THEY ARE INSPIRING.

• Georgia Molia-Hanna is the first woman to hold a government peacebuilding position in Papua New Guinea.
• Amina Abdulkadir was awarded the 2017 Woman Peacebuilders for Water Award, honoring women working to resolve water-related conflicts. Classmate Naema “Nimo” Somo was a finalist among eight others in the inaugural international award offered by Milan Global and the Milan (Italy) Center for Food Law and Policy.
• Fatuma Abass ran for public office in Kenya. So did Maryam Abdikadir.
• Violet Muthiga developed an impactful project focused on the re-integration of a group of mothers who had been ostracized from their community after their sons were arrested on terrorism charges at a local mosque.

The work of these graduates and others from the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program is the inspiration for new innovation at CJP.

“Recent decreases in traditional funding opportunities that supported WPLP in the past have led us to focus on new innovations that build on the program’s strengths and empower its alumni,”said Daryl Byler, CJP executive director. “It’s important for the CJP community to know that while we have not identified funders to continue WPLP in its current configuration, the success of program graduates and the contributions of those who supported them here at CJP is the basis for future cohort-based peacebuilding training in a different format.”

WHAT COULD THIS NEW PHASE OF COHORT-BASED EDUCATION LOOK LIKE?

• WPLP graduates and their organizations create a wide network and strong foundation to develop and implement effective peacebuilding projects.

In contrast to top-down project design and implementation, WPLP graduates, with their local knowledge and capacity to connect and empower, bolster the work and regional infrastructure that matters to specific communities and regions. CJP has relied successfully on graduates and their grassroots connections to identify areas of need and integrate their leadership and organizations into project implementation.

In Kenya, for example, WPLP graduates have advised on specific needs and topics related to a training and mini-grant program for youth-focused organizations, and their organizations have been integrated into the project’s future implementation.

• The program’s successful cohort model, in which participants learn and grow together through their coursework, has shown that building community among peacebuilders is just as important as each individual’s ongoing work.

A strong community of peacebuilders grows resilience, provides access to mentorship and resources, and inspires others. Participants in our cohort learning model often report that they feel more equipped, secure and empowered in the long-term because they can rely on other participants for advice, support and mentorship. Cohorts provide a problem-solving hub, allowing for frank discussion and lots of exchanging of ideas through the learning and implementation process. This collaborative, integrative model of community-building helps lay the groundwork for systemic change.

In Iraq, this model has been used successfully in youth peacebuilding leadership trainings and community projects, as well as with educators and administrators engaging with the potential for a national peacebuilding curriculum (see page 6).

Extending the cohort model to professional development and trainings, CJP staff can develop innovative combinations of curriculum on a range of topics to meet organizational needs.

• WPLP’s model can have impact in the United States – and WPLP graduates can help us create and implement new intervention models for diverse contexts.

Violet Muthiga’s work with ostracized mothers, for example, has direct application to diverse integration or re-integration projects in the United States. Her model – combining community education, counseling, mentoring, and trauma and resilience training – has the potential for application in other contexts: refugees and immigrants struggling to adapt to new cultures; residents in communities dealing with long-term conflict and/or misunderstandings; or mothers who want to use their experiences with family members to counter the effects of violent extremism, racism, or domestic violence through building resiliency in their families and communities.

With growing interest and coalition-building around important issues in the United States, there are many benefits to domestic deployment of the model that has empowered so many WPLP peacebuilders in other countries. With adaptable curriculum and a variety of online and face-to-face delivery options, a cohort focused on a specific topic could undergo training, followed by project-based practical application and leadership opportunities.

This could take shape in a variety of ways: A group from Appalachia could explore the effects of adverse childhood experiences through the lens of trauma and resilience and then collaborate on a specific project using their new knowledge and skills. Pastors could focus on conflict resolution and prevention. People working with youth could learn the basics of restorative justice to integrate into their organizational structure.

WHAT’S YOUR VISION?

Do you have an idea for a cohort-based project? (See pages 6 and 22 for examples of this model.)

Share your idea with Alena Yoder, CJP cohort projects coordinator: alena.yoder@emu.edu.

FOR MANY PEACEBUILDERS attending the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at ��ݮ����, scholarships provide the necessary funds to travel and take courses. Since 2006, the Valley Friends meeting, a group of 25 to 30 families, has made an SPI scholarship the largest allotment in their annual budget.

