Nonviolent Community Safety and Peacebuilding Handbook

By Anthony Kelly, Pt'chang

This handbook was produced by Pt’chang in 2003. Pt’chang was an Australian Nonviolent Community Safety Group which conducted a wide range of dynamic and creative violence-prevention, peace-building and community safety initiatives. Although no longer active Pt’chang has left a valuable legacy both through people they trained and materials such as this.

Download the full manual. Excerpts from this handbook are also included as separate articles on the Commons.

Introduction

The purpose of this handbook is twofold. Firstly it is designed as a training resource for volunteers working with Pt’chang on any of it’s community safety and peacebuilding projects.

Secondly, the handbook is designed as a handy and unique resource for activists and community workers engaged in work for peace at a community level throughout Australia.

Inspired by and drawn from local and international peace initiatives, we have attempted to adapt and integrate many diverse nonviolent activist and peacekeeping skills and concepts used for decades in social change movements throughout the world into the context of peacework in our local community and city.

Pt’chang would like to thank the many contributors to this manual and to especially pay tribute to the many volunteers who have worked with Pt’chang over the years.

Work to create safety and peace, to transform conflict in creative ways is constantly evolving and we are continually learning.

Pt’chang has long seen its work to be an experiment in developing increasingly effective ways to intervene in violence, to transform conflict and to build peace. This handbook also draws from the work and experience of so many tireless volunteers in Pt’chang who apply so much of these skills and techniques with such effectiveness.

Pt’chang hopes that this handbook contributes, in some small way, to the creation of a safer and more peaceful world.

Anthony Kelly
Pt’chang Nonviolent Community Safety Group inc.
April 2003

Handbook Contents

• introduction
• nonviolent community safety
• defining safety for ourselves
• strategies for peace
• roles and functions of a peacekeeping team
• components of a local community peacebuilding project
• staying non-partisan
• using power
• nonviolence

Nonviolent communication skills

• active listening
• skills used in active listening
• active listening – a summary
• listening blocks
• assertive communication
• giving and receiving feedback
• respecting difference
• empowerment

Nonviolent intervention and peacekeeping skills

• what right do I have to intervene?
• guidelines for peacekeepers
• area coverage and observation skills
• when intervening in aggression or violence
• de-escalating conflicts
• tokyo train story

Skills to look after ourselves and others

• emotional preparedness
• stress and burnout
• motivation and despair
• maintaining group morale and motivation
• dealing with fear
• critical incident debriefing
• references and sources

Download the full manual.

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Topics:

• Nonviolent Direct Action
• Working in Groups

Collection:

• Pt'chang

Tags:

• Active listening
• Capacity building
• Civil resistance
• Communication in organisations
• Conflict resolution
• Crisis management
• Debriefing
• Group skills
• Movements_Campaigns - Peace
• Safety
• Safety education
• Stress and burnout
• Team building
• Teams
• Training
• Volunteers
• Volunteers - Management
• Wellbeing
• Wellbeing_Self care

Language:

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