Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), now in its 43rd year, has developed and refined workshops to assist people in personal growth and change. Participants and facilitators join together to find their own pockets of violence and seek more satisfying ways to respond. Workshops are based on an experiential learning approach—that people learn best by doing, reflecting, and sharing with one another. There are no PowerPoint presentations, no worksheets, no lectures. AVP workshops are offered in prisons, communities, and schools in over 30 states and 45 countries.

Basic Workshop: 5 to 9 pm, Friday, April 13; 9 am to 5 pm, Saturday, April 14; and 1 to 6 pm, Sunday, April 15. Continental breakfasts, supper and lunch provided.

The basic workshop consists of themed interactive/participatory activities and discussions to build community, develop interpersonal skills, analyze personal and social forces contributing to violence, and envision steps leading to more just situations. Participants laugh, play, and eat together, and come to know one another face to face.

Trauma Resiliency Advanced Workshop. An AVP Basic is prerequisite. 8 am to 5 pm, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, April 17, 18, & 19. Continental breakfasts, and lunches provided.

Building on a basic workshop experience and establishing community and a “safe place,” participants are free to process trauma’s recurring feelings and deliberately clarify the emotional message being made. Participants gain insight, find empathy and become aware of key understandings of the persistence of trauma’s effects. Activities lead participants to face and master the effects of trauma and make choices to build alternatives to violent and to non-peaceful outcomes experienced in the past.

 $40 to $100 fees as able to pay for either workshop cover meals, snacks, facilitators’ travel. Please do not stay away because of money. Scholarships available. Deposit: $20. Make check payable to Nashville Friends Meeting, on memo line enter either “for April AVP basic,” or “for April AVP trauma,” mail to Trina Baum, in care of Nashville Friends Meetinghouse, at the address above.

PeaceQuest. 8:30 am to 5 pm, Saturday, April 21. Continental breakfast, and lunch provided.

A day of talks, discussions, discernments, and testimonies of worldwide & local efforts & strategies to bring hope, peace & reconciliation to our communities. Morning keynote by Val Liveoak, emerita coordinator of Peacebuilding en las Américas Initiative (PLA), cofounder of Friends Peace Teams in 1993. She is ideally positioned to recall the beginnings of FPT’s quest for peace and to explore its future, Afternoon sessions include old and young discerning, “How are we called to meet the challenges of today.”

Registration: $20 for adults, youth 18 & under, free. Scholarships available.

Lead Facilitators of the Workshops. Nadine Hoover has been an AVP facilitator since 1978 and has identified universal practices for effectively preserving public cultures of peace in the most unlikely places: refugee, militant, and professional communities. She is co-coordinator of the Asia West Pacific FPT initiative. Val Liveoak has been an active AVP facilitator for 25 years. She has co-facilitated workshops in the US, and in Central America, Canada, Africa and has been instrumental in starting AVP in many of these sites. Both have developed and pioneered AVP trauma workshops.

Friends Peace Teams. Friends Peace Teams (FPT) is a Spirit-led work to develop long-term relationships with communities in the different corners of the world to create interventions for peace building, healing, and reconciliation. Projects build on extensive Quaker (Religious Society of Friends) experiences, combing practical and spiritual aspects of grassroots peacebuilding. Teams are located in Columbia and the Central American countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras; countries around Lake Victoria in East Africa, and Asian countries scattered along the Pacific, among them: Indonesia, Nepal, Philippines, Korea, and Australia and with concerns for friends in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and the Ukraine.

FTP work is non-denominational and partners with many local and indigenous groups.

A council provides governance and support for Friends Peace Teams. The Council is comprised of representatives appointed by Yearly Meetings as well as working group members for each initiative, a small central office staff and volunteers. Each year the council convenes a “face-to-face” with one another and initiative coordinators. This year the Nashville Friends Meeting is hosting the face-to-face, from April 20 to April 24. Friends Peace Teams web site: http://friendspeaceteams.org/