In 2014, a total of 184 people from 36 countries attended SPI – about the size that SPI has been for the past five years, Goldberg says. As its third decade begins, SPI is as strong and as thriving as ever – planning for 2015 began before the books had even been closed on this year’s session.

Those who have been involved with SPI in some way over the past 20 years treasure the many memories and friendships they’ve formed along the way.

“I think it’s one of the best things that’s happened for EMU,” says Jantzi. “It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve been involved with here …. It’s just a really, really energizing time.”

One year, Jantzi and an Iranian seminary student who came to SPI struck up an intriguing, weeks-long conversation about whether converting other people to their respective religions could be done in a nonviolent, non-coercive way. This man later became a high-ranking diplomat who, years later, returned to the United States as part of an Iranian delegation to the United Nations. He contacted Jantzi and invited himself back to Harrisonburg to give a guest lecture in one of Jantzi’s sociology classes – an encouraging indication, Jantzi says, of the high regard this former SPI participant still had for EMU.

Goldberg says he’s often inspired by the great lengths that people will go to so they can attend SPI. In 2014, a group of Syrian participants traveled at least 12 hours each way, through difficult and unsafe conditions, to Lebanon to get their visas to travel to the United States. Then they did it again to catch their flights – an illustration, he says, of “the need that people have for this training.”

And he’s similarly inspired by the eagerness with which people return to very difficult circumstances in their homes to put that training and learning into practice.

“No matter how difficult the conflict someone comes from, they want to go back and make it better with the new skills they’ve learned here,” Goldberg says.

More generally, Martin, as well as others interviewed for this story, says one of the most important enduring memories of SPI is “the rich diversity of the whole thing. Oftentimes, that came out so well in the opening ceremonies. That just humbled you.

“You want heaven to be like this,” she says.

— Andrew Jenner

They are men and women aged 20 to 90 who do things on behalf of peace and justice like mediate between warring soldiers and live among suffering refugees in camps.

Souder is one of four 1990-born undergraduates at EMU who are “community assistants” in the main dormitory building occupied by participants in EMU’s 2012 .

Souder’s no slouch – he is a gifted singer and an expert photographer () and is majoring in , plus carrying four minors – but he says his accomplishments pale beside those of the people he meets on his SPI job.

Mixing with peacebuilders from around the globe

He points to 74-year-old Lilian Burlando, pictured to the left with her grandson, whom she brought with her to SPI in 2010. Lilian is a clinical psychologist who journeyed to SPI in 2011 and 2012 from the southernmost tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

She also came in 2006, 2008 and 2010.

This year she came alone, but on two occasions . (One of her daughters, a prosecuting attorney in Argentina, has attended SPI twice, in 2007 and 2011.)

“Lilian is one of the most engaging people you could ever meet,” said Souder, who follows over 60 SPI friends on Facebook.

When Souder learned that Burlando loves choral music, he arranged for her to attend performances of the acclaimed touring choir and the . Burlando squeezed in these activities on top of her usual active participation in all-day classes and in SPI-wide lectures, meals, and international dances. In her home community, Burlando is the founding director of the (Center for Study and Meditation).

SPI work strengthens cross-cultural experience

Souder spent his in the , leaving him with a special spot in his heart for SPI participants from that region.

He loved getting to know Nettie Pardue in May 2012, a California woman who leads Outward Bound trips that brings Israelis and Palestinians together for an extended sojourn in wilderness settings. And he worries about the volatile home-country situation of the four Lebanese students he recently met.

“When I returned from the Middle East, I was so grateful for the hospitality that was given to me,” he said. “I try to reciprocate by extending hospitality to people coming here.”

Souder and his fellow community assistants – Alli Eanes, Josh Kanagy, and Jamila Witmer – take shifts being available 24 hours a day by telephone to assist the students at SPI, some of whom are in a foreign setting for the first time in their lives. Common concerns are how to phone home (pre-paid telephone cards are best), where to get familiar foods (some items can be found in local food stores), and how to work the laundry machines in the dormitory (start with having the right change).

Sometimes assigned roommates don’t mesh, and the community assistants provide mediation, working with the SPI housing coordinator – this year it’s 2010 EMU grad Kate Bergey – on a resolution. Souder works at being equally helpful to high officials in foreign governments and in organizations like the United Nations and to grassroots workers who serve the poorest of the poor.

And then there’s his photography. James works with EMU staff photographers to compile . He also works with SPI co-director on a selection of printed photos each participant is gifted with as a memory of their time at EMU and in SPI classes.

“James does it out of a love of photography and his pictures are proof,” says Goldberg.

Undergrads fill out the ranks of SPI staff

In addition to the four community assistants, two other undergraduates are on the SPI staff – Kiersten Rossetto focuses on transportation to and from airports and other locations, and Louise Babikow is assigned to a residential unit that houses visiting instructors and guest lecturers.

