Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence

A poster in honor of David

From an interview for the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership Discourse journal.

Thanks to Heather Barry, Associate Director, Institute for Global Leadership, Tufts University for putting this together!

Clicking the image on the left will launch a new window with a 948KB JPG file. This version will fit on 11" x 17" paper.

A electronic copy (not a printout) of the  full-size version of the poster is 3 feet x 5 feet and is available as a 6.7MB PDF upon request. Write to hresko@gmail.com for an email copy. Sorry for any confusion!

Read what the Institute for Global Leadership wrote about David here.

Providence Journal: City’s community policing receives more high praise

City’s community policing receives more high praise
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
By Gregory Smith
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE — Prof. Herman Goldstein, whom Police Chief Dean M. Esserman calls “the father of community policing,” dropped by police headquarters yesterday.

Goldstein’s internationally influential book, Problem-Oriented Policing, is mandatory study for supervisors vying for promotion in the Police Department.

His thesis is that policing is so difficult and complex that the problems the police confront must be broken down and analyzed, and a body of knowledge accumulated that can spur well-informed action.

Providence Journal: In a tough part of Belfast, youths need help, as they do here

In a tough part of Belfast, youths need help, as they do here
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Julia Steiny

I recently went to Belfast, Northern Ireland, with a team from Providence’s Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence.

The institute has an ongoing relationship with an organization called Forthspring, a coalition of Protestant and Catholic churches trying to rebuild Belfast’s communities after decades of the civil war they call “The Troubles.”

Forthspring’s building is butt up against the euphemistically named “Peace Wall” that divides two once-warring neighborhoods. The residents still don’t cross to the other side.

This was the institute’s second trip in two years to train Forthspring staff in Martin Luther King Jr.’s principles and methods of nonviolence.
 

October trip to Belfast

In October 2007, Institute Director Teny Gross traveled to Belfast with Father Ray Malm, a co-founder of the Institute and a priest at Saint Michael’s Parish on Providence’s South Side; Maggie Meany, operations director at Amos House, and a trainer at the Institute; Ajay Benton, program manager for the Streetworkers Program at the Institute; and Sal Monteiro, streetworker and trainer at the Institute.

The Institute's contingent worked with adults and children in a sectarian area of Belfast that has long suffered from poverty and violence. Although violence has decreased in Northern Ireland, our trip hosts at the Forthspring Inter Community Group say sectarianism and polarization continue as problems. And, new challenges, like increased drug use and teen suicide, have emerged.

Read Julia Steiny's Providence Journal column on the trip here.

Read Teny's blog entries from Belfast, hosted by the Providence Journal here.

Rhode Island Voices on Violence, Perspectives on Peace

Showing October 5, 26 and 27th at Johnson & Wales (read continuation for details)

You are cordially invited to attend the screening of a documentary, which is the result of a student community service project conducted by Johnson & Wales University Sociology Students, in conjunction with the Institute for the Study and Practice of Peace and Non Violence.

This documentary features a series of interviews with individuals who represent various facets of society. Each answers the questions: “What causes violence?” “What are effective intervention’s?” and…” Whose responsibility it is to teach non violence and peace keeping strategies?” The documentary includes three segments: Gang Violence, Domestic Violence and Dating Violence.

Providence Phoenix: When the budget gets tight, young people become an easy target

Screwing the youth
When the budget gets tight, young people become an easy target

By: BRIAN C. JONES
8/15/2007 5:25:25 PM

Wole Akinbi was 16 when someone phoned to say his best friend had been shot.

He turned on the TV, and sure enough, there was footage showing rescue workers sliding someone into an ambulance. He could tell who it was. The pictures showed Barry Ferrell’s favorite green sneakers.

Ferrell, 18, had been Akinbi’s mentor in a summer jobs program, and his murder has shaped Akinbi’s life in the two years since.

Akinbi, who lives near the State House, in Providence’s Smith Hill neighborhood, linked up with the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence, conducting his high school’s mandatory internship there and working at the institute in the summer.

Now, newly 18 himself and counting down the weeks until he starts college this fall, Akinbi has as a unique vantage point on the debate about how Rhode Island treats teenagers, in particular whether 17-year-olds should be steered into adult or youth prisons.

"If you are ‘brave’ enough to do it — to carry out a murder — you should be tried as an adult,” he says somewhat bitterly. “If you are going to walk around with a knife in your back pocket, because you know that you are ready to stab somebody, by all means, go to the ACI.”

But Akinbi makes a big U-turn when he considers the suspect, 16 at the time, who allegedly killed Ferrell.

Chicago - Street Workers are key "violence interrupters"

Our note: the Providence Street Workers are doing these same activities. We're glad to see allies across the country. And, we're always thrilled when academia endorses the work of front line practitioners like street workers.

The violence virus
Boston Globe Op-Ed
By Susan C. Scrimshaw  |  April 22, 2007

IN URBAN areas across our nation, hardly a day goes by without news of a shooting. Many such incidents start with a rash argument between young people armed with guns. The typical response, when shootings increase, is to enhance law enforcement, but that is only part of the solution.

