2015 Peace from Within Graduation inside the San Bruno County Jail (click image for article)
Peace from Within is a nonviolence education and leadership development program for incarcerated communities. We facilitate regular workshops, as well as certify nonviolence trainers within the incarcerated population.
The program has two main goals. 1, to create a culture of peace inside and outside our criminal justice system, and 2, to show people that a different way of responding to harm is possible, as one small step towards creating a society without prisons as we know them.
We believe that in order to create peace in some of our most violent neighborhoods, we need to empower those who live in the most violent environment in the country: our prisons and county jails. If incarcerated communities can become the leaders in a call for peace, we believe that call from within will spread to our neighborhoods on the outside.
Peace from Within sees the people inside our “correctional” institutions not as society’s problems and throw-aways, criminals and convicts. We see them as the leaders we so desperately need, the experts who understand better than anyone the impact of violence.
We work to transform the culture of violence and the criminal justice system by:
- Giving individuals the skills and tools to manage conflicts in their lives.
- Help individuals heal through the trauma that they carry.
- Help identify the root causes of violence by looking at larger systemic issues that lead to harm.
- Connect them to a broader history of social change movements, inspiring them to not only transform their own lives but their communities and society as a whole.
In addition to facilitating regular nonviolence workshops, we work to certify nonviolence trainers within the incarcerated population. These trainers then go on to lead workshops for their peers as well as members of the community.
Every few months, East Point facilitates nonviolence workshops on the inside that are co-led by our inmate training teams. We are able to bring in a limited number of participants from the community each time. If you are interested, please click here to see upcoming events, or continue to check our calendar for updates.
