Keeping Peace in the Coady Agenda
Dear Coady Friends,
In 2008 I had the
privilege of participating in the Community Conflict Transformation and
Peacebuilding Certificate program. We, the participants were offered new ways
of examining, defining, relating, and conceptualizing peace and conflict. First
and foremost we began with ourselves, and then reached out to our families,
communities, organizations, countries, regions, and the world. It was in the
redefining of peace that we began to transform or own understanding of ‘peacebuilding’
and recognized that in order to build intra family/community/organizational/global
peace, we must first and foremost build intra personal peace.
For the past 15
years I have been working in the field of personal and community empowerment within
Canada and the Caribbean. After being a participant in the Community Conflict
Transformation and Peacebuilding Certificate Course I realized how deeply
connected I was to the work of building cultures of peace starting from the
inside out. I witnessed not only my own transformative paths widening, but also
the transformative paths of my fellow peace participants. For example a
participant from Sudan voiced passionately at the end of the course that his
major learning reflected his own understanding of violence on a personal,
family, and community level. He spoke of waking up to the violence within his
own family and how this affected his wife and children. He spoke of identifying
and recognizing the cycle of violence that was present in his own mind and the
minds of other men within his community and how this impacted the women and
children in their community. He recognized the cycle of violence perpetuated by
male dominant structures and systems that lived within his own attitude,
behaviour, culture, religion, society and world on a whole. He voiced that in
order to understand the work that he was engaged in as a peacekeeper within the
Sudanese government he needed to broaden his perspective of peace to include
the personal, family, and community.
I witnessed
participants (myself included) moving into a deeper understanding of the
interconnectedness of peace and the environment, broadening our definition of
peace, self, community to include the environment and non-human world. As
Edwards pointed out in his presentation, the devastating effects of climate
change is affecting all of us world-wide forcing us to work together, to build
right relations, to rethink what we call ‘development’, and recommit to
transformative ways of being and seeing the world. One of the larger questions
looming inside my head these days is how do we build cultures of peace that
enable / facilitate local and global communities to work together in
understanding and transforming our ways of seeing and being on the Earth? And
how do we integrate the crucial need for us as leaders to transform our own
deeply ingrained thought patterns and behaviors to encompass a more personal,
intimate, and critical view of ourselves, families, communities, organizations,
schools, environment and world and then how do we act on this? I recognize that
these and many more questions are addressed in the many courses offered through
the Coady Institute and I now recognize and understand more clearly how the
Community Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding course builds further on these
crucial themes of personal and social transformation in the context of
community development, leadership, and education.
After sharing space
with Edwards and the Coady family I realize the work Dr. Turay started and the
work I find myself passionately engaged in is vital to making a leap to a more
spiritual/social/environmental/ economic/ political consciousness that
transforms oppressive systems and structures that are clearly and tragically
problematic to all of us, and to the very environment that gives us life. I
therefor write this letter in hopes of
keeping and promoting peace education as a more substantial part of the
Coady agenda.
After listening and sharing space with Michael Edwards and the Coady family at a discussion on transformation, I
recognized immediately a deep connection to the work Dr. Turay, Sr. Joanne, and
recently I have been engaged in through the Community Conflict Transformation
and Peacebuilding course. Edwards spoke passionately about personal
transformation and the need to integrate this more fully into the political,
environmental, social, spiritual and ‘development’ realms of our global
systems; a need to re-examine and reflect on personal and social transformation
within a development, education, and leadership context. I believe facilitating
a more integral process of self- reflection and awareness helps leaders find
the courage to explore our own interior landscapes and identify habitual, and
often oppressive patterns and behaviors. This I believe is a direct path from
personal to social transformation. I believe the quality of our relationships
with ourselves, one another, and the environment is key to the transformative
leadership I believe Edwards is speaking about. I believe building cultures of
peace will depend on how we build relationships with one another, the
environment, and the non-human worlds around us.
Blessings
Maureen St. Clair
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