Harrisonburg, Virginia

As Jeff Heie is doing now (in 2010), Jim Hershberger defied gender stereotyping from 1990 to 1996, when he was the main caregiver for the three Hershberger children as they grew from preschool to upper-elementary ages.

Jim’s wife, Ann, was then a nurse with a master’s degree (she now has a PhD). The couple had served with Mennonite Central Committee for 10 years in Nicaragua. When they returned to the United States in 1990, Ann’s nursing credentials put her in the best position to be the family breadwinner.

“It was difficult for me [to be a ‘househusband’ and full-time father],” recalls Jim. “As a man, I was supposed to be out ‘hunting and gathering.’ But I now have memories that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

He entered CTP in 1994 (one of the program’s first two full-time students) to “re-tool” himself, as he puts it. “I thought it would give me some options in terms of future employment.”

Two years later Jim began work in the Harrisonburg Refugee Resettlement Office. He found his conflict transformation training handy when dealing with the school system. One teacher, for example, became frightened when a child recently arrived from Yugoslavia kept drawing pictures of tanks, bombs and people dying. Jim was able to explain that the boy’s own home had been bombed and that people close to the boy had been killed.

When a hurricane devastated Nicaragua in the fall of 1998, the Hershbergers returned to that country for a year to do relief work sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee.

Jim next became the pastor of Beldor Mennonite Church in Elkton, Virginia, a village 18 miles east of Harrisonburg. He pastored for nine years, sometimes addressing conflicts within his congregation, before returning to the Refugee Resettlement Program as its director in September 2010.

When he was with the refugee program in the late 1990s, the clients were mostly Christians from Eastern Europe and Central America. Now (2010), they are mostly Muslims from Iraq. “This is a chance for area churches to extend hospitality to people of another faith,” Jim says.

Harrisonburg, Virginia

Long-time work with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) seems to leave people with rich experiences and much wisdom, but not necessarily with credentials that translate into comparably responsible work in the US. Or so Hadley and Jan Jenner found after leaving their shared 7-year-long roles as MCC country representatives in Kenya.

Hadley had been trained as a land planner and had worked in planning for nine years in Alaska prior to heading to Kenya. So, in Kenya, he had a particular interest in land-use and environmental matters.

In 1997 when he enrolled in CTP – to “retool,” like Jim Hershberger and other returning MCC volunteers were doing, with MCC tuition assistance – Hadley became interested in conflicts arising from environmental issues.

Two professors in particular, Vernon Jantzi and John Paul Lederach, encouraged Hadley to take CTP into the public policy arena by marketing CTP’s services “to help address conflict in ways that nurture healthy communities, clean environments, and robust participation in a sustainable future,” as explained in a brochure published at the time.

For several years Hadley tried to realize this laudable vision, but sufficient funding never materialized. His wife was hired to write grants for CTP, which weighed in favor of the family remaining in Harrisonburg. Hadley, who had completed a master’s degree in environmental planning at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, went to work as a planner for Rockingham County.

As the three Jenner children approached college age, Hadley felt he needed to find a new career path that would both challenge him and offer the family solid, stable income. So he returned to EMU and completed a BS in nursing in 2005. (He was fast-tracked through EMU’s nursing program, having previously earned a BS in biology at Earlham College in 1972.)

How does Hadley use his CTP training in the hospital? “I am able to connect with all of the different kinds of people who come in, to establish relationships of trust.” Yet he confesses: “I miss thinking strategically [about burning social issues], gathered with other thinkers around a table.”

Harrisonburg, Virginia

Pat Hostetter Martin arrived at CTP at age 50, after serving for 16 years with her husband Earl in Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) programs in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines) and at MCC headquarters in Akron, Pennsylvania.

“We knew we wanted to be peacemakers, but asking ‘How?’ and studying to find answers to that question was a novel idea at the time [1995-1997].”

Like many of her classmates, Pat also hungered for time to read, reflect, and take stock of who she was and what she was doing. She and Earl planned to return to Southeast Asia to work another five years as MCC’s regional peace coordinators. But the illness of a family member changed those plans. Pat accepted a leadership role with the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, and Earl went to work as a carpenter.

Reflecting on the 13 years from her CTP student days until her retirement from CJP in 2008, Pat observed, “Peacebuilding is a tough field… [For instance] we didn’t succeed in stopping the Gulf War, or any of the others that followed. It is easy to get burned out.”

