THE 7 STEPS TOWARD A NONVIOLENT CITY
Build your Nonviolent City organizing group:
Gather a core group that represents the stakeholders in your community. Strive for a diverse group in age, race, class, experience, faith, occupation. Be thoughtful about this.
Hold an initial gathering to explore what it would mean for your community to work toward being a “Nonviolent City”.
Set a regular meeting schedule. You may also wish to use these Shared Meeting Agreements to guide your group process.
Consider asking a mainstream institution to host your Nonviolent City project, such as the local library, an interfaith group, a broad-based nonprofit, a community center, or local volunteer group.
Set up a volunteer list/enewsletter list.
Set up a website and/or social media page to promote your Nonviolent City.
Set up a media liaison/team to promote the vision of Nonviolent City in your newspaper, TV news, local talk shows on radio, and on social media. Encourage this committee to do ongoing, regular outreach to advance the idea of a Nonviolent City and speak about nonviolent solutions.
Empower an Outreach Coordinator who will invite new people and organizations to work with your Nonviolent City Project.
2. Study the violence in your local community in all its forms.
What kinds of physical violence occurs in your community?
What kinds of structural or systemic violence occur? (Redlining, poverty wages, environmental racism, pollution in low-income neighborhoods are all examples of structural/systemic violence.)
What kinds of social, cultural, psychological, and emotional violence is taking place?
What groups are already working on addressing all of these locally?
3. Research nonviolent solutions and alternatives.
What alternatives to physical, structural, systemic, social, cultural, psychological, and emotional violence exist in other places?
4. Identify an initial project. What will your Nonviolent City group work on first? See our tips and ideas on identifying potential projects here.
5. Build support. Make a robust inventory of your community’s groups, alliances, networks, and sectors. This includes the mayor and city council members, police chief and police officers, all religious leaders and communities, all educators, students, and families; healthcare workers, housing authorities, prison officials, youth and grassroots activists, nonprofit community groups, children, the elderly, each neighborhood, retail workers, construction workers, lawyers and judges; and more. Find a full list here.
Make a plan to outreach out to every sector of the community to help promote and build a more Nonviolent City.
Consider who among these groups is willing and interested in helping to advance nonviolent solutions. Look for potential allies, supporters, and collaborators among the institutions, organizations, and networks in your city. Identify both the usual suspects, the unlikely allies, and odd bedfellows.
Reach out to these potential allies and invite them to work with you on achieving the goals of your project.
6. Launch your first project. Make a list of upcoming projects and systematically work toward those goals.
7. Plan annual gatherings to celebrate, reflect, and adjust the work that you’re doing. Make these fun and welcome, a time of replenishment and appreciation. Nonviolent Morro Bay, for example, holds picnics in the park.
“By inviting people to imagine what their city would look like as a nonviolent city, people have begun to connect the dots between the various systems of violence, and work more holistically with every sector of their city.”
— Rev. John Dear
