• Zehr is “distinguished professor” of restorative justice, a pioneer in international restorative justice field; author, co-author or editor of about 22 books pertaining to restorative justice
• Zehr’s bestselling Little Book of Restorative Justice (over 110,000 sold) was cited as a reference in Handbook on Restorative Justice Programmes, published in 2006 by UN Office on Drugs and Crime following UN conferences in 2000, 2002 and 2005.
• Former CJP director Vernon Jantzi served on Working Party of Restorative Justice, a major resource at UN Congresses on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in 2000 and 2005. WPRJ drafted basic principles on restorative justice adopted by UN Economic and Social Council.
• ĚýJantzi, professor emeritus of sociology, now works for Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR).

Carl Stauffer, PhDĚý

• ĚýAssistant professor of justice studies and co-director of EMU’s Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice
• As regional peace adviser in Southern Africa for Mennonite Central Committee, 2000-09, Stauffer was associated with peace accords, community-police forums, truth and reconciliation initiatives, and local community development structures, often interacting with UN agencies involved with post-conflict stability.
• The UN Secretary General’s 2004 Report on The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-conflict Societies defines transitional justice as “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation.”
• ĚýStauffer elaborated on this theme in his “Restorative Interventions for Postwar Nations,” a chapter published in Restorative Justice Today – Practical Applications (Sage Publications, 2012).

Barry Hart, PhDĚý

• ĚýProfessor of trauma, identity and conflict studies, former CJP academic dean
• Has conducted workshops on psychosocial trauma recovery and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Burundi and among Rwandan refugees in Tanzania.
• Lived and worked for years in Balkans, launching trauma and conflict transformation programs for schools, communities, religious leaders.
• Collaborated with UNICEF personnel in Liberia to create the Kukatonen (We Are One) Peace Theatre, along with a manual of the same title, centered on these themes: understanding conflict, active listening, conflict resolution, reconciliation and trauma healing.
• Developed a training manual Za Damire I Nemire (For Peace and Not for Peace: Opening the Door to Nonviolence) for UNICEF while in Croatia.
• Collaborated with UN humanitarian and relief agencies when working in Liberia, Tanzania and the Balkans.

ĚýLisa Schirch, PhDĚý

• Research professor
• Director of human security at the Alliance for Peacebuilding
• Senior advisor to “People Building Peace” conference held at UN headquarters in 2005, encompassing about 1,000 civil society peacebuilding delegates from 119 countries.
• Evaluator for the UN Peacebuilding Support Office to advise on grantmaking to support women in peacebuilding in 2011.
• Facilitated UNDP meeting in Fiji between military, government and civil society groups.
• Consultant to UNDP in 2012 to develop strategy for UNDP to fit into new UN Peacebuilding Architecture
• “The UN is central to the success of peacebuilding in many countries. UNDP has an opportunity to provide the link between short-term humanitarian response in the midst of a crisis and longer term support for building the foundations of peace. UNDP is also one of the few institutions that is positioned to bring together civil society, governments, international NGOs and donors to work together to support strategic peacebuilding.”

ĚýRon Kraybill, PhDĚý

• ĚýFounding faculty member of CJP (’76 graduate of sister college, Goshen), current Senior Advisor on Peacebuilding and Development United Nations, assigned by UNDP to Philippines, previously assigned to Lesotho
• ĚýSupports peace process in Mindanao.
• Worked behind scenes, 2009-13, to nurture peaceful elections in Lesotho.
• Supported process led by Lesotho heads of churches, working with gridlocked parliament to negotiate electoral agreement among political parties to pursue free and fair elections.
• Effort yielded Lesotho’s first free, fair and peaceful election since independence in 1966.
• Facilitated visit to Lesotho of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who oversaw signing of political pledge that committed parties to respect laws and accept outcome of election.
• “Mediation, facilitation and process design lie at the heart of almost all that I do; I strengthen human capacities to respond constructively to conflict.”