The answer to the threat of burn-out, she feels, is tapping into “our spiritual energies, or what John Paul [Lederach] calls, ‘the moral imagination.’ We can’t survive on theories. We need faith that opening ourselves up and being led by the Spirit will eventually result in finding ways to live together peacefully – if not in our lifetimes, then in our children’s, grandchildren’s or great-grandchildren’s.”

Pat applauds the “maturing of the peacebuilding field,” whereby people who view themselves as peacemakers are working with, and in, the military, diplomatic corps, business, and religious institutions. She points to the 2009 founding of the Northeast Asia Regional Peacebuilding Institute by CJP alumni as an example of “good and exciting things that are happening.”

Pat’s current career is in pastoral chaplaincy, which provides spiritual care for people in hospitals, prisons and nursing homes. She is enrolled in her second unit of clinical pastoral education at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. She is also training to be a hospice volunteer.

Harrisonburg, Virginia

Since fleeing his native Burundi in 1996, Jean Ndayizigiye has been rebuilding his life in exile. He is on the board of directors of the United Burundian-American Community Association (, the largest organization of Burundians in the USA.

His association launched an annual celebratory convention three years ago – first held in Washington DC on the Fourth of July weekend, then in Dallas, Texas, and most recently in Atlanta, Georgia – to reduce Burundians’ sense of isolation and to build a vibrant community of mutual support. About 600 went to the convention held July 3-5, 2010, in Atlanta.

In the summer/fall 2005 issue of Peacebuilder, writer Sue Gier summed up Jean’s life before coming to the United States this way:

A teenage boy beaten near death by Tutsis classmates for being Hutu. A fugitive in hiding for three months by the grace of a Muslim woman. A prisoner starving in a filthy dark cell for six months. One year as a farm peasant.

A resurrected student in a Jesuit school. One of 10 in Belgium on college scholarship. A returnee to Burundi as a civil engineer, a senior official – director of Public Works, adjudicator in the Ministry of Finance – excelling at nation building.

New military rulers. Hunted again. A refugee, this time seeking and receiving political asylum in the United States. A man without hope of returning to his home or using his talents, skills, experience.

Trained in accounting, Jean works part time as a financial counselor for the residents of Gemeinshaft, a program to assist former prisoners to transition to living productively in mainstream society. He came to the US with his wife, Spes, also a Burundian refugee. They have four young adult daughters. He is an active member of Park View Mennonite Church and regularly contributes to charitable causes, including to an orphanage in Burundi.

Jean stresses that his greatest challenge through the years has been finding peace within himself: “You have to have inner peace before you can give it to someone else. You have to find your own blind spot before you can accept that others have blind spots.”

Harrisonburg, Virginia

Given the worldwide reputation of EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, one might reasonably ask, “But what impact have its graduates had in EMU’s home community?”

An observer might cite the work of CJP-linked people in churches, health-care centers, school systems, a transitional program for recently released prisoners, and a center that helps immigrants and refugees. But at or near the top of the list of “most impact in the community” would have to be the Fairfield Center, founded 28 years ago by a dozen visionaries, almost all of them EMU faculty members or alumni.

The Fairfield Center was launched in 1982 under the name Community Mediation Center, the first such center in Virginia. The center was renamed “Fairfield” in 2010 to enhance its marketability and to recognize one of its founders, Kathryn Fairfield ’70, an attorney who has been a steadfast mediator, trainer and advocate over the years.

In the center’s early years, Tim Ruebke was an undergraduate majoring in social work at EMU. For his social work practicum, he went to the mediation center in the fall of 1992. Two months later he was employed as a case manager and mediator. He spent the next 15 years handling 1,500 cases involving issues as “minor” as marital conflict and as major as criminal cases and complex organizational or multi-party issues. He is a state-certified mediator for civil and family circuit court cases and has taught alternative dispute resolution in community workshops and college classes.

Since 2007 Tim has been the executive director of the Fairfield Center, a role which requires him to spend more time “managing the business” – producing grant applications and reports, supervising personnel, working with his board – than actually mediating or facilitating, as he did in his earlier years.

Tim has four part-time staff members and eight volunteers to handle an average of 45 cases per month. Their efforts are enhanced by those of almost 30 trained community mediators. Collectively, these workers offer an array of “conflict resolution, communications excellence training, business services, restorative justice and civic engagement initiatives,” according to .   In short, they can address “any circumstance requiring dialogue or decision-making between two or more people.”

