Leading the Way with Peace & Empathy

The Peace Keeper Training was a City Wide 21st Century Civic Leadership Campaign that conducted 15 training events in Oakland beginning in September and ending in November 2010. The trainings enabled the community to respond peacefully to the sentencing of Johannes Mehserle for the death Oscar Grant. During this intense situation in Oakland, we went into the schools and the community and held open dialogues, established empathy circles, began a process of respect for all viewpoints, and used art to create a vision of Oakland as a City of Peace, bringing intergenerational and multicultural community groups together. We explored the essential positive attributes that we all must develop to generate empathy for differences in an urban city where bullying can be found on many levels, in schools, in neighborhoods and within Police relations. We guided people through extensive self-assessment processes, and using restorative justices principles and practices, taught empathy listening skills with non violent communication techniques.,. Participants introduced their selves from the ethnic and cultural backgrounds and we emphasize the important of cultural pride and awareness.

If community members attended the requisite number of sessions, they were certified as peacekeepers and played a key role in insuring that highly-volatile protest gatherings stayed non-violent.
On the days when the most outrage was expected, we established “empathy tents and empathy circles” for peacekeepers to help transform angry emotions into useful dialogue. We were successful.