David Brubaker, MBA, PhDĚý

• ĚýAssociate professor of organizational studies, co-author of The Little Book of Healthy Organizations.Ěý
• Hired by UNICEF-Mozambique for peace education and conflict resolution trainings immediately after peace accord signed in 1992.
• On joint project of Mennonite Central Committee and World Council of Churches, interacted with UNHCR staff at Benako refugee camp in Tanzania in 1994.
• ĚýApplauds UN for work on human development, women’s rights, indigenous rights, and awareness of environmental perils. But adds: “The UN’s basic structure hasn’t changed since it was founded 68 years ago. Healthy organizations need to undergo a structural review process every three to five years to ensure that their structure is still meeting their mission and objectives.”
• “My main issue is with the UN Security Council, where the veto power of the five permanent members often blocks meaningful international action, as seen in the cases of Israel and Syria.”

Catherine Barnes, PhDĚý

• Associate professor of strategic peacebuilding and public policy
• Has been engaged with UN since the early 1990s, when helped conduct trainings in conflict analysis and resolution for diplomats and staff.
• Regularly involved in policy dialogue in the UN on peace processes, especially how to increase public participation for inclusive and comprehensive settlements and effective use of sanctions, incentives and conditionality.
• Served as advisor during 2002-05 to Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict and participated in UN discussions on roles of civil society in preventing armed conflict and building peace.
• ĚýHelped design and facilitate 2005 conference on this theme at UN headquarters in NYC, which involved about 1,000 people from civil society, governments and IGOs from around the world, including CJP alumni, faculty, staff, and partners.

Paulette Moore, MA ’09Ěý

• Associate professor of the practice of media arts and peacebuilding
• As MA student, did practicum with Community Development Gender Equality and Children, an agency within UNHCR. There created a blog – itbeginswithme.wordpress.com – launched on International Women’s Day in March 2009.
• Next, as UNHCR consultant, worked on films in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, along with a blog, in collaboration with a young woman filmmaker in that camp named Kate Ofwano, who is now in film school in Geneva.
• Moore recalls leaving career in corporate media to become more invested in community. “I didn’t want to keep being the kind of person who would helicopter in somewhere, do something, and helicopter back out,” as she thought UN personnel often did.
• ĚýExperience at UNHCR made her aware of a third way: “To partner with people who I really, really trust. Big organizations and community-based work aren’t necessarily exclusive.”

Amy Knorr, MA ’ 09Ěý

• ĚýCJP practice coordinator
• Worked and lived in Haiti for 7.5 years total
• Worked with UNDP “disarmament, demobilization and reintegration”program 2006-07, on team to reintegrate gang members into society, often using stipends, vocational training, and cash to start small businesses.
• Didn’t work – community members were fearful; program heightened conflict rather than transformed it – i.e., it was not “conflict sensitive.”
• UN workers were required to wear bullet-proof vests and helmets, circulating with armed escorts when in dangerous urban areas. “This sent an uncomfortable message – were the UN workers’ lives more important than the Haitians’?’’
• With the UNDP at that time, “relationship-building and trust weren’t really there. There were civil society groups in existence in the communities where this project was working. But the UNDP didn’t work directly with these groups. They created new ones that conformed to the vision they’d dreamed up for the project – without the input of local groups that knew what things were really like.”
• The UNDP had $14 million to spend in this Haitian case: “The UN has a huge potential to reach many stakeholders, but attention must be given to conflict analysis.”

Ali Gohar, MA ’02

• Founding director Just Peace Initiatives (JPI) in Pakistan
• Was commissioner, 1987-2001, on UNHCR-funded project for 258 Afghan refugee camps, concentrating on community development, peacebuilding, drug use and HIV/AIDS, the plight of street children.
• Has partnered with UNDP, UNICEF, UNHCR and UNFPA to address humanitarian situations – when much of Pakistan was affected by devastating flooding; when 50 primary schools in Bajur Tribal Agency needed clean water and sanitation facilities; when four areas were assisted in restoring their livelihoods, building community-based infrastructure, and improving their governance.
• With UNICEF funding, JPI now working on two unprecedented projects on social cohesion and resilience in three areas – SWAT, DIR, and Bajur.
• With UNFPA funding, JPI addressing gender-based violence cases through alternative dispute resolution in camps housing large numbers of host-community and internally displaced peoples.