Harrisonburg and surrounding Rockingham County abound with examples of the influence of the Fairfield Center:

• An annual international festival, now sponsored by the Fairfield Center, attracts hundreds of people living in the region – representing perhaps a dozen or so traditions or ethnic groups – who gather to eat each other’s food, watch each other’s dances, check out each other’s crafts, and otherwise mingle appreciatively and respectfully for the day. The festival is in its 13th year.
• Through adept facilitating, Fairfield staffers have kept community conversations on a civil level. For instance, they have moderated debates among local political candidates. They have also facilitated public forums where people feel passionately about their divergent views, as in a forum at James Madison University involving Israeli and Palestinian women, where the participants explained their people’s claims to Jerusalem.
• Since 1986, Fairfield staffers have worked with personnel in the local school systems to spread the techniques of peer mediation, circle processes, and restorative discipline throughout the system, as an alternative to purely retributive ways of dealing with offenses.
• Trainings and dialogues with various “movers and shakers” in the community – judicial and police officials, schools and colleges, businesses, the media, and government officials – have contributed to remarkably harmonious relations among these groups.
• The “town-gown” frictions often found in communities with large college-student populations, as is the case in Harrisonburg, have been eased through a series of Fairfield-sponsored “summits to create connections.” Scheduled for about six hours on a given day, each summit is organized around a theme. As of November 2010, the themes had been: supporting youth and families in crisis; strengthening local businesses and economy; sustainability; intercultural/interfaith matters; health and wellness; and justice.

Harrisonburg isn’t perfect, but its inevitable problems tend to be addressed in a responsible and calm manner. Part, maybe even much, of the credit for this situation of relative social harmony lies with the work of the Fairfield Center and its long-time staffer and current leader, Timothy Ruebke.

The neighbor’s dog is keeping you awake with his barking. Or maybe you’re facing a divorce, and you would rather not hire a lawyer to slug it out with another lawyer in court. Or perhaps your son was caught putting graffiti on a school wall. Or you feel your business partner isn’t doing her fair share. Or perhaps your problem goes far beyond your home and business: The drinking water in your city has been contaminated by industrial toxins.

In all of these cases, trained mediators might be able to help you to arrive at a resolution to your problem that is more satisfying to all concerned than a legal battle and more healing than (say) your son’s expulsion from school. Probably less costly, too.

That’s why the Community Mediation Center was founded in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in 1982. “It is estimated that in 1976, there may have been less than 10 community mediation centers; in 1986, approximately 100 community mediation programs” in the United States, according to the website of the National Association for Community Mediation (NAFCM). Now there are more than 500. The Association credits Mennonites and Quakers for playing leading roles in getting mediation centers up and going.

“Records from programs throughout the country demonstrate that 85% of mediations result in agreements between the disputants,” says NAFCM. “Similarly, studies show that disputants uphold these agreements 90% of the time… A full 95% of participants indicate that they would use mediation again if a similar problem were to arise in the future.”

The Harrisonburg mediation center not only offers mediation services, it trains people in how to “productively handle disputes,” including training school staffers and students as peer mediators.

A 2001 study of community mediation by University of Virginia researchers found that issues handled by community mediation programs included race relations, prison life, boycotts, migrant workers, agriculture, clean air and water rights, farm grazing rights, employment, religious disputes, AIDS, community policing, and business and corporate disputes.

On a cautionary note, these researchers observed that most community mediation centers – which are committed to serving all, even those unable to pay – lack financial stability.

“One notable exception is North Carolina, which provided state appropriations of nearly $1.3 million for 26 non-profit centers; the centers still relied on outside funding sources for an additional $3 million,” said the study, sponsored by UVa’s Institute for Environmental Negotiation. As a result “North Carolina’s community mediation network is one of the nation’s strongest. In 1999-2000 the state centers served 58,939 clients, and managed 16,698 cases, 79 percent of which were resolved.”

The Community Mediation Center of Harrisonburg is directed by Tim Ruebke, a 1999 MA graduate of EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. CJP professor Barry Hart was its founding director and served on its board from 2002 to 2008, most recently as its president.

CJP-trained personnel can be found working in community mediation centers across the United States, including Kansas, Missouri, Oregon, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.