Most of you are aware of our commitment to financial transparency.

Some of you also know that we are beginning to live into our evolving understanding of a new theory called Fierce Vulnerability. Among other things, this means that we are also transparent about the things that are hard to talk about.

With those two things in mind, we want to share some news about our current finances. It’s not all bad news, so hang in there with us.

It looks like this year, we will come in about $20,000 under budget. This means that when the calendar switches over to 2019, our savings will have dwindled and we will be close to a zero balance.

This feels vulnerable to write and to share so publicly. But we want to be clear that this is not a panicked, end-of-the-world “we need to save East Point NOW!” type of email. Believe it or not, we are actually pretty confident with where we are today.

Part of how we ended up here is that one of our major funders shifted the timeline of their giving, so instead of receiving a significant gift at the end of this year, we anticipate that gift coming in early next year.

And part of it is that we have been so busy this year expanding our programs and spending significant time re-imaging our infrastructure and creating organizational systems and practices that is aligned with our values that we have not had much time to ask people for money.

We have been having a lot of intentional conversations about our relationship with money, and how much of our time we want to invest in raising it. While we are still in the midst of this complex conversation, we are leaning towards putting the vast majority of our time into the work, and having faith that our community will come together to sustain that work.

Part of our understanding of the Gift Economy is that we rely much more on faith than in fundraising strategies.

So we are putting this out there: we need to raise $20 - $25,000 by the end of this year. It’s a big ask. But this is another experiment in faith; faith in our community, faith in our work, faith in the generosity of people.

Here’s a little bit of what we’ve been up to this year.

• Through trainings, lectures and presentations, we reached over 1,200 people, including community leaders, incarcerated people, high school students and more!!!
• Organized workshops in 10 different states!!!
• Sponsored programs in four prisons, four colleges, two high-schools and eight faith based communities!!!
• Co-sponsored a week-long, national gathering of nonviolent action trainers!!!
• Launched a new training curriculum, Fierce Vulnerability, for which we had 50 people on a waitlist!!!
• Launched a new, four-month self-transformation program in the San Bruno County Jails called Peace from Within!!!
• Entered into a process of completely reimagining our organizational structure!!!
• Officially received our 501c3 nonprofit status (more on that in the coming months)!!!

In the first months of 2019, we plan to launch a new website, begin a long-term restorative justice program in Soledad Prison in partnership with the Ahimsa Collective, launch a decentralized network of Direct Action teams and so much more!

Please give as generously as you can by clicking here to help make sure that all of these programs happen!!! As an organization that relies almost entirely on our community for support, and as an organization that is committed to staying small (in 5 years, we have never spent more than $90,000 in a year!!!), every dollar truly counts.

Thank you so much for all you do to support building a new culture!!!

In Peace,

Kazu and Chris

It’s been half a year already!!! I know I’m not alone in feeling like every year goes by faster and faster! As usual, East Point Peace Academy has had a busy first six months, and we’re here to share some of our numbers with you.

First of all, in accordance with our practice of financial transparency and the Gift Economy, the Profit & Loss Statement from the second quarter of 2018 is in.

In the first half of this calendar year, we raised a total of $53,052.95, and spent $56,915.87. Click here to see the details of our finances. As always, we will update our numbers to you all each quarter.

In addition to the financial numbers, here are some programmatic ones: we’ve hosted 29 events and workshops in nine states, including four prisons, three Buddhist meditation centers, six Christian churches, one elementary school, two high-schools and six universities, reaching over 880 people!!!

Now that we’ve shared some numbers, let me share some stories from the last six months.

In January, we finished a series of workshops that we started last fall at Balboa High School, where we worked with 60 students who are on the Social Justice Pathways.

Kazu and Dion on the radio

Also in January, we were honored to work with Dion Martin, a young man who became a certified nonviolence trainer during his incarceration at the San Bruno County Jail. He is home now, doing well, and we were able to spend the day with him as he got to share his story in front of a church congregation in Sonoma County and in his first ever radio interview!!! You can listen to that interview here.

In February, we partnered with Impact Justice and hosted a two-day workshops for 30+ restorative justice practitioners, which was a great opportunity to further connect the worlds of nonviolence and restorative justice. We also traveled to Atlanta and worked with Dr. Lafayette and hosted a two-day workshop for a cross section of Atlanta activists.

Workshop for RJ Practitioners

In March we hosted our first ever Gandhian Iceberg workshop, facilitated by Chris. We also launched our brand new “Peace from Within” curriculum inside the San Bruno County Jail, a four-month leadership development program that combines nonviolence, mindfulness and trauma healing.

In April, we worked with a group of nonviolence trainers from around the country and hosted the first national gathering of nonviolent direct action trainers in decades. Over 30 trainers representing a wide spectrum of movements, experience and geography gathered for five-days to strategize about our role as trainers.

In May we started our ongoing partnership with Green Gulch Organic Farm and Zen Monastery with a day-long workshop on nonviolence and Buddhist Dharma.

The 2018 graduates of the URI Summer Institute

And in June, we assisted the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Nonviolence & Peace Studies at their annual Summer Institute, where we certified 60 new trainers from a dozen different countries!!!