Manas Ghanem, MA’06Ěý

• ĚýProject Development Officer, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), now based in London, England
• Native of Syria employed by UNHCR, 2006-11, delivering direct support to refugees and displaced peoples due to violent conflict in such countries as Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen.
• “My work now [beginning in 2012] is more of coordination of private sector fundraising in support of various operations around the world, because most of the operations are underfunded, and refugees and displaced are in dire need of every support, even if little.”
• “UNHCR is present in every conflict area to help, with dedicated and passionate staff.”
• “The agency does not have a political mandate to influence political peacemaking. But I see it as one of the most effective peacemakers on the ground, with its efforts to reduce the suffering and to call the international community to show compassion and participate in sharing the burden of helping.”
• “Often when I am in the middle of something problematic, I find myself recalling CJP classes or a discussion with a CJP professor regarding organizations, theory, human rights, practices in conflict transformation, mediation and restorative justice.”
• “Most importantly, I remember STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience) – I try to always find ways to take care of myself and to recall that self-care is important, if I am to help others.”

Amy Rebecca Marsico, MA ’09

• Manager of NYC-based stage productions; conflict and peacebuilding consultant
• Presented arts-based approaches to peacebuilding to UN Interagency Framework Team for Preventive Action
• Did practicum for her MA at UNHCR in the Community Development, Gender Equality and Children section.
• Promoted AGDM (age, gender and diversity mainstreaming), whereby refugee women, men, boys and girls contribute to the design and implementation of programs, identify own protection risks, and participate in finding sustainable solutions.
• Helped develop the Heightened Risk Identification Tool, a field tool used to identify refugees at risk.
• “To be part of work that was engaging in long-term change processes – seeing refugees as active partners instead of passively waiting for a handout – was incredibly meaningful.”

The children of prisoners, however, have been a hugely overlooked group until recently. As the book cover notes, “Every night, approximately 3 million children go to bed with a parent in prison or in jail.” This means that almost every schoolteacher in America is likely to have at least one child in class who fits this description.

What Will Happen to Me? (Good Books, 2011) contains poignant photos by Howard Zehr of 30 children whose parents are incarcerated, along with the children’s thoughts, plus some reflections by their caregivers. Co-author Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz has compiled practical suggestions on such topics as “staying in touch,” “adjusting to a parent’s return,” and “self-care for family caregivers.” One of the main objectives of What Will Happen to Me? is to alleviate the sense of shame and isolation felt by the children of prisoners and to support their resiliency. The book also contains a valuable “bill of rights” for the well-being of these children.

Restorative justice is fragile. It hinges on people taking determined steps to relentlessly pursue their healing despite the pain it may bring. It challenges us to growth, to imagine beyond the current status quo and to take the creative risk of feeling and acting in a different, yet deeply courageous way.
—,ĚýEMU restorative justice professor

I spend 30 to 40 percent of my time in a typical workweek researching grants for funding, writing grants, reporting to grant-givers, and otherwise focusing on fundraising. I had not expected to be doing so much of this type of work when I was getting my master’s degree in conflict transformation, but unfortunately it is an absolute necessity. This field does not yet have clear streams of funding.
—, executive director, Communities for Restorative Justice (Mass.)