“We’re a small meeting so we’ve decided that financial support of peacebuilders is a way to live out our values,” said member Lois Carter Crawford.

Over the years, that support has contributed to training for Quakers working with the African Great Lakes Initiative, an initiative of the Friends Peace Team. This year, with no international SPI participants signaling Quaker affiliation on their SPI application, the committee shifted their focus.

“Because there’s been so much violence in the US, we looked for someone locally who was working on reduction of gun violence and peacemaking,” Crawford said.

That recipient was Zanetta Ford-Byrd, executive director of the Harrisonburg Education Foundation and a sociology professor at James Madison University. By paying tuition of a local recipient, the fund also had money remaining to award a partial scholarship to Mohammed Ishaq Israr of Pakistan. He works with Penny Appeal, an organization that provides foster care for orphaned children and homes for widows and homeless men.

Israr has attended SPI four times, once as a Winston Fellow and last year with the support of Valley Friends. Each time he has stayed with the Crawfords in their home.

During SPI 2018, more than 180 people from 35 countries took at least one of the 19 training courses offered.

OTHER SCHOLARSHIP AWARDEES:

• Esther Paya, of Nigeria, is the 2018 Winston Fellow. She took the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) II training, as well as courses in “Formation for Peace Practice” and “Truth-telling, Racial Healing and Restorative Justice.”

• Paul Ruot Bayoch, a master trainer with AECOM International in South Sudan, was awarded the Alper Family Scholarship, which supports one African or Asian peacebuilder with tuition and lodging for two SPI sessions. Bayoch facilitates the trauma awareness program, which uses STAR curriculum. He took courses in restorative justice, conflict analysis, and truth-telling and reconciliation.

• Maji Ndasule PeterX, a trainer and coordinator with Carefronting’s Alternatives to Violence Project in Nigeria, and Alexia Stouraiti, a lawyer, mediator, restorative circles keeper and psychodramatist from Athens, Greece, received the Stoltzfus Scholarships for international participants working to bridge global barriers of language and culture.

• Coming to the Table offers scholarships to its members, who work on “acknowledging and healing wounds from racism that is rooted in the United States’ history of slavery,” according to their website. This year’s recipients include Cheryl Goode, Sarah Kohrs, Sharon Morgan, Crixell Shell and James Tyler Jr. They each took one course, ranging from circle processes and truth-telling to restorative justice and STAR training.

A CIVIL RIGHTS ATTORNEY AND A RACE RELATIONS EXPERT SHARE NEW PERSPECTIVES

Race relations expert Daryl Davis and attorney Ari Wilkenfeld brought diverse perspectives on civil rights to Horizons of Change luncheons during SPI 2018.

Davis has spent decades in dialogue with members of white supremacist groups, including the Klu Klux Klan, and convinced many to rethink these affiliations. He is the author of Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan (New Horizon Press, 1998) due for reprint in the next year. He has also been the subject of a 2016 documentary Accidental Courtesy and has been featured by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR and CNN.

Wilkenfeld has spent his professional life in the combative, confrontational world of litigation. In a corner of his Washington, D.C. office at the law firm of Wilkenfeld, Herendeen & Atkinson, he keeps a collection of baseball bats, one for each case he has won in court. At SPI, Wilkenfeld visited Professor Carolyn Stauffer’s “Sexual Harms: Changing the Narrative” class and later spoke at a luncheon.

Those interactions exposed “the world that I live in,” which stigmatizes the possibilities, process and potential of collaborative conflict resolution, he said in a phone interview a few days later. “I’ve studied truth and reconciliation as it was conducted in South Africa, and taught negotiation and diplomacy in college and law school, but never had the opportunity to have my manner of doing my job challenged by a group of people who have different ideas about conflict resolution, and not just different ideas but carefully studied and well-thoughtout ideas.”

Many SPI participants – and not just those attending this year’s first-time course offering on sexual harms – bring a nuanced understanding of gender-related violence, said Bill Goldberg MA ‘01, SPI director.

“Increased gender-based violence and inequalities are common symptoms of fragile states, which is why global attention is much more attuned to this issue,” Goldberg said. “The United States delayed development of its required action plan related to UNCR 1325 for 11 years, which says something about how little our political leadership cares about this issue. The grass-roots efforts of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements reflect on issues of global importance.”

