COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS
Partners | East Point Peace Academy
“The social-political-environmental crisis we currently face signals the need for a collective response unlike any we’ve seen before. We are at a movement-building turning point, and we recognize that changes in laws and policies barely scratch the surface of the needed transformation. What we yearn for is a fundamental transformation of our hearts, our values, and our relationships – to ourselves, to each other, and to the earth.” “Sand” is a tangible, verbalized, ceremonial process that welcomes people to process their loss and shows us that the parts of ourselves that feel most disconnected from each other – unprocessed griefs – are actually the points in which we become the most interconnected.”
Founded in 2013, East Point Peace Academy envisions a world in which conflict is fully reconciled and experienced as a trusted pathway for growth.
EPPA works to build a powerful community of nonviolent leaders and active participants invested in creating, supporting and nurturing the Beloved Community. The organization views itself as something akin to a martial arts school, where people receive nonviolence and conflict reconciliation training in order to transform conflict in healthy, skillful and just ways.
By using the principles of nonviolence, mindfulness, restorative justice, community organizing, movement building and various healing modalities, they aim to bring about a holistic change to the personal, interpersonal and societal issues that plague our society. They offer many different training opportunities for the general public and in several California prison institutions.
For years now, East Point has been reflecting on the dilemma or society is in given the limitations of conventional organizing and activism in the face of social and ecological collapse. More and more they are directing their energy and creativity toward culture-shifting work that opens up space for a fuller collective experience of our humanity during this extraordinary time.
An expression of this is a 2-year artistic collaboration Embodiment Project has begun with EPPA called Grain of Tooth Inside of Sand (working title).
East Point has been serving as consultant and coach for Embodiment Project for the past several months, as they undertake a major organizational restructuring process. This process includes the implementation of sociocracy as Embodiment Project’s governance and decision making system. This collaboration has set the stage for rich mutual learning and experimentation in the arts of liberatory governance, nimble decision-making, and co-holding of power and initiative – all of which sociocracy is designed to foster. A key experiment in this mix is to leverage the flexibility of sociocracy to imbue its structures with practices that open up relationships between collaborators to address repair, trust building, and care.
East Point’s coaching and consulting work with Embodiment Project has catalyzed other powerful possibilities for collaboration. After learning more and more about one another’s work, the two organizations have begun to envision ways of blending East Point’s community organizing and direct action work with EP’s dance-centered liberatory storytelling model. New dreams abound: of public gatherings infused with dance, grief-tending, installation art, music, and direct action for racial and climate justice. Visions of prison-based offerings that combine restorative dialog, East Point’s Kingian Nonviolence training, and EP’s embodied movement approach are also coming into view.