Dear Task Force Leaders,
At this time we would like to draw your attention to one of the new programs SNV is embracing this year. Some of you who are working with the 2004 CD-rom may have reviewed the SAIV folder but for those of you who have not, this will serve as an introduction to that program with the sincere wish that it will become a cornerstone for this years campaign.
The Spiritual Alliance Against Intimate Violence (SAIV) was co-founded by Nobel Peace Laureate Betty Williams and author. Riane Eisler. The SAIV mission is nothing less than to bring about a fundamental transformation of beliefs and institutions that have produced an unsustainable way of life, including the chronic reliance on violence to resolve conflicts. Using Riane’s book “The Power of Partnership” as well as some extremely thought provoking research articles by experts in this field we have created a 9-week study course to guide participants through a personal and ultimately a cultural transformation.
We encourage you to form a SAIV study group to catalyze your task forces partnership in Season 2004. Towards the end of this e-mail we will tell you how to order the books. The following is a synopsis of why we consider this work to be especially relevant to the SNV campaign in 2004.
“The United Nations declared the years 2001 to 2010 the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and NonViolence for the Children of the World. This declaration recognizes that a lasting peace requires attention to much more than international agreements – that moving to a time when peace is not just an interval between wars requires that we understand what kinds of cultures are peaceful or warlike, and that we join together to apply this knowledge.
Drawing from cross-cultural and historical studies, we today have a much clearer understanding of what kinds of beliefs, behaviors, and institutions support or inhibit relations based on mutual respect, empathy, and nonviolence. We know that habits of violence in the global family of nations cannot be changed without changing habits of violence in the foundational day-to-day relations between men and women and parents and children. It is in these intimate relations that people learn to accept the use of violence to impose one’s will as normal and right, or to relate to others in empathic, mutually respectful, nonviolent ways. While not everyone replicates traditions of domination and abuse, and some of us devote ourselves to changing them, throughout history, and cross-culturally, the most violently despotic and warlike cultures have been those where violence, or the threat of violence, is used to maintain domination of parent over child and man over woman. We see this connection in the European Middle Ages, in Hitler’s Germany, and in some so-called religious fundamentalist cultures today. It is a disturbingly familiar pattern; and if we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it.
Both SAIV and The Power of Partnership focus attention on this link between intimate and international violence and provide materials to raise consciousness to it among leaders and policy makers as well as men and women worldwide. SAIV is also a call to spiritual leaders, both well known and grass roots, to spread the message that intimate violence will no longer be condoned.
It should be enough to say that intimate violence must stop because of the horrible damage it causes to the children and women directly affected. Yet it has not been enough. Nor has it been enough to point to the massive economic and social costs of this violence, even though this too has been extensively documented. But if we do not address these cornerstones of violence and abuse, we will not have the foundations for a more equitable, peaceful, and sustainable future.” [From Riane Eisler’s Introduction to SAIV.]
This important work focuses on the core issues that create violence in our culture and on ways we can change this cycle through inquiry, awareness, education and practice. Below are suggestions for getting started with your study group and ordering the books. (from: “J. SAIV 3.b. Using POP Study Guide.doc” on the 2004 SNV CD-rom.)
The Power of Partnership
What to do with these materials and how to do it.
These materials have been provided to help SNV Task Force leaders and educators create awareness and implement action steps in their communities or organizations towards personal, community and global change. The study guide, using the book The Power of Partnershipby Riane Eisler, can be used as a 9 week program. Each week you will focus on a chapter from the book and follow up with dialogue/discussion group sessions
We suggest that you:
Read the introduction to these materials (Intro to POP study guide.doc)
Review the excerpts from the book The Power of Partnershipby Riane Eisler, with a brief summary of the chapters and copy of the action steps in each chapter. (POP chapter excerpts folder)
Form a study group or class within your community or organization.
Appoint a coordinator to:
oOrder books.
oSet up weekly meetings/classes to read and discuss the information in each chapter.
As your group learns more about the Partnership model, choose action steps (found at the end of each chapter) that are appropriate to your community or organization and integrate them into your SNV program.
We feel that the information in The Power of Partnershipby Riane Eisler is so important and powerful that we are offering the books to study groups at a discounted price of $10, including shipping. (Book scholarships are also available.) Task Force leaders and teachers may request a complimentary book for review to see if this program would be applicable to their community or organization.
Please contact us by e-mail with any questions or book requests. Send to: . Please put “POP Book Request” in the subject box of your correspondence.
*** It is critical to the success of the SAIV program that we receive feedback from you regarding your experience around these new materials. Please contact us with your observations, opinions, feelings, suggestions and comments about the SAIV materials on the 2004 SNV CD-ROM and as a addition to the SNV campaign. We truly appreciate your response.
The following is Riane’s passionate personal appeal to you, our SNV Task Force Leaders.
Welcome to the SAIV Project
We at SAIV believe that the work of the Season for Nonviolence 2004 local taskforces is one of the most promising dimensions of a time of great challenge for the human community. We’re happy for the opportunity to work in partnership with Season. We hope that many of the local taskforces will consider taking up the critical issue of intimate violence – the coercive abuse of women and children – during the 2004 Season.
Groups engaging with the effort against intimate violence require support in at least three areas, which the materials assembled here are designed to provide.
First, activists need persuasive, compelling information about the issue. How widespread is the problem? Is intimate violence indeed linked to international violence, terrorism, and war? What, if anything, is being done to address the scourge? Here you’ll find thoughtful analysis, statistical information, and links to groups that are active in addressing violence in its many forms.
Second, participants in the effort need to know about the SAIV project itself and its partnership links with key groups like the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS), the Interreligious Engagement Project (IEP21), and Season. The materials included give a clear outline of the first stages of the SAIV effort and its hopes for the future. We hope your group will want to be involved from the beginning.
Finally, it’s absolutely essential that participating groups and communities know that interpersonal technologies exist that can facilitate the kind of community study, reflection, and growth that can nurture cultures of non-violence and partnership. That’s where the “Partnership Way” study materials come in. The sections provided (especially in conjunction with Riane Eisler’s groundbreaking book (The Partnership Way) offer not only guidelines but a clearly-articulated group process of healing, discovery, reconnection, and transformation.
How your taskforce addresses the critical problem of intimate violence depends of course on the realities and needs of your community. The key lies in the understanding that it is a problem that is at long last coming to awareness in the planetary community and that a genuine network of awareness and activism is taking shape. We can make a difference!
We invite you to become a part of that network of hope and healing. – Riane Eisler
Season for Nonviolence
Barbara Fields Bernstein, Project Director
Carolyn Pester, national task Force Coordinator
Assn. for Global New Thought
1815 Garden Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
tel 805-563-7343
fax 805-563-7344
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