During his talk, his word choice was respectfully challenged by listeners. Later, Wilkenfeld said that he’s been mulling over the different perspectives he heard.

“It would be better if, instead of beating each other up in court, we could all sit down and talk things out, figure out how much harm is done and do so in a way that is designed to heal everybody, even the alleged perpetrator,” he said. “People in my profession should all be thinking about that possibility. But our culture doesn’t value that kind of resourceful thinking about conflict resolution. Our culture values wins and losses.”

SOME TIME AWAY IN 2003 was exactly what Kenneth Wilson needed to figure out his next move. A longtime activist and organizer in the August Town community on the outskirts of Kingston, Jamaica, Wilson was feeling isolated in his efforts to address the gang violence that routinely brought “misery and mayhem” to his hometown.

“I was like John the Baptist, the lone voice speaking about peace,” Wilson recalls. “People were cowering. People were afraid of the violence.”

At the Summer Peacebuilding Institute that year, able to reflect from a distance on these challenges, he began drafting plans for a new organization composed of leaders in each of August Town’s five districts. Wilson, who had also attended SPI in 2000, 2001 and 2002, envisioned a group that could both identify emerging conflicts and then work together to resolve them.

While still at SPI, Wilson compiled a list of specific residents to recruit to the effort, and immediately upon returning, began working to make the August Town Peace Builders a reality. Over the 15 years since, the group has been able to repeatedly defuse local conflicts before they spin out of control, working with a variety of partners including the police, churches and other organizations.

“We meet, we plan, we engage. Once we hear of an incident, we meet and we plan and we intervene,” Wilson says. “I know that [we] have saved many lives in August Town, each time a conflict threatens to explode and we are able to neutralize it.”

As a result, August Town Peace Builders’ stature and reputation within the community has grown, propelled by Wilson’s frequent interviews with local media. It still came as a shock, however, when he received a phone call earlier this year letting him know that he’d been chosen to receive the Jamaican Prime Minister’s Medal of Appreciation for Contribution to Nation Building. Wilson accepted the award from Prime Minister Andrew Holness at a ceremony on April 25.

“It was really a defining moment for me personally,” Wilson says.

There have, of course, been setbacks along the way, including a recent outbreak of violence in August Town despite the group’s best efforts. And there have been constant sacrifices required of Wilson and his colleagues, such as putting personal lives on hold to prioritize community needs. Buoyed by the recent honor, however, Wilson hopes his fellow peacebuilders around the world find the strength to continue their work.

“Persons who are a part of this field are a special kind of human being,” he says. “We care about humanity. We want to live in peace, in harmony. We must never give up, because if we give up, it will be worse. I just want to encourage my colleagues in this work.”

I RECENTLY HEARD

Maha was one of several panelists invited to a post-production discussion of the play “The Vagrant Trilogy,” performed by the Mosaic Theater Company of [Washington] D.C. She described the limited choices – few of them good – she and her family have had living under military occupation. But despite the overwhelming odds, Maha holds onto hope. And she continues to build relationships with Israelis to work for a future of justice, peace and security for both peoples.

Maha’s experience reminds me of another Middle Easterner – the Apostle Paul – who wrote that suffering gives birth to resilience. Resilience gives birth to character. And character gives birth to hope (Romans 5:3-4). Hope, we know, is also vision.

Many CJP students come to us from situations of suffering and trauma – political oppression, war, poverty and the legacy of enslavement. But theirs are not stories of defeat and despair. Rather, their stories are of resilience and hope. The hardships they have experienced have given birth to powerful visions for justice and healing. Indeed, the most compelling visions are birthed from the deepest, darkest struggles in life.

In this issue of Peacebuilder, you will read many stories of resilience and hope – as CJP alumni engage a broken world. Despite encountering racism in Anabaptist institutions, Iris de León-Hartshorn has “stuck it out” with her brothers and sisters in Christ because of her vision to be part of God’s reconciling mission in the world (pages 4-5). And Tecla Namachanja Wanjala’s “new-dawn” dream of healing for Kenya grows from the country’s massive trauma (p. 31).

Still, getting students to ��ݮ���� is not without challenges. Visas are not the only issue. Graduate education is expensive and many of those who want to study at CJP do not have adequate financial resources to cover the costs. We are launching a major endowment campaign to boost our scholarship offerings. Our goal is to raise an additional $5 million by 2020. Will you help us offer more peacebuilders the tools necessary to birth visions of healing and hope in their communities?

