Power, Privilege, and the Body: Focused International Intensive Training (IIT) (ten day residential)

Program

This event is a 9-day residential training designed as an “immersion experience” in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) for people at all levels of NVC understanding led by a team of experienced CNVC trainers. This particular intensive will include the standard IIT curriculum and will also have a special focus on the themes of Power, Privilege, and the Body.

Vision

To bring together the values and worldview of NVC and the social analysis that emerges from movements from social justice to support individuals in facing the realities of the world from the multiple social and cultural locations in which they live.

Purpose

To support the movement towards this vision by offering an intensive training in NVC that is informed by the following questions:

• How does the lens of power* and privilege** combine with the deep practices of NVC to create relationships with self, other, and the world that are informed by social analysis?
• What does social analysis look like when informed by the perspective of putting needs at the center?
• How do trauma and power differences affect the body and how can NVC learning support an accelerated path to inner freedom?

* We define power as the capacity to mobilize resources to attend to needs
** The dictionary definition of privilege is “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.” We also rely on Stephanie Wildmans’ definition of privilege as “the systemic conferral of benefit and advantage. Members of a privileged group gain this status by affiliation, conscious or not and chosen or not, to the dominant side of a power system.”

Goals

This IIT is our first experiment in doing this integration. As such, we anticipate learning together and co-creating aspects of the curriculum. Participants experiences, insights, and whatever prior exposure to NVC and/or to social justice work they have are likely to be core and central to this process.(NOTE: prior exposure to NVC or to social justice work are not in any way an expectation or condition for attending. We anticipate having a rich mix of social justice folks with no experience in NVC, who want to hear if this lens could transform their work, NVC folks genuinely curious and open to learn about the frameworks that power and privilege offer, and others without experience in either aspect of what we are exploring in this IIT.)

Our goals are affected by this being a first:

• Within the training:
  • Creating the conditions for people to be able to engage meaningfully with their own and others experiences, needs, and challenges across differences in power such as race, nationality, culture, and class.
  • Supporting people in engaging with their bodies to learn about and free themselves from the effects of trauma and power differences on their bodies.
  • Facilitating significant learning of NVC principles and practices
  • Facilitating greater capacity in approaching the daunting task of learning about, mourning, and working to transform the existing power structures in the world.Rox
• Beyond the training:
  • Creating a community of people committed to carrying forward the work of integrating NVC with social analysis and practice.
  • Offering the fruits of our work together to the larger NVC community in the form of a revised NVC curriculum more accessible to people in marginalized groups; materials for NVC trainers and candidates to engage with and learn from; and proposals for how to attend to power differences within the NVC community.

Trainers

Bios for the trainers are included on the event website:

• Jeyanthy Siva
• Roxy Manning
• Sarah Peyton
• Miki Kashtan
• Bob Wentworth