How did I start from zero? We did research on the indigenous system of restorative justice called jirga, and I wrote a book on it. I then arranged for the first international conference on restorative justice in Pakistan. I started talking about the similarities and differences between jirga and RJ in the media, NGO and UN forums. I re-wrote Howard Zehr’s Little Book on RJ for the Pakistan-Afghan context and circulated it widely. I wrote a short play for [Pakistani] TV on RJ. I made it clear that I am doing RJ the Islamic way. And then donors started approaching us…
—, founding director of JustPeace International, based in Pakistan

At the outset we tried to convince some seemingly skeptical schools to sign up for the training. While they consented to the training, they did so reluctantly and ultimately the restorative action program there never successfully took root. A lot of time and money wasted to no avail. The experience taught us to go where we are invited and welcome.
—, author of Educating for Peacebuilding

Always start by building relationships, by working in partnership with others.
—,Ěýdirector of Central Virginia Restorative Justice

It’s common sense

Restorative justice is basically common sense – the kind of lessons our parents and foreparents taught. This has led some to call it a way of life. When a wrong has been done, it needs to be named and acknowledged. Those who have been harmed need to be able to grieve their losses, to be able to tell their stories, to have their questions answered – that is, to have the harms and needs caused by the offense answered. They – and we – need to have those who have done wrong accept their responsibility and take steps to repair the harm to the extent it is possible.
—, professor of restorative justice at EMU

Three million children in the United States are estimated to have one or both parents in prison.ĚýĚý Here is some information about these children:

• 1 in 15 African American children has a parent in prison.Ěý For white children the figure is 1 in 110.
• About half of parents in prison have never had a personal visit from their children.
• Half of children with an incarcerated mother live with their grandmother.
• Children of prisoners are 5 times more likely to go to prison themselves than other children.
• Common reactions include feelings of guilt, shame and loss; fear of abandonment and loss of support; anxiety; attention disorders; traumatic stress and even post-traumatic stress disorder.
• Longer-term results can include maturation regression as well as reduced ability to cope with stress and trauma.
• The associated stress and trauma often results in both short and long term mental health, behavioral and educational issues.

The impact of prisons on families has been called the collateral damage of crime and of our justice policies.Ěý Nell Bernstein, in her important book, , states it eloquently:

These children have committed no crime, but the price they are forced to pay is steep. They forfeit, too, much of what matters to them:Ěý their homes, their safety, their public status and private self-image, their primary source of comfort and affection.Ěý Their lives are profoundly affected….

is intended to bring attention to these children.Ěý Rather than speak for them, Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz and I wanted to provide an opportunity for them to present themselves through their portraits and words.

The book is also designed for those who care for these children:Ěý grandparents, teachers, social workers.Ěý Using a restorative justice framework, it concludes with an essay on the justice needs of these children.Ěý The appendix includes suggested resources and the .

Also just off the press is a new edition of Doing Life: Reflections of Men and Women Serving Life Sentences that has been out of print for several years. The new edition contains a number of updates on people and statistics. The first book in the series is Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims.

More info:

• at VisualPeacemakers.org
• Story in
• Interview on

[Editor’s note: This story is cross-posted from Howard’s restorative justice blog. Comments are closed here, but open on .]

Who would come from half-way around the world to enroll in a program at ˛ÝÝŽÉçÇř that was so new, no college catalog listed it? Sam Gbaydee Doe did. From Liberia.

Initially, the plump squirrels running around campus dismayed him: They could be food for very hungry people in his war-torn homeland. He himself would have welcomed eating a scrap from a squirrel not long before.

Today [November 2010] Doe is a “development and reconciliation advisor” with the United Nations Development Programme in Sri Lanka, thanks in part to his master’s degree in conflict transformation from EMU.

Herein we explore the lives and reflections of the first group of students to complete EMU’s Conflict Transformation Program (CTP), now called graduate studies in conflict transformation under the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). In this series of articles, the acronyms “CTP” and “CJP” will appear somewhat interchangeably, depending on the interviewee and the years referenced.

CJP’s first MA students

CJP’s first non-credit students, 40 of them, enrolled in the 1994 Frontiers of International Peacebuilding, the earliest version of the Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

The first for-credit students were two US-born Mennonites: Jonathan Bartsch, raised in Pennsylvania, and Jim Hershberger, raised in Kansas. In the fall of 1994, both men began graduate classes, hoping that their MA in conflict transformation program would be accredited by the time they finished. (The program became accredited in the fall of 1996; the men graduated the following spring.) The first courses taken by Bartsch and Hershberger were done mainly as a combination of independent study and one-on-one sessions with the founding director of CJP, John Paul Lederach, and sociologist Vernon Jantzi, author of CJP’s first curriculum.

