CJP 25th Anniversary

Storytime & Oral Histories: stories with CJP founding women and former CJP executive directors

Top row from left: Daryl Byler, Margaret Foth, Ann Hershberger, Vernon Jantzi, Jan Jenner
Bottom row from left: Janelle Myers-Benner, Carolyn Yoder, Howard Zehr, Ruth Zimmerman, Elaine Zook Barge

Daryl Byler has four delightful grandchildren – Sydney, Kiara, Jesse and Davey – who help keep his spirit young. He enjoys running, reading, journaling, and exploring Washington, DC where he lives with Cindy Lehman Byler, his spouse and soulmate for the past 40 years. Together, they enjoy hosting groups in their home and taking walks. They have three adult children. Daryl currently spends his days at the DC Bar Foundation, working to transform the civil legal aid network in Washington, DC so that the city’s most vulnerable residents – persons facing eviction from their homes, loss of jobs, discrimination, deportation or domestic abuse – have access to justice and quality legal representation. His previous work includes being a legal aid attorney, a pastor, an advocacy office director, international development administrator, and executive director at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

Ann Graber Hershberger and her husband Jim (first CJP cohort graduate) worked with John Paul and Wendy Lederach in Central America in the late 1980’s. In the early 1990’s, then President Joe Lapp asked Ann to chair the faculty committee tasked with writing a proposal for the program that became CJP. That led to a long-term relationship with CJP through the reference committee and later as part of a strategic planning group. Ann has worked in Central America in development, health, relief and peacebuilding for 10 years and, as an EMU faculty, taught community health nursing and cross-cultural studies for over 30 years. She retired as EMU faculty in 2019 and currently works as associate executive director of MCC U.S.

Vernon Jantzi, PhD in Sociology, helped found CJP and directed/co-directed the program from 1995-2002. While working with the Costa Rican “Land Reform” program in the early 80s he discovered and denounced to the US National Security Council and the House Subcommittee on Hemispheric Affairs the US-funded covert insurgency against the Nicaraguan Revolution from Costa Rica. Dr. Jantzi helped write the first academic curriculum for the University for Peace with Francisco Barahona and later EMU’s Conflict Transformation Program with John Paul Lederach. He led the feasibility study for EMU’s Center for Interfaith Engagement and coordinated its early program activities. In 2000-01 he lived in New Zealand as a Massey University Scholar in Residence where he and his wife, Dorothy, wrote a history of Restorative Justice in the country. Since 2009 Dr. Jantzi has focused on peacebuilding-and-justice-informed psycho-social work with CJP’s STAR Program—Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience.

Jan Jenner began her peacebuilding career in the early 1990s while she served in Kenya with Mennonite Central Committee. Realizing she needed more knowledge to become an effective peacebuilding practitioner, she came to EMU to study at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). She received her MA in 1999 and shortly began to work at CJP managing grants and peacebuilding practice. During her 17 years of work with CJP, she wrote and managed numerous grants and practice contracts, and was instrumental in developing and managing the Practice and Training Institute, and a number of its innovative programs, including STAR, Coming to the Table, and the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program. Since her retirement from EMU in 2015, Jan has continued her peacebuilding work in local Harrisonburg-area nonprofit organizations.

Janelle Myers-Benner completed studies in justice, peace and conflict studies at EMU in 2001. She began working at CJP in 1999 while finishing her bachelors. Her childhood years in Jackson, MS and time living in Immokalee, Florida and Santa Cruz, Bolivia have been significant parts of her life journey. Since 2005 she has been putting roots down in Keezletown, VA on a 6-acre homestead with her husband, Jason, and daughters Kali, Alida, and Terah, along with the memories of their daughter, Nora, who died in 2008. They are focused on learning to gain their dietary needs from the soil in that place. This is very connected with their desire to find a just way of living. When not working for CJP, she can probably be found in their gardens, tending animals, making cheese or working on some other food-related project.

Carolyn Yoder is a psychotherapist with a private practice specializing in finding courage, healing, and growth amid and after trauma. She was the Founding Director of STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience), the justice-and-conflict-informed training program begun by CJP after 9/11 that has trained thousands of civil society leaders on six continents amidst crisis, division, and violence. Yoder recently updated The Little Book of Trauma Healing and she offers online resources at www.PeaceAfterTrauma.com. For 18 years, she lived, learned, and worked in East and Southern Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. Now home in the United States, her passions include learning to act mindfully from the heart in a turbulent world, playing with her four delightful grandchildren, and caring for the planet they are inheriting.

Howard Zehr, widely known as “the grandfather of restorative justice,” began as a practitioner and theorist in restorative justice in the late 1970s at the foundational stage of the field. He has led hundreds of events and lectured in more than 25 countries and 35 states. A prolific writer and editor, speaker, educator, and photographer, Zehr actively mentors other leaders in the field. His books include Changing Lenses and The Little Book of Restorative Justice, both highly influential in the field, as well as photo/interview books such as Doing Life: Reflections of Men and Women Serving Life Sentences and Transcending, Reflections of Crime Victims. He was the initiator of The Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding series. Zehr joined CJP in 1996 and in 2013 stepped away from active classroom teaching. He remains involved with the Zehr Institute of Restorative Justice. Before coming to EMU, he directed the Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Office of Criminal Justice.

Ruth Zimmerman returned from eight years in the Philippines in 1993, an experience that pushed her to pursue further education and job opportunities in the areas of peace and justice. She applied for an administrative secretary at Eastern Mennonite University’s newly forming Conflict Analysis and Transformation Program (later shortened to Conflict Transformation Program, or CTP). Zimmerman was the first full-time employee of the fledging new academic program in 1994 and went on to become the co-director with Howard Zehr in 2002, remaining in that position until her departure in 2007. Ruth left CJP to join Mennonite Central Committee as a regional area representative, giving leadership to programs in India, Nepal and Afghanistan. After three years, she joined World Vision US as a senior program manager and has had responsibility for both Asian and African development programs. She plans to retire from that position in May of 2020 and return to live in Harrisonburg, Va.