“On the SPI evaluation forms, we get lots of compliments on our student staff,” says SPI co-director . “They play key roles in creating the kind of welcoming atmosphere that SPI is renowned for.”

Learn more about peacebuilding at EMU

• (photos by James Souder and EMU staff photographers)
• Undergraduate
• , EMU MA 2007

or from our admissions staff!

Goldberg and Helbert are veteran employees of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, under which SPI operates. Goldberg has been employed in various capacities by CJP since 1999, Helbert moved into an administrative role with SPI in 2005 after working in other staff positions at EMU for five years.

These co-directors are replacing Sue Williams, who is retiring from a staff role to return to consulting internationally, after directing SPI for the last three years.

Upon appointing the two new leaders, CJP executive director Lynn Roth said: “Their combination of skills and experience will ensure that SPI will not skip a beat in being one of the premier Summer Peacebuilding programs in the world. Their creativity and network connections should help SPI and CJP continue to develop new and innovative training initiatives.”

Since the institute’s 1994 founding, over 2,500 international workers in humanitarian, conflict transformation and other peacebuilding endeavors have taken part. During four week-long sessions – this year, until June 18 – they investigate many aspects of peace and conflict while forming cross-cultural friendships and working partnerships.

Halbert and Goldberg will lead the SPI program for the 2011-12 academic year, a time of review for SPI as the program has grown and EMU looks towards its long term future.

That morning, as a conga line danced, singing, into the crowded Martin chapel on the Harrisonburg, Va., campus, volcanic ash storm-related travel delays kept one participant behind in Italy. Lack of funds and/or visas barred others. Yet attendance had jumped back significantly from the recession- and epidemic-driven drop, to 84, a year ago.

Now, those assembled laughed as SPI Director Sue Williams noted, “We have only seven days of class, and we will try to fit too much into them.”

Thousands of alumni worldwide

Since the institute’s 1994 founding, about 2,500 international workers in humanitarian, conflict transformation and other peacebuilding endeavors have taken part. During four week-long sessions – this year, until June 18 – they investigate many aspects of peace and conflict while forming cross-cultural friendships and working partnerships.

Vera Giantari from Indonesia introduces herself during the opening SPI gathering. Photo by Lindsey Kolb

Williams expects enrollment to total more than 200 over all sessions. She adds, “One new thing this year was a one-week intensive English class, before SPI began, for those who wanted to spend some time getting comfortable speaking English.”

“We are people of many colors, and we represent so many ministries and activities around the world,” said EMU President Loren Swartzendruber. Learners’ home countries, ranging from Afghanistan to Zambia, include Haiti, Israel and Palestine as well as the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Building networks

Valerie Helbert, a staff member with EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding – which sponsors SPI – encouraged learners to “educate others” if misunderstandings arise. “Assume that they mean well,” she suggested.

Richard Higginson from Northern Ireland introduces himself during the opening SPI gathering while fellow participants post “footprints” with their names on their home countries on a world map. Photo by Lindsey Kolb

Participant introductions were accompanied by the beat of CJP student Mashuri’s djembe drum. Another CJP student, Richard Higginson, strummed a guitar for a sing-along of his “Colors Song”:

“We are many colors . . .a portrait of perfection.”

CJP master’s student Abdinasir Nur, attending his first SPI, says, “In CJP we talk about social capital.” He hopes that in SPI, “We’ll be making a lot of social capital: networks.”

He wants to be a peacebuilder in his country, Somalia. “I like to work with communities,” he says, and may do so either in professional work with an NGO or as a volunteer. He’s taking the course, “Conflict-Sensitive Development and Peacebuilding,”

Clan rivalries and religious discord – even among people of the same faith – drive conflict in Somalia, Nur explains. “I want to see a world where people live together in peace and harmony without any form of conflict. This is a naive hope, but we can at least try.”

Memphis team works with youth

Although this is the first trip to SPI for Vickie O’Neal, her husband, Michael, and their colleagues with the Memphis, Tenn., conflict-resolution team, Turning Point Partners, attended in 2009.

O’Neal, a Turning Point coordinator, is happy that after years of volunteering in Memphis schools, the team has been hired to do similar work. Members lead empathy-training and “peace-making circles,” working with children involved in juvenile courts.

Having enrolled in the courses, “Introduction to Conflict Resolution” and “Restorative Justice,” O’Neal says, “Violence is not only physical. I’m sure I’m going to find that conflict is on many levels.”

The opening ceremony featured two Irish blessings. An American CJP student with Irish ancestry led the recital of one in a brogue. Williams shared another: “If God sends you down a stony path, may he give you strong shoes.”

Learn more about conflict resolution at EMU

• Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP)
• Graduate Program in Conflict Transformation
• Summer Peace Institute (SPI)
• Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience (STAR)
• CJP Faculty and Staff

Chris Edwards is a free-lance writer from Harrisonburg, Va. Contact EMU’s marketing and communications office for more information on this article.