CJP’s first MA students came with extensive experience beyond the United States. Bartsch had studied at the University of Cairo and Birzeit University near Ramallah in Palestine and could speak Arabic. Hershberger had lived for eight years in Nicaragua as a Mennonite Central Committee volunteer and could speak Spanish.

In January of 1995, they were joined by [student whose name has been redacted for security purposes.]

Ron Kraybill, who helped shape the new program while finishing his PhD in religion in South Africa, also came aboard that January as CJP’s first professor hired exclusively for the program. Hizkias Assefa, an internationally renowned mediator based in Kenya, taught each summer from the beginning.

By the summer and fall of 1995, word had spread, mostly via circles frequented by Lederach, Jantzi and Kraybill. The program grew exponentially, enabling EMU to hire Howard Zehr to teach restorative justice in 1996, soon followed by the hiring of two more faculty members, Lisa Schirch and Nancy Good.

Bartsch, Hershberger, and the third student were joined in the fall of 1995 by 12 more students, including four women. By the fall of 2000, six years after CJP first opened its doors, 37 people had earned master’s degrees or graduate certificates and more than 900 had attended its Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

CJP’s first several dozen graduate students now have had 10 to 13 years to gauge the impact of their studies on their lives and work. For the fall/winter 2010-11, Peacebuilder staff sought to contact each of the 37 to collect their reflections. We succeeded in locating 36 of them, 21 men and 15 women.

Without exception, the 36 felt positive about what they “got” from CJP. Many spoke about how their studies influenced their interpersonal relationships, including those within their immediate family. Those who came directly from conflict-ridden situations also spoke about the need for respite, for recharging their inner batteries.

Gilberto Peréz Jr., who completed a graduate certificate in 1999, recalls the ever-present physical violence in south Texas, where he grew up. Even in his family, it was no surprise when he hit his sister. Today, he and his wife Denise, a 1992 EMU alumna who majored in Spanish and elementary education, “work hard at having a non-violent household.” They use such techniques as paraphrasing what someone has said and reframing things.

Says Pérez: “My [12-year-old] daughter will stand there and tell her [younger] brother, ‘I’m mad at you.’ That’s not what I would have done when I was her age – I would have belted him.”

Babu Ayindo, MA ’98, says when he was growing up in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, he experienced violence every day of his life. He feels he carries the potential for violence within him, as he thinks most of us do. He and his wife Miriam have taught their children that reacting violently is a short-term act with long-term repercussions. Babu explains:

Momentarily it gives you a good feeling. You’re annoyed, so you kick a chair, or you punch the wall or punch someone. You project on someone else, someone you can easily blame. But if you take your time and reflect on it then you realize that it’s not the best way out. It’s an easy way out, it feels good, but you also live with the trauma you are inflicting on others. You also become a traumatized person.

Sandra Dunsmore began courses at EMU while living in El Salvador, where her early Quaker-sponsored peace work involved (in part) listening to people linked to death squads. “I needed some space to think through what I had been involved in, to reflect in a guided way. I hadn’t done a particularly good job of taking care of myself. I couldn’t continue as I had been living.”

On the professional level, 33 of the 36 respondents (92%) mentioned specific ways they have carried their CJP studies into their work as non-profit administrators, mediators, trainers, social service workers, teachers, and other roles.

Jim Bernat, who studied at CJP while working as a mental health specialist in a region 90 minutes from Harrisonburg, says his graduate education helped him “refocus his being, thinking and practice around the principles of justice and nonviolence.”

Bernat is in his 25th year of working for the same government-supported community services board as he did in his CJP days, though he is now an administrator. From his CJP-influenced perspective, Bernat sees justice as “not just what one sees in a court of law, but as an everyday matter: How do we treat our employees here? Do our clients feel valued, and our staff too? How am I contributing to our sense of community?”