J. Daryl Byler
Executive Director

THE DESTRUCTIVE FORCES OF WIND, flood or machete do not defeat the resilient Haitian reed wozo. Instead, they only make way for it to grow back stronger. There’s even a proverb that Daryl Snider MA ‘12 learned in his years of service in Haiti: “We are wozo. We bend, but we do not break.”

It’s also what Snider and Frances Crowhill Miller GC ‘11 call their music- and story-based performances that explore grief and loss, trauma healing, resilience, restorative justice, structural justice and the legacy of colonialism. They first performed Wozo: Songs for Resilience in 2014, and released a CD with that title in 2015.

The Pennsylvania duo perform as Sopa Sol – they both sing, and Miller plays hang and violin and Snider guitar, sax, oboe and akogo – but Wozo specifically grew out their time together at CJP and studies in the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience program.

In 2013, after Miller relocated near Snider in Lancaster County, the duo began collaborating to further incorporate their training with music. They realized that their songs fit onto STAR’s “snail model” – a spiral that shows various stops on the journey of breaking cycles of violence and building resilience.

STAR lead trainer Katie Mansfield also sees music as having that potential “to touch the specific and universal in our life experiences, and to integrate people’s embodied experience, emotions and stories,” she said. “It invites community and connection around both our traumas and our resilience, just as STAR promotes the integration of our experiences into our emerging identity as individuals and collectives.”

The album and program include songs such as “Hole in Her Heart,” about Snider’s widowed mother’s grief: “Not even the love of ten thousand good friends / eases pain she now feels just may never end.” Other songs – such as “We Are Wozo,” from a poem by a Haitian man – tell other’s stories.

Not all focus on brokenness and trauma; some are about reconnecting to community and finding joy. The heartening yet bittersweet “Glimmer of Sun” proclaims, “One of these mornings we shall rise / and the clouds will have broken… / Kiss the morning sunlight / and this path you have chosen.”

While not all Sopa Sol performances are specifically Wozo, many of their 40 events in the last several years contained elements of the project. As artists, they are “concerned about the musical elements, for sure,” Miller said, but the nature of their music means they also have to think about whether they are inviting listeners into a helpful experience.

“The music is more than just entertainment,” Snider said. “It’s important for us to take care of our audience. We want to be sure to bring people along in a careful way.”

Miller and Snider tailor each live performance to their audiences. A recent gig for a STAR course meant they could get into the “the harder stuff,” Miller said, while in more general settings, they stick with songs of resilience and “letting the music do more of the work.” She said it felt like two of her songs had been “written for” one particular sexual assault prevention event; at a hospice event, a simple group ritual that the duo incorporated felt “especially poignant.”

On their part, it takes trust and hope, they said – that the perspectives, stories and emotions woven into their performances will offer “reassurance of healing and life after brokenness,” Miller said. “There’s this balance of analyzing what we are presenting, but then at the same time there’s letting go and letting music do its thing beyond what you could ever plan or imagine.”

That can be difficult – “or perhaps impossible” – to measure, said Snider. “Changes that occur within people at such a visceral level may take years and other experiences to grow, and folks may never point to our music as the catalyst or seed. Our music may be only a small part of that change, that awakening.”

�´dz���’s ongoing development is balanced with the rest of their lives – they both perform individually or with other ensembles, too, and Miller has a micro-dairy and two young children – but they see Wozo as a potential resource for many different groups, such as veterans and people who are incarcerated.

ANDREW DANIELS HAD A HUNCH

In the midst of the heated 2016 presidential campaign season, politically-derived tensions naturally entered into the school environment and trickled down into team dynamics, challenging the boys’ ability to work together. “Some boys supported one candidate in pretty vocal ways and their language, as well as that from other students, made teammates feel like they were being targeted,” Daniels said.

Thinking through possible approaches, he realized that structured dialogue in a calm and supportive environment could potentially help mediate the situation.

Daniels led the team through weekly circle processes, beginning with “our values and relationships,” he said. “As the weeks went on, we got more into what people were saying and how that made them feel. It made a difference in how the athletes interacted with each other.”

