Community Accelerator-Essential Skills for Cooperative Living (Berkeley)

“Peace is conflict done well.” —Brandon WilliamsCraig

This workshop is part of EBCOHO's new Community Accelerator project: essential tools and knowledge for creating cooperative households, cohousing, and ecovillages, for coliving and coworking.

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) (http://www.wikihow.com/Practice-Nonviolent-Communication) offers a simple method for clear, empathic communication.

NVC aims to find a way for all present to get what really matters to them without the use of guilt, humiliation, shame, blame, coercion, or threats. It is useful for resolving conflicts, connecting with others, and living in a way that is conscious, present, and attuned to the genuine, living needs of yourself and others.

Join us for a three hour taste of Nonviolent Communication with John Abbe (http://johnabbe.wagn.org/).

This interactive workshop will let you to discover and practice principles of NVC on issues that arise around living in community. These include:

a) Needs vs. Strategies

Identifying emotions/feelings to help us get in touch with our needs.
We are generally more moved to help when we understand why someone is asking.

There's always more than one strategy to meet a need.

b) Observations vs. Evaluations

Explore distinction between observations – what we actually see/hear/etc., and evaluations -- judgements, or assumptions and about purpose or intention)

c) Requests vs. Demands

Practice and reflect on how different ways of asking for something (or listening to others ask us for something) can affect our relationships and make conflict more or less likely.

The workshop is free to members of the Dwight House community accelerator. We ask $25-$45 for all others.

Biography: John is a long-time practitioner and trainer of NVC. He lived in Sri Lanka as part of a peace community helping people in the middle of its civil war. Now, he uses it as an extension of permaculture and of cooperative living. John is a longtime member of Walnut House, a 10 member cooperative community in Eugene, OR. He is also part of the collaborative team that created the GroupWorks Deck: a pattern language for great meetings and other gatherings (http://groupworksdeck.org/).

John is in town to raise funds to join the Climate Walk -- a yearlong journey to raise awareness and support across the country for this earth-changing issue.