In fact, the most enduring trait acquired at CJP, said a majority of the respondents, is viewing the world through distinctive lens. This has proved to be personally transformative.

Daagya Dick, MA ’00, who fostered a network of peacebuilders in Central America from 2000 to 2003, said CJP taught her about shifting “from destructive dynamics to positive dynamics.” She said she gained an “understanding of how people work and what human needs are and how to respond to those needs in a way that people can be positively engaged.” She liked the way the program encouraged “balance and wholeness in life in order to be an effective peacemaker.”

Dick, who now teaches Spanish in a public high school in Kansas, added: “You can call on these skills anywhere you work.”

Christine Poulson, MA ’98, used similar words: “What I learned at CTP would be useful to anybody doing anything. It gave me a better

understanding of the world and of myself. I became a more reflective person. I am better at prioritizing what is really important to me.”

Experiences from 33 countries

That first group of 21 men and 15 women brought rich experience to CTP. They were diverse in almost every respect – age, nationality, ethnicity, and motivation for coming to the then-new program. They were not diverse in religion, however. Most of them were Mennonite-style Christians – eight arrived directly from service with Mennonite Central Committee – though there were also Catholics and mainstream Protestants. One student was exploring Native American religions. But there were no practicing Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or Jews. These arrived in later years.

In addition to the United States, the 36 students had lived in 33 places: Angola, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Britain, Burundi, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Karen territory (officially part of Burma/Myanmar), Kenya, Liberia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nagaland (officially part of India), Nicaragua, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Peru, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Vietnam.

About 60% of these graduate students had survived civil wars or other society-wide violence.

Sam Gbaydee Doe of Liberia, one of the 12 students entering CJP in its second year, told this story in When You Are the Peacebuilder, a spiral-bound book published by CJP in 2001:

In December of 1989, I was only two semesters away from achieving my dream [to finish a degree in economics and accounting and become a banker] when the Liberian civil war began. By May of 1990, the rebels had captured every part of the country except the executive mansion where the president was hiding.

By July, 1990, we had gone without food for nearly three months and were hiding under beds and between concrete corners most of the day. One day there was a temporary cease-fire and I decided to take a walk, just to flex my muscles. While walking around this slum community, I came across a young boy, lying under the eaves of a public school. I remember his face like it was yesterday. He was just skin and bones.

I stood over him for quite a while. His mouth was open. Flies were feeding on his saliva. In a surreal moment, I raced to a nearby community to find something edible. I found some popcorn being sold for fifty cents. I bought some and dashed back to this child. I stooped over him, slipped a few pieces of the popcorn into his mouth, and waited anxiously to see him chew the popcorn and regain his strength. ‘Chew your popcorn, you innocent child,’ I said to myself, ‘God has answered your prayer.’

About ten minutes passed by but his little mouth remained frozen. It must have been half an hour later when, with a last rush of energy, he opened his eyes wide and looked at me. Our eyes locked. He shook his head, and closed his eyes. After several minutes, his movements slowed and eventually stopped. The child had given up the ghost. I began to cry profusely. I asked myself, “How many children like you are dying right now throughout this country? How many have been swallowed in the madness of adults?’

I made a pledge to that boy: I would work for peace so that children could live… I have never turned my back on the promise I made to that nameless and faceless child.

From one success to another

Doe went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees in the field of peace, co-found what is now the largest peace organization in Africa (WANEP), join the staff of the United Nations, and spend several years in Sri Lanka, helping that country emerge from 30 years of civil war. In the long term, he sees himself working in Africa once again.

Periodically, Doe teaches at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI). He will teach “conflict-sensitive development” at SPI 2011. He will also attend EMU’s graduation ceremony in the late spring, proudly watching as his daughter, Samfee Doe, receives her bachelor’s degree.

— Bonnie Price Lofton, MA ’04 (conflict transformation)

Editor and writer of Peacebuilder

Madison, Virginia

For the last 25 years, Jim Bernat has worked in Culpeper, Virginia, a town that is mid-way between the two universities in his state that offer master’s degrees pertaining to conflict transformation: EMU and George Mason University (GMU). Jim holds an undergraduate degree in counseling from GMU. But he passed up a chance to get a master’s degree at his alma mater “for a fraction of the cost of going to EMU,” because he preferred the practice focus of EMU’s program and because he felt more welcomed by EMU.

