AVP Mini Workshop - Making Friends with Conflict

ENJOY a hands-on, experiential, conflict transformation workshop where you'll connect deeply with others, laugh, share, and listen while learning ways to reduce conflict in your classroom, your family, at work or in the world.

AVP fosters self-esteem, empathy, conflict resolution and other social-emotional goals with powerful impacts in organizations and institutions.

AVP is experiential. AVP teaches through a carefully structured and ordered set of immersive experiential exercises, games, role playing, and small and large group discussions. It does not involve lectures, written texts, or homework. Learning comes from the group rather than “experts”. This is empowering as participants learn they already have a certain level of wisdom and skills and need only organize and consciously use them to reap real changes.

AVP is a process. AVP is a facilitated process designed to engage and draw on the wisdom and experience of the group. This means that the material covered, coming from the group and directed by the facilitators, stays relevant and real to the participants. Thus, for example we may have facilitators working in cultures they are not from, whether gang culture, police culture, prison culture, etc. and the process still works because the group is doing the lion’s share of the teaching, not the facilitators.

AVP works on the individual. AVP is not something we “do” to others. It develops a way of being that changes how we address conflict and how we bring ourselves to the problems and conflicts in our lives.

* Treat yourself to this workshop purely for personal growth, or make it a first step toward facilitating additional workshops.

Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) offers conflict transformation workshops in prisons, the community, or the classroom. AVP began in 1975 as a cooperative project between incarcerated people, Quakers, and activists in the Civil Rights movement. AVP is practiced in over 60 countries, in schools, prisons, refugee camps, addiction centers, conflict zones; working with gang members, veterans, the incarcerated, school students, indigenous peoples, child soldiers and more – the program has evolved and deepened to be about far more than violence reduction.

Register soon as there are limited spots. Follow the instructions on this site (clicking the "Reserve a Spot" button) or email Nathan at nkleban@gmail.com.

You can learn more about AVP by visiting avpusa.org.