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.

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.

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.

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.

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

At the end of 2017, we announced the thrilling news that we officially hired a new staff person at East Point Peace Academy!!! Chris Moore-Backman is a long-time friend of East Point, a lifelong dedicated nonviolence activist, and someone rooted in the tradition of Gandhian Nonviolence.

We are thrilled to have him on board as we look to expand our work heading into 2018. We wanted to give you all a chance to get to know him a little better, so check out our interview [Read more…]

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.

“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