Jim started his multi-decade career with the Rapidan-Rappahannock Community Services Board as a substance abuse counselor, working with lots of people who had criminal records. Today he is an administrator, charged with supporting and improving the work of 300 employees in three clinics serving thousands of people with mental health problems.

He calls Howard Zehr his “most quoted person” and only wishes CJP had offered courses on organizational development when he was a student. (It does now.) On a sobering note, Jim says: “Our system is clearly broken, because we’re seeing the second generation of people we saw when we first came here. The cycle is continuing.”

Jim had to hold onto his job while he was taking CJP classes – his income was needed for his family of four – so he commuted 90 minutes to class and home immediately afterwards. “As a commuter, there is something you do lose,” he says, referring to his absence of bonds with his fellow classmates. He would recommend that commuting students try to do at least one semester in residence or live on campus for the .

Winnipeg, Canada

Reflecting on the 10 years since he finished his master’s degree, Dave Dyck says two memories loom large:

(1) The joyful time spent in community, experiencing meaningful relationships.

(2) The way that his restorative justice professor, Howard Zehr, “handed off power.” Dave recalls that Howard had a way of empowering others, of encouraging his students to come along with him. “Howard is a busy man – he could easily be excused for not grooming other people. But he always found time to be helpful to others in his humble way.”

Immediately after graduation, Dave founded and coordinated Circles of Support & Accountability, a program aimed at the safe re-integration of sex offenders in his hometown of Winnipeg.

In 1999, the art interests of Dave’s wife, Tammy Sutherland, took them to Nova Scotia, where he became the lead trainer of people working with the Nova Scotia Restorative Justice Initiative. This program brought restorative justice options into the court system for all youth in the province.

In 2003, the couple returned to Winnipeg, where Dave offers his services through two agencies: (1) Facilitated Solutions, where he is one of the partners/owners among nine mediators and conflict-management specialists, and (2) Mediation Services, a community-based, conflict resolution agency where he serves as a trainer and volunteer victim-offender mediator.

From 2001 through 2004, Dave taught at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI). He now teaches at the Canadian School of Peacebuilding, which opened in 2009 at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg. The school is co-directed by Jarem Sawatsky, a 2001 alumnus of CJP, and is organized similarly to SPI.

Dave and Tammy have two sons, aged 3 and 4. Dave has given up one workday, Monday, to be their full-time caregiver on that day. (Tammy, a textile artist who also coordinates the Manitoba Craft Council, stays home with them on Wednesday and Thursday. Grandparents and paid caregivers cover the other two weekdays.) Dave notes that it has been both humbling and fun to try to mediate the disputes that arise among the boys.

Harrisonburg, Virginia

Jan Jenner is outranked only by Howard Zehr for being the longest-serving full-time employee currently at CJP. Over the last 13 years, she has been a student, grant writer, administrator, book author, and teacher at CJP.

She and her husband Hadley formerly served with Mennonite Central Committee in Kenya.

Books she co-authored – When You are the Peacebuilder: Stories and Reflections on Peacebuilding from Africa (2001) and A Handbook of International Peacebuilding: Into the Eye of the Storm (2002) – continue to be widely referenced. Most issues of Peacebuilder, for instance, cite at least one of these books.

“CJP is certainly more rigorous than it was when I was a student,” Jan says. “It is larger, more structured.” She notes that the CTP graduate program began in the 1990s with professors drawn from other fields, such as sociology, religion, social work and history (of crime). By 2001, however, CJP had three professors with PhDs in the field: professors Lisa Schirch, Barry Hart and Jayne Docherty had all earned their doctorates at George Mason University’s Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

CJP’s evolution reflected a trend, says Jan: “The field has professionalized over time. It depends more on bureaucracies than individual people. It is less led by Westerners. People know a lot more about what they are doing and why. We have moved from working on an anecdotal basis to evidence-based work.”