That is, of course, just a sample of what we’ve been up to. And we’re able to do so much with very limited funds because the money is not what we focus on. We rely on relationships, we rely on community, we rely on faith in our work and faith that it will be sustained by our community.

Our leadership retreat. Missing in the picture is Aaron Nakai!!!

Just last week, we gathered some of East Point’s leaders and spent a weekend exploring alternative organizational structures, the Gift Economy and how to operationalize our values so that we are able to continue expanding our work without growing our budget and bureaucracy. We are excited about how that conversation will influence our work moving forward, and you will definitely be hearing a lot more about that from us soon!

Until then, THANK YOU ALL for all of your support. As an organization that relies almost exclusively on community support, when we say that we couldn’t do this without you, we mean it more than most.

In Peace,

Kazu

A few months ago, I received a call from a young woman named Gaberila about the possibility of us coming down to her region in Southern California to do a training.

Gaberila

“I’ve never been an activist before, but after Trump’s election, I knew that I needed to do something,” I remember her telling me at the time.

“I started looking online for trainings so I can figure out what to do,” she went on. “It started with a selfish tone, because I didn’t know a lot about activism and I wanted to take a training that would help me. But as I started talking to people, I realized that A LOT of other people were feeling the same way – wanting to do something but not knowing what.”

So today, I am driving down to Oxnard, California for a weekend-long training on Nonviolent Organizing. Will you consider donating $25 or more to help more trainings like this?

Gaberila has been a tour de force since our first conversation. As someone who has never organized before, she quickly found funds to cover our travel, found a training location, and began building relationships with organizations all over her region.

The registrations started to trickle in, and we are now looking forward to a packed audience of new and old activists from all over Ventura County and beyond.

Gaberila told me that when she was little, “My mom would always put on movies about the holocaust and other social injustices. People look back at those times and say, “that’s terrible, if I were around in that time, I would have done something to fight it.” It’s easy to say those things in retrospect, but while those things were happening, too many people sat around and did nothing. I told myself that if I were ever in that situation, that I would do something.

My dad is Palestinian, and even though I saw him face discrimination, it was still easy to live in blissful ignorance. But when Trump was elected, I knew millions of people were in danger, and I had to do something.”

There are people like Gaberila – budding leaders in an emerging movement for justice - all over the country. As an organization grounded in a Gift Economy, money will never be a reason why we can’t work with people like her.

But that means we also depend on people like you to make our work possible. Please consider becoming a monthly so we can continue to work with all of the Gaberilas of the world.

I look forward to updating you about this workshop after the weekend is over. In the meantime, please continue to share our updates with your friends, communities and networks so that we can continue to expand our Beloved Community.

In Peace,

Kazu Haga
Coordinator

Beloved Community,

Last Friday, we surpassed 500 men who have gone through a Kingian Nonviolence workshop in Soledad State Prison!!! It was an inspiring milestone, especially since the majority of those men went through a workshop facilitated by their peers.

The men who were present were treated with a special surprise, in the form of a visit and presentation from Carmen Perez, an old friend, advocate of Kingian Nonviolence, executive director of the Gathering for Justice and national co-chair of the Women’s March. After a morning workshop filled with incredible stories, Carmen’s speech left the 50 men in awe.

Will you donate $25 or more to help raise $500 this week to celebrate our 500th participant? Your support will help us reach the next 500 men!

I also want to share an incredibly inspiring story shared to us by one of the 500 men we’ve worked with at Soledad, one of our inside facilitators, Chris Diep.

“In October of 2000, four days after my birthday, my best friend whom I had known since I was 5 was murdered. I am currently incarcerated for a retaliation murder.

In 2013, I was transferred to Soledad. When I got here, I found out that the person who actually murdered my friend was here

For the first several weeks, I was completely stressed out. I was feeling angry, frustrated, worried and conflicted. I wanted to take revenge, and felt that if I didn’t do something, my peers would look down on me. At the same time, if I did take revenge, I knew it would affect my family.

For a few years, I avoided him at all costs. I didn’t do anything, but inside I was filled with anger and hatred. But I wanted a chance to eventually go home, so I just kept my distance.

When I started to learn about Kingian Nonviolence, I realized how that anger was affecting me, and how avoiding him was only creating a negative peace. Kingian Nonviolence helped me accept my friend’s death, and move towards forgiving the person who took his life. I learned that holding onto anger was an act of violence I was doing to myself, and the importance of reconciliation.

I reached out to him. Now, I am able to sit and talk to him, about our purpose in life, about the type of men we want to be when we go home. He was actually in the room today as I was facilitating.”

This is the type of work that your donation of $25 or more will support. Please donate to support our three-week campaign to raise $5,000!!!

Peace requires reconciliation on a personal level like Chris embodies, and it requires communities to resist violence and injustice, like the participants in our workshops last weekend in Oakland and this coming weekend in Oxnard.

Please consider supporting our work, supporting Chris and the rest of our relatives on the inside, and communities throughout California that we are working to empower.

I look forward to sharing more exciting updates later this week.

In Peace,

Kazu Haga
Coordinator