Interview from Justice Week During the Shift Network's Summer of Peace, 2012, Hosted by Molly Rowan Leach.
Arun Gandhi was born in 1934 in Durban, South Africa. Arun is the fifth grandson of India’s legendary leader, Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi. Growing up under the discriminatory apartheid laws of South Africa, he was beaten by “white” South Africans for being too black and “black” South Africans for being too white; so, Arun sought eye-for-an-eye justice. However, he learned from his parents and grandparents that justice does not mean revenge, it means transforming the opponent through love and suffering.
Grandfather taught Arun to understand nonviolence through understanding violence. “If we know how much passive violence we perpetrate against one another we will understand why there is so much physical violence plaguing societies and the world,” Gandhi said. Through daily lessons, Arun says, he learned about violence and about anger.
Arun shares these lessons all around the world. For the past five years, he has participated in the Renaissance Weekend deliberations with President Clinton and other well-respected Rhodes Scholars. In recent years his engagements included speaking at the Chicago Children’s Museum and the Women’s Justice Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He also delivered talks at the Young President’s Organization in Mexico, the Trade Union Leaders’ Meeting in Milan, Italy, as well as the Peace and Justice Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Sometimes, his journeys take him even further. Arun has spoken in Croatia, France, Ireland, Holland, Lithuania, Nicaragua, China, Scotland and Japan. Also, he is a very popular speaker on college campuses and in recent years, he has spoken at, North Dakota State University, Concordia College, Baker University, Morehouse College, Marquette University, and the University of San Diego, to name a few.
Arun is very involved in social programs and writing, as well. Shortly after Arun married his wife Sunanda, they were informed the South African government would not allow her to accompany him there. Sunanda and Arun decided to live in India, and Arun worked for 30 years as a journalist for The Times of India.
Arun and his late wife, Sunanda, rescued over 125 orphan children from the streets and placed them in loving homes around the world and began a Center for Social Change, which transformed the lives of millions in villages in the western state ofMaharashtra. Together, Arun and Sunanda started projects for the social and economic uplifting of the oppressed using constructive programs, the backbone of Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence.
The programs changed the lives of more than half a million people in over 300 villages and they still continue to grow.
In 1987 Sunanda and Arun came to the US and in 1991 they started the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the Christian Brothers University in Memphis Tennessee. In 2008 the Institute was moved to the University of Rochester, New York. In the 17 years of the Institute’s life the Gandhi’s took the message of nonviolence and peace to hundreds of thousands of high school and University youth around the US and much of the Western World.
Sunanda died in February of 2007 and the family is working to establish a residential-school in poorest rural India in her honor. Arun founded the Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute in 2008 headquartered in a suburb outside of Chicago, ILL. The Institute was founded to promote community building in economically depressed areas of the world through the joining of Gandhian philosophy and vocational education for children and their parents.
Arun is the author of several books. The first, A Patch of White (1949), is about life in prejudiced South Africa; then, he wrote two books on poverty and politics in India; followed by a compilation of M.K. Gandhi’s Wit & Wisdom. He also edited a book of essays on World Without Violence: Can Gandhi’s Vision Become Reality? And, more recently, wrote The Forgotten Woman: The Untold Story of Kastur, the Wife of Mahatma Gandhi, jointly with his late wife Sunanda and his bestseller Legacy of Love: My education in the path of nonviolence. In March of 2014 Grandfather Gandhi was released. A picture book for all ages by Arun Gandhi, Bethany Hegedus illustrated by Evan Turk.
Founder & President of Catalyst for Peace and Co-Founder of Fambul Tok International.
Ms. Hoffman has been active in peacebuilding for over 20 years in a variety of capacities - professor, trainer, facilitator, program director, consultant, and funder. A former Political Science professor at Principia College, Ms. Hoffman left academia to focus on the practice of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. She has developed and led conflict resolution training programs in corporate, congregational, educational and community settings.
She was a founder and Executive Director of Peace Discovery Initiatives, which pioneered in positive approaches to peacebuilding, as well as in mobilizing religious resources for peace. She has designed, convened and facilitated backchannel Middle East peacemaking initiatives and worked to bring grassroots Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers together with American policymakers. She advocated for religion to be used as a constructive element of this peacemaking process and pioneered in techniques for doing this, culminating in the establishment of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. Fambul Tok International is dedicated to advancing peace by mobilizing ordinary people-entire communities ravaged by war-in the hard work of reconciliation. Fambul Tok originated in the realization that peace can't be imposed from the outside, or the top down. Nor does it need to be. The community led and owned peacebuilding we support, witness and celebrate in Sierra Leone are teaching us that communities have within them the resources they need for their own healing. We believe this process has much to offer other post-conflict countries-and the world. www.fambultok.org
Catalyst for Peace is a Portland, Maine based foundation that identifies and supports community based peacebuilding work around the world. Our current work focuses on post-conflict Africa, and also on the ways moderate religious voices are mobilizing for peace.