That nexus between peacebuilding and sports led Daniels to pursue professional work in the field upon graduation in 2016. Sport for development, modeled on the ideals of the Olympic Movement, uses athletics participation as a means of enabling cooperation and peacebuilding among both children and adults. The approach has staunch believers and dissenters around the globe.

Daniels is now an international fellow with the Belfast-based program of PeacePlayers, which combines sports programming with peace education and leadership development for youth in communities in conflict. PeacePlayers also has programs in Cyprus, the Middle East, South Africa, and the United States.

“I do have a lot more optimism than I had before, because now I can see an alternative reality,” Daniels said. “I’ve seen kids from conflict areas, who have had really hard lives, with their arms around each other, building friendships.”

As a project coordinator in South Belfast, Daniels oversees programs for youth ages 7-18 with the aim of bringing together residents of starkly segregated neighborhoods. Ninety percent of public housing is divided along sectarian lines, and only 7 percent of pupils attend integrated schools, according to PeacePlayers research.

“That means many Catholic kids have not set foot in a Protestant school, even if it’s only a few miles away, nor have they really had the opportunity to interact with Protestant kids,” Daniels said. “You can imagine the long-term effects through adulthood of this deep sectarian segregation.”

In a “twinning” program for the youngest residents, a Catholic and Protestant school pair up for 12 weeks. Daniels and a team of coaches conduct introductory sessions at the separate schools during the first week. Over the next two weeks, each student group visits its partner school for a welcoming ceremony and tour. “They see a lot of similarities, of course, with their own schools, which helps to set the stage for relationship-building,” Daniels said.

The following weekly sessions of about two hours are hosted at a neutral site. A rigorous set of “mixer” exercises helps to break down barriers and create integrated teams, which then rotate through 30-minute sessions devoted alternately to basketball skills that demand teamwork and communication and peace education curriculum about topics such as stereotypes, peer influence, symbolism, prejudice and discrimination.

“The main objective is to have fun and give the kids an opportunity to interact, and the curriculum is really secondary,” Daniels said. “One of the program mottos is ‘Kids who can learn to play together can learn to live together.’”

Given the space and freedom, kids gravitate towards each other, Daniels said, “even if what they have in common is that they both dislike basketball.”

Daniels said the change from the first meeting, “when the Catholic kids are on one side of the circle and the Protestant kids are on the other side, just looking at each other,” to the final meeting is “amazing.” The bonding exercises nudge students together, but it’s the willingness of the children to overcome stereotypes and prejudice that Daniels finds inspiring.

“One day, early in a program when the two school groups had just met, I noticed one boy keeping to himself, and I was thinking, ‘How can I get him more engaged?’ I got distracted for a bit, and the next time I looked over, he’d found a kid from the other school group who was also kind of shy, and they bonded over that. By the end of the program, when they had to say their final goodbyes, instead of a high-five, they shared a hug,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing that makes me keep going.”

Daniels also works with Champions 4 Peace, a leadership program offered by invitation to youth ages 14-18 who have been through the twinning program, as well as Belfast Interface League, an evening and after-school program that offers opportunities to play basketball and explore peace education at more advanced levels.

In the gym and in the classroom these last 10 months, Daniels still finds the experience of living and working in Ireland “surreal.” He is walking in the footsteps of one of his heroes: His grandfather, now living in Daniels’ hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, is a Belfast native who immigrated to the United States in the ‘50s.

“I grew up hearing my grandfather tell stories of the violence in the Ardoyne district. He didn’t exactly have a peaceful time growing up,” Daniels said. “Here I am living in the same city, helping to work on some of the same issues he experienced. I like to think he’s proud of that.”

Along with a dream of peace for Belfast, he has one more, he said: a walk through the city with his grandfather.

Before becoming a Fulbright Scholar at CJP, the Syrian native spent one year with the Vincentian Volunteers in Denver, Colorado, and a second year in Manchester, England, working in a variety of social services positions.

His first introduction to New York City was during a CJP practicum with the United Nations Development Programme. After graduation, Salim returned to the city to work for Nonviolent Peaceforce, an organization that advocates for the protection of civilians in violent conflicts through unarmed strategies.

Eventually, though, he wanted to delve into the root causes of violence at a community level – at a family level.

“To understand conflict, we really need to understand family dynamics because it’s all interconnected,” he said.

