Much is said about the value of empathy and the need to cultivate habits of nonviolence which lead to Peace. At the same time, it is very rare to find truly humane and co-creative environments which insist on the daily practice of peace in order to actually achieve this end. Through Association Building Community, the Peace Practices curriculum was offered for the first time in public at The Renaissance School, a Montessori learning environment in Oakland, CA. This support allowed us to open a door through which even the most scattered and conflicted children and families could walk to learn habits of peaceful interaction. Peaceful ways of working through conflict and difference have always been one of the traditional pillars of learning and of Montessori education in particular.

In May 2014 we received international funding and began the next phase, our local launch in partnership with Pacific Rim International School in Emeryville and San Mateo, CA. We are seeking your support and assistance, as well as looking for other Montessori environments for our expansion in 2015 as we move from a local to a national and then international level. For more, please visit Association Building Community's Peace Practices page. Now is the ideal time to offer your support and help us multiply our impact.

Even in the world of the Montessori method, most educational communities lack access to high-quality, integrated curricula specifically devoted to practicing peace. At the same time, actual peace-making requires strength of purpose and dedication to frequent practice that is characteristic of the best teachers and classrooms. It comes as a surprise to some that teachers of the martial arts have tools at their disposal to step to the forefront of peace practice, and that an entire martial system, called aikido, was founded for this purpose and is known around the world as The Art of Peace. 

Aikido blossoms into a form of explicit community building when it is extended beyond the traditional boundaries of its physical practice. Combining aikido with theater and facilitation techniques, Brandon WilliamsCraig Ph.D. created Martial Nonviolence (MNv) to be a method of regular practice for all ages, a way to prepare body, mind, and spirit to respond as one system to conflict of all kinds in ways that lead people--young and old--to build communities which practice peace.

Peace Practices,  is a series of site-specific, carefully designed variations of the Martial Nonviolence training that is already practiced privately by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, in particular by students, faculty, and staff at both UC Berkeley and Pacific Rim International School. We've just received international funding and are creating a sustainable base from which Martial Nonviolence may grow so that it can be said that Peace Practices may be found wherever our children find themselves.