Beginning Nonviolence: Learning and Teaching Nonviolence To Use Every Day

Beginning Nonviolence is a guide to proactive problem solving using proven strategies and tactics of nonviolence. Not a remote system used only by saints, albeit deeply rooted in the Ghandian-Kingian tradition, this handbook offers specific strategies for building peace in families, schools, communities, and commerce. Readers will learn ways to tap into the vast reservoir of power called nonviolence for use in everyday life. Based on a highly respected course, Alternatives to Violence, developed in Northeast Ohio in the 1970s, this book can be used as a primer as well as an introduction to an ancient body of knowledge that is reflected in the world’s major religions. The authors believe that the practice of nonviolence in everyday interactions is far more efficient and productive than common oppositional competitiveness. Those who try the strategies offered here will be convinced of the greater efficiency of nonviolence. Keywords: nonviolence, violence, anger, conflict, resolution, peace, listening, arbitration, mediation

Trained in both engineering & law, John Townsend Looney (1916-2005), sold his successful machine tool business in Wadsworth, OH in 1970 so he could work fulltime to prevent nuclear war. He organized both the Ohio Nuclear Freeze & the NE Ohio Office of the American Friends Service Committee, & recruited several NE Ohio church groups to help develop & test a nonviolence course for adults. Alternatives to Violence is an intensive comprehensive conflict resolution course. Looney & Danene Bender of Akron incorporated a nonprofit, Peace Grows, to promulgate this course, which has been taught to community groups, teachers, social workers & law enforcement, as well as for academic credit in several Ohio colleges & universities. His mission & fulltime vocation was to spread nonviolence: he personally visited educators & trained his students in an advanced course so they could teach it to others. He was planning a handbook for the general public when he died in 2005. Bender funded an internship in his memory at Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee in Akron. Interns under Bender's tutelage have put the entire course on the website, alternativestoviolencecourse.org. Thus Looney's mission to "spread nonviolence" is now worldwide & free of charge. Kezia Vanmeter Sproat graduated from Laurel School, Vassar College, & The Ohio State University. Her 1975 dissertation, A Reappraisal of Shakespeare's View of Women, prompted a feminist revolution in Shakespeare studies. As Editor for the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience, she initiated a bibliography that is updated annually by the U.S. Department of Labor. Abbott Laboratories published & distributed several million parent education books she created; she has had invited articles in Kenyon Review and Monthly Labor Review. Her most significant education, however, began in 1988, when she signed up for a nonviolence class taught by John Looney at a church in her Columbus neighborhood. In 1994, at Looney's suggestion & to support the mission of Peace Grows and the Alternatives to Violence course, Dr. Sproat opened Highbank Farm Peace Education Center in Chillicothe, Ohio. The Center supports studies and creates educational materials in conflict resolution. In 2002, Dr. Sproat was honored by Morehouse College for her response to 9/11, "A Short Course in Nonviolence," which condensed Looney's basic lessons to 271 words.