AAFSC, present in each of the five boroughs of New York City, offers many social, educational and legal services to new immigrants and citizens. In his role as director of the anti-violence program, Salim supervises a dedicated team of multilingual staff that works with victims of intimate partner violence, sex trafficking and sexual assault. He spends part of his time among the New York City Family Justice centers, which are operated by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence.

“Our partnership with the mayor’s office is to offer culturally competent, trauma-informed services to victims of all backgrounds, because we understand the challenges of the community and have the resources to be cultural brokers between the community and mainstream service providers,” Salim says.

Founded in 1994, AAFSC is the first Arabic-speaking social services organization in New York. With 13 languages spoken among nearly 60 staff, it serves the Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian communities, collectively described with the acronym AMEMSA. Though culturally and linguistically diverse, these communities have been subjected to similar oppressions and prejudice in the United States.

Salim started in the organization working on child protection issues, a space in which his conflict transformation training was helpful. One experience that “sticks in my head,” he said, was when he facilitated a parenting workshop with three men and three women using the circle process as its structure.

“This had not been done before, and after the first two sessions, I thought ‘What am I doing? Is this the right decision?’ It took two or three sessions before the participants began to open up, but everyone attended every session. And in the end, one person said, ‘I wish this was filmed or recorded because it could be a lesson to others.’ In the end, they wanted more,” he said. “They valued the experience to hear different perspectives and challenges the other person was going through and why that led them to where they were.”

That position also allowed him to follow the families of the participants, and see, first-hand, how their dynamics improved.

He repeatedly characterized his current work as “rewarding but challenging,” with its transformative impact less visible. Salim educates victims about their rights and options, empowering them to make their own choices, and offering support.

He deals with complex dynamics of gender, culture, language, power, relationship. Abuse, he said, comes from power differentials, “when one person has power over another.” Conflict is a power struggle. Thus transformation and resolution is more challenging in an abusive situation, “because intimate partner violence is abuse, not conflict, and the abuser has to first acknowledge the wrong, which is challenging.”

Yet, he said, “my background in conflict transformation is still with me. It doesn’t go away. Change happens over time but change can happen. It takes transformation and time. Justice can be challenging, because it takes time and effort. And justice can happen, too.”

Bringing a new sense of justice to multiple city venues – neighborhoods, courts and prisons, schools and more – is a challenge that requires focus, patience and an empowering spirit.

“One bite at a time. That’s all you can do,” said 2018 Peacebuilder of the Year Annette Lantz-Simmons at the June 13 luncheon ceremony in her honor during the Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

The executive director of the Center for Conflict Resolution (CCR) in Kansas City, Missouri, is the fourth recipient of the annual recognition of a CJP graduate. She first attended SPI in 2005 and earned a master’s degree in conflict transformation in 2009.

Lantz-Simmons “has led CCR’s commitment to a workplace environment that is reflective of its mission in the community and expanded the traditional work of a mediation center by promoting a holistic mission that focuses on prevention, education and restoration,” said CJP Executive Director Daryl Byler in an announcement of the honoree in spring 2018.

In her acceptance speech, Lantz-Simmons highlighted CCR’s programs. The organization offers neighborhoods and families group facilitation, conflict resolution and mediation training, and trauma and circle workshops; has assisted the city in implementing – and anticipates expanding – restorative justice practices in schools; offered restorative processes and trauma and conflict resolution trainings in prisons, reentry facilities, and courts; and provided various organizations with group facilitation, trainings, trauma awareness and mediation.

Trainings and programs such as these are “planting seeds,” Lantz-Simmons said in an earlier interview. “People often do what they know, even if it doesn’t work or is very uncomfortable for them. We offer a different mindset and practical skills to do conflict in a new way.”

“CCR is an example of what it takes to do real peacebuilding and effect significant change, beyond the boundaries of mediation,” said CJP academic programs director Jayne Docherty, in her presentation of the award to Lantz-Simmons. “It takes long-term vision and teamwork to actually make significant transformation in systems, and not just resolve conflicts. The vision that you have held is a big vision for a less violent and more just city, and that is what we love to see.”

In a video made by CCR staff for the occasion, founder Diane Kyser MA ‘06 praised Lantz-Simmons as having “brought this agency to incredible places because of the vision that she has had and then dedicated [herself] to pursue.”

