Meet Some of the Team for our Next Basic AVP Workshop – Beginning Sept. 26, 2020!

August 24, 2020August 24, 2020 / avpindiana / Leave a comment

AVP facilitators often speak of each other as family. The team for the fall 2020 workshop is a wonderfully diverse and enthusiastic clan.

Tre is a high school teacher, with experience in yoga, legal studies, and the military who came to AVP several years ago. “AVP has given me very specific and concrete tools to improve the way I facilitate small group discussions about challenging topics. More fundamentally, AVP was a huge step in developing my compassion for self and others. My most powerful AVP experience was my first prison workshop. I walked in with prejudices about people in prison and the mentality that I was going in to “help” these men. I walked out with profound gratitude for these men who had welcomed me, shown me true compassion, and been more “real” with me than I almost ever find on the outside. That workshop radically changed my perspectives and my self-perception – for the better! And every workshop has strengthened and deepened my commitment to that path.”

Having a heart for the least of God’s children led Sylvia into prison ministry. Prison ministry led her into Madison Prison and her first Alternatives to Violence Program (AVP) workshop. That was the beginning of Sylvia’s AVP relationship that has continued for many years to this present day. Sylvia has brought AVP into the community and her prison ministry has grown in the intermediate and advanced courses of AVP. Sylvia is excited about continuing with AVP in the era of COVID19 and to all the bright lights that will come into the Basic AVP workshop.

Latwan served 12 years and 3 months in IDOC. During that time he struggled with the guilt, the shame, and all of the pain that he brought on himself, his family and his community. During that time he participated in an AVP workshop. “It wasn’t work. I started to see myself as a person. My value was returning to me. The support, encouragement, and connectivity gave me tools within myself to heal. Who knew that would put me on a path to become a facilitator. Recognizing that I am so much more than my mistake breathed new life into me.” Today, Latwan’s passion is breaking barriers and building new relationships. Whether as a caterer serving the construction crew he once worked with or as an AVP facilitator, Latwan enjoys learning new skills and is committed to nurturing love, connectivity/community, and down right enjoyment.

Jana, now a resident of Richmond, Indiana, helped introduce AVP in Ohio’s prisons and has facilitated workshops in Tennessee and Indiana communities. She is excited to have time to be active in AVP again. She always receives so much from workshop participants and is thrilled to be part of the effort to re-activate workshops at the Dayton facility where she participated in her first prison workshop. She is an educator and advocate who serves on the Board of the American Friends Service Committee and until recently was the Director of Community Engagement at Earlham College.

Margaret raised her son in Richmond and has recently returned after 15 years living on the East coast. During that time she became addicted to AVP, facilitating in New York prisons and Central America. “People often praise me for volunteering, but I am really doing this for myself. In every workshop, someone says something that is exactly what I need to hear. That’s what I love about AVP: people who may be very different on the outside share their common humanity, each learning from the other.”

The fall 2020 workshop is designed to be Covid-Cautious, bringing together the best of both in-person and on-line workshops. We will begin by meeting each other out-doors with masks for two sessions on one Saturday. The pavilion at Quaker Hill has room to spread out and a large roof to protect us from the elements. The 10 am to 5 pm time frame allows participants to travel from 100+ miles and still make it a one-day event. We look forward to meeting everyone in person, but are prepared to move that first session onto Zoom if conditions dictate. Subsequent sessions will be on Zoom, reducing the need to travel and recognizing that temperatures will be dropping as the fall progresses.

If you would like to try a sneak preview of a workshop or sign up for the Basic, please signup on our registration page.

Want to Do Something About the Violence in our Society?

August 9, 2017August 9, 2017 / avpindiana / Leave a comment

Do you–want to make a difference in your life?

want to learn anger management skills?
want to help others learn to control their aggression?
want to become a conflict resolution facilitator?

Benefits of our training include learning to,

Diffuse potential conflicts at home, school, work,
Solve family issues with “win-win’ options,
Understand opposing viewpoints,
Resolve common misunderstandings that lead to violence,
Become more emphatic and caring

Consider becoming an AVP Facilitator! It is a life-changing experience and a lot of fun. We at AVP Indiana would love to share this process with everyone, but cannot without more volunteers like you.

Will you join us? Our next Basic workshop is in Indianapolis on Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 26-27 at West Newton Friends Meeting, See flyer for details. Don’t forget to sign up on the registration page!

August 2017 Basic Workshop Flyer

The Power of the Process

April 1, 2017 / avpindiana / Leave a comment

As a life-long avoider of conflict and an acknowledged introvert, I find it ironic that I spend so much time facilitating Alternatives to Violence Project workshops. It seems so out of character to willingly go into a minimum or medium security prison and spend essentially 18-20 hours over a weekend, once a month, with a bunch of guys dealing with conflict and talking about feelings. It is difficult for me on so many levels. And yet, I keep going back.

