Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service hosted the largest nonviolence training in its history as part of the August 6-8 Campaign Nonviolence National Conference, which had been moved online in the face of COVID-19.

Pace e Bene has led over 1,000 trainings for 35,000 people in the US and around the world.  A number of these have been large workshops — between 100 and 250 people — but this week, thanks to the magic of Zoom, it saw over 350 registrants join its online, three-hour training led by Veronica Pelicaric, Rivera Sun, and Adam Vogal.

Rooted in a foundation of nonviolent dynamics, the training featured fundamentals of nonviolent bystander intervention practice for defusing unexpected situation of conflict and violence on the streets, in demonstrations, and even in our families.

Originally scheduled as a live workshop in Albuquerque, New Mexico as a prelude to the day-long conference on Saturday, August 8 — marking the 75th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and envisioning a nonviolent shift toward a culture of peace, justice and nonviolence — the organizers had hoped that 100 or so people would participate.  

Moving the event online posed challenges — especially since Pace e Bene’s typical trainings are extremely interactive — but it also widened the possibility that more people could attend from across the US and around the world. The facilitators were gratified not only that over three times the number of paid registrants than originally forecast participated, but that virtually all the attendees stayed engaged for the entire training.

As the pandemic took hold this past Spring, Pace e Bene — under the leadership of Pelicaric, the organizations’s director of nonviolence training — accelerated its online programs. Joining a variety of intensive online classes over the past few months, 150 participants gained critical tools for transforming conflict in their own lives and building a more nonviolent world.

The success of these online educational programs and the August 7 event speaks to a growing hunger for learning the ways of nonviolent change — and the potential for helping them gain these tools via online programming.

We look forward to receiving the evaluations from the workshop participants, but the comments at the end were appreciative.  One person wrote during the course of the training, “This is like rain in the desert.”  

Congratulations to the trainers and to Ryan Hall and Erin Bechtol, whose outreach and organizing for this training over the past several months was relentless, as well as to Robert Ferrell who assisted with the online logistics.