This deadly cycle of shootings is a public-health epidemic. By approaching it as such -- as a contagious disease of underlying expectations and pressures, one that is both treatable and preventable -- we can make significant progress toward halting it.

Eyes on the Prize returns to PBS

The landmark 14-hour series, created and executive produced by award-winning filmmaker Henry Hampton, will air on American Experience in October 2006, as part of the acclaimed history series' 19th season.

This series, and the companion book, is highly recommended by the Institute's trainers and is part of our nonviolence training curriculum.

More information here.

Streetworker Program spotlighted in US Conference of Mayors guide

We're spotlighted in the United States Conference of Mayors 2006 guide to "Best Practices of Community Policing in Gang Intervention & Prevention". View the 2 pages on our Streetworker Program here.

Providence's Gang Intervention Unit and Gun Task Force are also featured in the guide.

Click here to view/download the entire guide (144 pages, 2.8 MB - a larger download).

'Politics, petty feuds, and street violence'

Nonviolence Institute Executive Director's Op-Ed in The Boston Globe....

THINKING BIG
Politics, petty feuds, and street violence

By Teny Gross  |  February 12, 2006

I loved every minute of my 10 years as a youth worker in Boston, teaming up with partners inside and outside law enforcement who strived like never before to reduce violence -- an effort that brought remarkable calm to the city's streets in the late 1990s. I left Boston in 2001, and it has been painful to witness from the sidelines the past few brutal years in the city.

There is no polite way to say it: Boston's regression into its old territorial self has translated directly into death. A decade ago a young man in Dorchester told me, ''You adults are the real gang members, easy to feel slighted, fighting petty beefs, vying for attention and credit." It is the beefs on the streets that get the headlines. But the beefs in the offices and agencies are now equally to blame for what is happening.
 

Rhode Island Peace Mission Forum on April 18

"How Our Oil Dependency Fuels War"

A forum on "How Our Oil Dependency Fuels War" will be held on Tuesday, April 18, at 7:00 PM, at the First Unitarian Church, corner of Benefit and Benevolent streets, in Providence.

Keynote speaker is Michael Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum. Responders include Katherine Brown, Executive Director of the Southside Community Land Trust, and Barry Schiller of the Sierra Club of RI.  The moderator is Karina Wood of the Providence Congress for the New Urbanism.

The forum is sponsored by the Rhode Island Peace Mission and co-sponsored by the First Unitarian Social Justice Council.  Free and open to the public.  For more information, call (401) 724-7700, Ext. 6.

Download the flyer here (pdf)

Birmingham News publishes unseen Civil Rights photos

Minutes after the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed on Sept. 15, 1963, Tom Self was on the scene taking pictures.

The photographs, published in The Birmingham News, were among hundreds that appeared in print during the civil rights struggle in Alabama. Self, who retired as chief photographer in 1998, remembers many of those images.

He also recalls many not published. One is a picture from inside the Sixteenth Street church moments after explosives blew the face of Jesus Christ from a stained-glass window and killed four little girls.

"I shot a picture of Jesus, and everything was intact except his face; his face was blown out," Self remembered. "It was an eerie feeling to look up there and see the whole frame of the window and just the face was gone."

Hundreds of photos from that era were lost, sold, stolen or stored in archives. Some of those pictures appear today for the first time in the newspaper, in an eight-page special section titled "Unseen. Unforgotten."

With the cooperation of The News, Cohn interviewed dozens of photographers, clergymen, elected officials, civil rights movement participants, historians and other witnesses to the events. More than 30 photos appear in today's special section, and dozens more are available on the newspaper's Web site at www.al.com/unseen.

"Pericles and Youth Violence in Providence"

 ATHENAEUM SALONS
 
Teny Gross, Executive Director, and Jane Jellison, Director of Training, Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence 

Friday, February 17th, 5:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.

251 Benefit Street
Providence, RI 02903
401-421-6970,   fax 401-421-2860

Drinks! Animated converstion! Gaiety! Brilliant presenters! Uninhibited exchange of ideas!

Dr. King's "World House"

Our friends at the Rhode Island Peace Mission have launched a web site for "The World House Project", "dedicated to promoting Dr. King's World House vision and agenda."

In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture in 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. first articulated his vision of a World House in which a family of different races, religions, ideas, cultures and interests must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish together as fools. He identified racism, poverty/ materialism, and war as the three major threats to human survival. He stressed the urgency of addressing these problems, warning that it might be humanity's last chance to choose between chaos and community.

Remembering Rosa Parks

What you do counts!

• Wikipedia
• AOL Black Voices
• Complete audio/video and newspaper archive of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Mocking Parks's legacy - Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson

Parks' legacy challenges new generation

By Erin Texeira, AP National Writer  |  October 25, 2005

The death of Rosa Parks underscores that the generation responsible for the key victories of the civil rights movement is fading into history, leaving its survivors with the challenge of keeping the movement's memory and work alive even as today's youth often seem disengaged.