As of July 1, 2013, Bill became the director of the Summer Peacebuilding Institute. He has worked at Eastern Mennonite University for 13 of the last 14 years.
Associate Director of Summer Peacebuilding Institute, CJP
In our STAR Level I and Level II trainings, we explore the impacts of trauma and resilience on body, brain, beliefs and behavior. We integrate many learning modalities, from embodied exercises to art-making to practice in compassionate listening. In this course we will dig deeply into embodied practices both for the individual practitioner’s well-being and ...More
Barry Hart and Mikhala Lantz-Simmons will co-facilitate SPI 2016 course Strategies for Trauma-Informed Organizations. With STAR and the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, they are inviting more people, policy and structure into trauma-informing our own SPI at EMU. Following the SPI 2015 course in Strategies for Trauma-Informed Organizations, Barry and Mikhala embarked on a process to apply ...More
At age 20, EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute has directly inspired the creation of 12 other intensive peacebuilding training programs in Africa, Europe, the South Pacific, North America, and Northeast and Southeast Asia, all of which are explored in this issue of Peacebuilder. The training programs operate under the following entities, listed in chronological order of ...More
The spring/summer 2014 issue of Peacebuilder focused on EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute at its 20th anniversary year. With the proliferation of peacebuilding institutes and workshops in Africa and elsewhere, is SPI still needed? In separate interviews, two Africans – one from Kenya and the other from Mozambique – answered “yes.” In 1996, Babu Ayindo traveled ...More
In the years I spent earning my master’s degree in conflict transformation in the early 2000s, the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) class I took with Mohammed Abu-Nimer remains a touchstone for me. The course title was something like “Understanding the Cross-Cultural Aspects of Conflict Transformation.” I don’t remember the names of my required readings, nor ...More
August 15, 2014 – 10:56 am
In the summer of 1994, about 40 peace and development workers gathered on the campus of Eastern Mennonite University for a one-week seminar called “Frontiers in International Peacebuilding.” It was the first official event held by what is now known as the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, or CJP, which was then so fledgling it ...More
August 11, 2014 – 1:06 pm
When volunteers were solicited, nobody immediately stepped forward. It was a tough request: tell a painful personal story before an audience of maybe 40, many of them strangers to each other, and watch seven people trained in playback theater re-tell it through an impromptu performance. Yet Muhammad Afdillah – a visiting scholar with EMU’s Center ...More
August 11, 2014 – 12:23 pm
In more than 20 years of participating in interfaith dialogue, guest lecturer Dr. Mohammad Shomali has travelled widely. He is the director of international affairs at Jami’at al-Zahra, a Shi’a Islam seminary for women, as well as director of the International Institute for Islamic Studies (IIIS). He resides in Qom, Iran. “I feel at home ...More
August 11, 2014 – 12:11 pm
Farshid Hakimyar has much in common with four men he greatly admires – Mahatma Gandhi, Khān Abdul Ghaffār Khān, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Like them, Hakimyar is a man from a comparatively comfortable family background and, as a result, he is well educated and can make choices that could lead him to ...More
August 11, 2014 – 11:54 am
Angela R. Dickey spent 25 years promoting the policies of the United States while working for the U.S. Department of State in Washington DC and in a number of countries from Canada to Vietnam. Now, the former diplomat hopes that her studies at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) will mark the beginning of a new ...More