She expresses concern, though, that the field may become “too professional.” She doesn’t want people to think “they can’t do anything unless they have the right [academic] degrees. I don’t think we should be dis-empowering ‘Joe on the street’ from working for peace.”

She is also concerned by the disconnection she sees between “the short-term orientation of most of the funding and the long-term commitment necessary to stabilize communities.”

Jan is the behind-the-scenes administrator responsible for launching STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience) after the events of 9/11 and for the founding of Coming to the Table, an initiative to deal with the legacy of slavery in the United States.

Chorlton-cum-Hardy, England

Tammy Krause was the founding director of JustBridges, a group working across the United Stated to develop awareness of the needs of victims by attorneys working for the defense. She also was the first person hired by the federal government to work with victims’ families in capital cases and to do victim-sensitivity training for defense attorneys.

Tammy’s first victim outreach case was with the team defending Timothy McVeigh, who was executed in 2001 for killing 168 people by bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Both Tammy and her CJP mentor, restorative justice expert Howard Zehr, were involved in that case.

Tammy believes victims should be permitted a strong role in the trial process and should be able to interact with both defense and prosecuting attorneys to ensure their concerns are addressed. Tammy’s pathbreaking work on behalf of victims won her a Soros Justice Fellowship in 1999 and an Ashoka Fellowship in 2000, one of 10 awarded in North America that year for social entrepreneurship.

Tammy left her death penalty work in 2007 “in order to think more critically about the decade of work I had done and in order to renew my commitment, focus, and strategy in the field.” She, her husband Jeff Heie, MA ’00, and their two young sons moved to a village near Manchester, England, to enable Tammy to pursue a PhD in law at the University of Manchester.

For her doctorate, Tammy says she is “developing a new framework of victim engagement within the federal criminal justice system to address victims’ potential needs of redress, recognition, and participation without violating the rights of the accused.”

She is aiming for a faculty position in the United States where “I can both teach and advocate for policy change within the federal judicial system.”

Tammy credits “the values and ethos of the [CJP] program, faculty, and students for strengthening my belief that there is another way to engage people, especially people forced into the criminal justice system.ĚýIt is these values that have made my work so effective – even if it appears that it ‘slows down’ progress.”

San Jose, Costa Rica

“John Paul Lederach’s elicitive approach to learning has stayed with me through the years,” says Lina Maria Obando, who is Habitat for Humanity’s organizational learning manager for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The “elicitive approach” refers to a participatory educational process often used at CJP. It deviates from the traditional teacher-student role, whereby the teacher is viewed as the expert, filled with knowledge to be poured into the empty-vessel student. In an elicitive classroom, the teacher positions herself or himself as a facilitator, enabling everyone to tap into each other’s experiences and knowledge. The students are active in shaping the lessons.

Lina says she is “elicitive” in the way she works with others, builds networks, determines needs, helps people to identify the resources they have, and conducts trainings.

She also has never forgotten Howard Zehr’s way of modeling what he taught about respecting people. “You can ask questions in a way that empowers people, as Howard does, or that dis-empowers them. I try to give people the opportunity to have a voice.”

In October 2010, Lina coordinated a large Habitat for Humanity conference involving about 60 people from 14 Latin American countries, including the president of each national unit of Habitat.

Lina has been able to work at her highly responsible job, involving much travel, because she and her husband Ruben have agreed to share child rearing. Sometimes Lina works from home, and other times Ruben does. “We didn’t want to sacrifice our [two] children to our jobs,” says Lina. “It hasn’t been easy though. We had to review our traditional gender roles.

“We had to explore the ‘new masculinity’ as a family: What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman too? We didn’t get healthy help from the church. We had to find a special counselor who had lots of experience working in ‘new masculinity.’”

Lina wonders why the peacebuilding field doesn’t pay more attention to the “important topic of masculinity and peacebuilding” and to “restorative relationships” within the family.