For me, it was the power of the process that kept pulling me back. An AVP workshop is packed with interactive, immersion type experiences. It very successfully builds a sense of community and level of trust I have never experienced anywhere else before. It was the power of this community that drew me. I kept learning things about myself and changing, and even though it was challenging, everyone else was being challenged at some level at the same time. I was not alone.

I used to be afraid of doing anything that put me in a position of making mistakes in front of others. The first community workshop I helped facilitate was a baptism in fire. I made all kinds of mistakes, but the process worked so well that in spite of my mistakes, all of the participants grasped what we hoped they would. As one person said at the end of the workshop, “I realize now that non-violent resolution of conflict is inside everyone of us and what we need to do is reach down inside ourselves and pull it out.” I learned to trust the process, because it works. — Magical Miriam

Basic AVP Workshop – Plainfield Correctional Facility – January, 2017

Spring Advanced Workshop at IREF

April 1, 2015April 1, 2015 / avpindiana / Leave a comment

This past weekend (March 28-29th), AVP Indiana conducted an Advanced Workshop at the Indianapolis Re-entry and Education Facility. This workshop was facilitated by two inside facilitators, Fly Ty and Stellar Steve, and two outside facilitators, Courageous Kirsten (myself), and Magical Miriam. The workshop was exciting and all but one participant signed up to take the Training for Facilitators workshop when it becomes available.

Working with inside facilitators on a workshop is an incredible experience, and one that really breaks down barriers to stereotypes that a person may unconsciously have developed about people who are in prison. I enjoyed my experience and the lessons that I learned from my co-facilitators about humility, bravery, and dedication. Both Fly Ty and Stellar Steve put their full selves into the workshop, taking risks to facilitate activities that they had not participated in before, and taking risks to make the workshop inclusive and engaging for all of our participants.

One of the struggles of crafting a workshop with inside facilitators is that preparation time is very limited. During times when Magical Miriam and I were able to talk and plan, our fellow co-facilitators had to return to the dorms for mandatory “counts.” This happened twice a day, and took away from valuable planning time that we could have used. Fly Ty and Stellar Steve showed such flexibility and calm in the face of this lack of preparation time and really immersed themselves in the unknown in order to make the advanced workshop meet the needs and desires of our participants.

Our focus for the workshop was around poor communication and issues of power/powerlessness, with a bit of anger and stereotyping mixed throughout. Speaking with participants at the end, it was clear that people got a lot out of the workshop and only hoped that they would have a chance to pursue these topics more in depth with each other in the coming weeks. The participants and our inside co-facilitators decided that creating an AVP support group that could meet weekly or bi-weekly would be a great way for people to stay in touch, practice skills, and have deep conversations about the skills and ideas that we covered in the workshop. Magical Miriam and I fully support this idea and hope that participants are able to make it a success so that they can work with each other through the many confusing and concerning issues that we all deal with when encountering conflict.

Thanks for reading! Till next time,

-Courageous Kirsten

Inside Facilitators and the Transforming Power of AVP

December 4, 2014 / avpindiana / Leave a comment

In October, we held our second 3rd level AVP workshop at the Indianapolis Re-entry Educational Facility (IREF). The significance of the third level is that it trains participants to become facilitators of the workshop themselves. One of the beauties of the AVP model is that it grows its leaders from the ground up, empowering participants to transform themselves as they seek collectively to transform the violence they encounter and learn to channel their power into solving conflicts in creative and constructive ways. They learn by practicing and doing actual facilitation.

In this particular workshop, we trained eight new facilitators who will now begin their apprenticing. Two of the facilitators are from outside prison and six of the new facilitators are residents of IREF. At the end of the workshop, after each participant had concluded approximately 55 hours of workshop experience, I asked them to write a few words about their experience with AVP and what it has meant to them or how it has changed them.

I will share these responses one by one in separate posts and at the end, I will put all of the responses together on a page of Testimonials. As we continue to conduct these workshops and grow new facilitators, I will continue to ask the questions of participants and facilitators alike, “What have you learned? How have you changed? What does AVP mean to you?”

Below are the words of Dependable Dale. Dale did not attend this particular workshop because he was moved to a different facility, but without his help, this second Training for Facilitators workshop and all of the other workshops before it most likely would not have happened. He attended the first workshop we conducted at IREF in November 2013 and was one of the first group of inside facilitators in the state of Indiana. The program at IREF owes him a great debt of gratitude for his tireless organization, incessant recruiting, attention to detail, communication, and his inability to stop talking about and advocating for AVP once he saw how much it really worked. What I quote here are words I heard him say on multiple occasions.

“AVP has opened up a whole new world for me that I never knew existed. I used to think, where there is a will, there is a way, and I usually meant a violent way. Now I think that where there is a will, there is a non-violent way. I want to see AVP conducted in every prison in the state of Indiana. I want to see it in every half-way house, recovery center, community and school system in the state as well. And I will pursue my goals as long as I can take a breath.” –Dependable Dale