We are committed to finding the stories that aren't being told, learning from the lessons of local cultures and supporting their role in peacemaking, and disseminating these lessons to a global audience. www.catalystforpeace.org
The River of Peace and Justice: regaining interconnectivity to sustain and flourish amidst conflict and change with heart phoenix, dot maver, and jeffrey weisberg of the river phoenix center for peacebuilding
Heart Phoenix, Jeffrey Weisberg, Dot Maver
(L to R) of the
River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding
Thursday, May 3rd
Focus: We will explore the foundational, grassroots aspects of regaining our human connectivity and underscore the consciousness plus practices that support a more humane justice: one that seeks to understand, amend, atone, and heal individual and collective wounds. It is my pleasure and honor to host Dot, Jeffrey and Heart and to honor the powerfully service-oriented and conscious life of River Phoenix, who devoted his life to raising awareness of these very principles of a unified humanity and planet.
Please visit Living Justice Press for books on Restorative Justice and beyond.
www.livingjusticepress.com
Kay served the Minnesota Department of Corrections in the position of Restorative Justice Planner from 1994 to 2003. In that position she provided education to the criminal justice system, other agencies and the general public about restorative justice. She also assisted groups interested in implementing the principles of restorative justice in their communities through system change and community empowerment. She worked with leaders in corrections, law enforcement, the judiciary, civic organizations, neighborhood groups, faith communities and education to develop a comprehensive response to crime and conflict based on restorative justice.
Kay continues to be active in the field of restorative justice, providing training and technical assistance to national and local initiatives with a special emphasis on the use of peacemaking circles. She has been involved in the development of circle processes in criminal justice, schools, neighborhoods, families and the workplace. She is a co-author of the book Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community and author of the Little Book of Circle Processes: A New/Old Approach to Peacemaking. Most recently she is co-author of Doing Democracy - Using Circles for Community Planning.
Kay is an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, Eastern Mennonite University and Southwest Minnesota State University.
Kay has served as a consultant, curriculum writer and trainer for the National Institute of Corrections, the National Institute of Justice, and the Balanced and Restorative Justice Project of the Office for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. She serves on the Board of Reference of the Conflict Transformation Program at Eastern Mennonite University and the Board of Directors of Living Justice Press, a non-profit publisher for restorative justice.
From 1988 to 1994 Kay worked for the Minnesota Citizens Council on Crime and Justice in public policy research and advocacy. Kay's background in community activism includes nine years of service on a local school board and three years as chair of the board of the Southern Valley Alliance for Battered Women.
COUNCIL TOPICS: Restorative Justice and Circles in action; Discovering conflict's gift, and more. Linda is changing the system day by day from within, as an attorney. I am so grateful to her for taking time to share with us insights from the "trenches".
Linda Alvarez's work as an attorney and as a business consultant transforms the way contract negotiation, drafting, and enforcement impact business relationships. Linda facilitates a wide range of transactions and relationships, enabling the parties to design worthwhile, sustainable and enjoyable transactions and relationships, conduct their business and legal affairs with integrity, and establish reliable frameworks for addressing conflict productively.
The Discovering Agreement approach:
Calibrates alignment of the parties' intentions, values, and expectations - allowing them to gauge in advance whether the proposed relationship or transaction will be workable and worthwhile in the long-run;
Aligns content and language in legal contracts with the Vision-Mission-Values of the parties - so that contract terms and provisions harness the power of the conventional legal system to support the parties in conducting business and engaging crisis in accordance with their declared Vision/Mission/Values; and
Produces contracts that function as guidebooks for keeping the enterprise/transaction/relationship on track and productive - by orienting and re-orienting parties towards collaborative, creative responses to unexpected change or disagreement (as opposed to destructive adversarial posturing).
About Linda
The first twenty years of Linda Alvarez's professional life were spent pursuing a successful career in the Arts. Trained in theatre, she and her husband produced and managed theatrical and media productions across the United States. In the mid-1990's Linda reentered the academic world earning her law degree, magna cum laude, in 1997. She entered private practice in the large firm environment - including Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (Palo Alto) and Vinson & Elkins (Houston).