CCR has strong ties to CJP, as CCR founder Kyser and staffers Gregory Winship MA ’17 and Debbie Bayless ‘18 have completed graduate degrees. Additionally, former CCR education strategist (and Annette’s daughter) Mikhala Lantz-Simmons is a 2015 graduate.

INSPIRATION. REJUVENATION. Sharing a journey together. Delegations from Brazil and Korea made pilgrimages to EMU this past academic year for multi-day programming hosted by the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice.

Although preparing for such delegations requires a major commitment of time and resources, CJP Executive Director Daryl Byler said that “the payoff is priceless” for all groups involved.

The first such delegation came in 2015 and included six curriculum developers from Nepal’s National Judicial Academy in Kathmandu. CJP anticipates hosting a group from Colombia this next year.

‘LIKE OXYGEN’

From across Brazil and with diverse professional backgrounds, 25 practitioners spent five days visiting Harrisonburg-area programs, contemplating practices and pedagogies, and witnessing shared values.

“It’s like oxygen,” said public prosecutor Danielle Arlé. “I can breathe again.”

“There is an Eastern saying that when the disciple is ready, the master comes,” Judge Leoberto Brancher said. “Restorative justice came to us in Brazil in the late 1990s and now almost 20 years later, we can come before the source … to review what we’ve been doing. It’s a time for tuning and beginning a new stage.”

“The source” is Howard Zehr, professor emeritus and the institute’s co-director, who led a session on restorative justice and serious crimes. Other sessions and site visits were hosted by EMU-educated “disciples.”

Retired judge Isabel Lima, a professor at Catholic University in Salvador, developed the idea for the intensive seminar while a visiting professor at CJP in spring 2017.

In contrast to the United States, where a disparate group is driving the widening influence of restorative justice concepts, the Brazilian judiciary has played a key role in Brazil, Lima said.

Brancher, from Caxio do Sul, is one proponent who has made a nation-wide difference. He talks about restorative justice as an allegorical light during a dark time in his career, when he questioned the efficacy and meaning of his work with incarceration facilities for juveniles. Seen as both a punitive and protective system, “the way those two positions were disconnected made everything we did harmful because of misunderstood conceptions,” he said. “It was an existential question for me: What does life want from me as a judge? And also a professional question: How can I enforce the law? RJ came to me during that period as an answer.”

After nearly 20 years working to advance the concept, the five-day experience at EMU heralded a new stage, he said, towards “the creation of a more solid basis and more integrated leadership to give support and enable this process to be sustainable.”

‘WALKING THE SAME WAY WE WANTED TO GO’

Last year in South Korea, middle school teachers Yongseung Roh and Kyungyun Hwang read Howard Zehr’s seminal text Changing Lenses with a study group. This year, they were part of a South Korean delegation that came to EMU to learn directly about restorative justice from Zehr himself.

“We wanted to meet people who were walking toward the same way that we wanted to go,” the husband-wife duo wrote in an email. The 11-day east coast tour for 21 teachers, students, community leaders and legal professionals was organized by the Korea Peacebuilding Institute (KOPI). Because participants already had a firm basis of RJ concepts, the purpose was to learn about the “spiritual, cultural, and historical backgrounds” of the movement, said KOPI director Jae Young Lee MA ‘03. “If we believe RJ is a paradigm and not a program, it is important to know the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition emphasizing peace and justice as a center of their faith.”

The visit was also an opportunity for “two-way” learning, said CJP executive director Daryl Byler – for both CJP staff and graduates like Lee and fellow delegation participant Yoonseo Park MA ‘16.

“They and others have taken the restorative justice training they received at CJP and expanded its application to a variety of Korean contexts – including the criminal justice, educational and health systems, as well as in housing and church conflicts,” Byler said.

The delegation also visited the Mennonite Central Committee headquarters and Material Resources Center in Akron, Pennsylvania; met with shooting victims and family members in the Nickel Mines Amish community; and visited two Washington D.C. schools that practice restorative discipline.

IN THE FUTURE…

Members of the Brazil delegation are exploring attendance at a future Summer Peacebuilding Institute, and staying in touch through online forums and webinars.

CJP and KOPI have signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding. The partnership will strengthen the regional capacity for peacebuilding in Korea and cross-promote CJP-KOPI professional trainings in restorative justice and trauma and resilience, as well as academic programs.