Beginning with her engagement as a member of the team successfully defending the first mp3 player to come to market[1], Linda has remained active on the frontier where digital technology pushes the boundaries of legal concepts designed for the analog and print-based era. As Senior Counsel for Litigation and Trademarks at Align Technology, Inc., Linda managed major litigations on behalf of the corporation as well as shepherding the company's valuable consumer trademark portfolio. With the successful conclusion of the litigations in 2005, Linda chose to re-focus her career toward transactional work and launched her solo practice. Linda's Website: www.discoveringagreement.com
RESTORATIVE & UNITIVE JUSTICE TUESDAY, MARCH
Sylvia Clute, Attorney, Author of Beyond Vengeance, Beyond Duality and one of the world's foremost advocates and practitioners of "Unitive Justice"
Sylvia Clute is a former trial attorney and holds an M.A. in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, a Juris Doctor from Boston University School of Law, and an M.A. in Public Administration from the University of California at
Click for info and to purchase. Highly Recommended!
Berkeley. After graduating from law school and establishing a practice, Clute co-founded the only women's bank in the South, became chairman of the board, and helped move Virginia's laws relating to women and children into the twentieth century. She is currently Program Coordinator of a restorative school program and serves on the board of Restorative Youth Services of Virginia, and her recent book, Beyond Vengeance, Beyond Duality: A Call for a Compassionate Revolution has received profound and significant praise and exposure as mapping a new territory for systemic change in criminal justice and beyond--in how we heal ourselves, our communities, and our world.
More about Sylvia and her work: www.sylviaclute.com
KENNY JOHNSON, AUTHOR: The Last Hustle, FORMER PRISONER, FOUNDER: THIS SACRED SPACE
Thursday, March 22nd 5pm PST/8pmEST
Kenny Johnson devoted his life to crime, beginning in his early teens and served over twenty years in various city, county, state, and federal prisons.
During his early years in prison, he spent most of his time participating in all sorts of religious and substance abuse groups. Hopefully, in one of these groups he would hear the magic words that would release him from the grip of his inner and outer prisons. It was his inner desire for freedom that led him and a band of truth-seekers to a meeting in the prison chapel. Antoinette Varner, his spiritual teacher answered his most pressing question.
"It is my understanding that we have to wait until we die before we can receive God's Grace. Is that so?" She replied, "Kenny, God's Grace is here now! Kenny you think you are a convict, you think you are your name, you think you are a black man. Kenny you are none of these things."
Instantly he knew he would never be a thief again. But how do you re-enter the world outside without resorting to old weaknesses? How would he survive and how would it be possible to maintain his newly found experience of grace?
"This ever present Grace supports me in each moment now."
Paroled from prison in 1997 and successfully discharged from supervision, Kenny now resides in California. He visits inmates at the San Quentin Prison, and around the world. Kenny has founded This Sacred Space a non-profit corporation dedicated to sharing the timeless message that real freedom resides within each one of us.
"If there is anything worth serving, it's this love. If there is anything worth being, it's this love. If there is anything worth talking about it's this love. If there is anything of real value it's this love". - Kenny Johnson
The Last Hustle
Kenny Johnson is the author of the book “The Last Hustle” chronicling his years as a criminal and how he was transformed while incarcerated. His story proves that however hard and unpromising our particular life circumstances, we can discover true happiness.
He speaks of this freedom at correctional facilities the world over. His story is an inspiration to hundreds of others.
For thirty-one years Kenny Johnson’s most fervent desire was to hear his name ‘ringing in the streets’ as a hustler, thief, and pimp. Running parallel with that desire was a persistent seed of spiritual longing that would not leave him alone.
Kenny was arrested thirty-seven times and spent much of his life in prison, or on the run. Each time behind bars sent him into a deep and profound despair. Eventually his desire for lasting freedom would drive him to find a power that could not only get him through his final sentence, but free him from prison forever.
“I had to find a power that would not only get me through my current sentence, but would free me from prison forever.”
To provide connection, advocacy, education and inspired action as a public service to individuals and communities seeking to proactively improve relationships and structures within their spheres and our world.
Restorative Justice on The Rise is an international live dialogue via Webcast and Telecouncil platform, held weekly, reaching an international constituency of a wide spectrum of invididuals, organizations, professionals, academics, practitioners, and beyond.
Interview from Justice Week During the Shift Network's Summer of Peace, 2012, Hosted by Molly Rowan Leach.