Nonviolent Communication: Facilitate Change: Using NVC to Create Social Change

Dian Killian, PhD, is founder and director of Brooklyn NVC, a CNVC Certified Trainer, and co-author of Connecting across Differences: A Guide to Compassionate, Nonviolent Communication and Urban Empathy: True Life Adventures of Compassion on the Streets of New York. As an NVC trainer, she has worked with diverse organizations leading trainings, conducting mediation, and providing organizational support; some of the non-profits she has worked with include the 14,000 member Park Slope Food Coop, Connect NY, the AJ Muste Institute, the Peace Alliance/Dept. of Peace campaign and Planetree. She has taught NVC workshops across the US and in Ireland, including at the NY Open Center, Insight Meditation, SUNY Binghamton, LaGuardia Community College, and at the NY Residential Intensive. As a trainer, her passions include NVC for social change and organizational development/support, NVC and creativity, and a kinesthetic/body-based approach to NVC/empathy. Along with a team of four other trainers, she is the creator of the Facilitate Change program, a year-long program on NVC and social change.

As a social change activist, Killian has been active for more than 25 years in the anti-war, labor, and gay rights movements and in community gardens. She is a graduate of the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute, has organized graduate teaching assistants, worked as organizer for the National Writers Union/UAW 1981, and chaired for several years the NY chapter of Pride at Work, a gay labor organization. In the alternative press, she has written about gay rights, labor, immigration, and other social change issues; her PhD, in the area of critical/narrative theory and cultural studies, focused on the inter-play of colonialism, emigration, and the construction of race and national identity. In 2003, New York City Counsel recognized her for her activism when she was given a Hero Award.

Martha Lasley

Martha Lasley is a founder of Leadership that Works, where she coaches and trains leaders from all walks of life. She designs courses for Coaching that Works, a coaching school that integrates NVC philosophy. She has taught hundreds of coaching courses, in person, by TeleCourse and on line with Capella University's MBA program. As a CNVC certified trainer, her passion is coaching visionaries, especially social activists, executive directors of nonprofits, and Nonviolent Communication practitioners.

Partnering with Dian Killian, Martha is developing a year-long Facilitating Change program (facilitatechange.org) that uses NVC as the primary activist tool for promoting social change. She wrote the book, Courageous Visions: How to Unleash Passionate Energy in Your Life and Your Organization, and is working on another book, Facilitating with Heart: Inspiring Social Change and Personal Transformation. Her article, Difficult Conversations was published by Group Facilitation magazine which you can read here.

Facilitate Change: Using NVC to Create Social Change

A Telecourse Recording with Dian Killian, PhD, CNVC Certified Trainer and founder and director of Brooklyn Nonviolent Communication and CNVC Certified Trainer Martha Lasley from Troy, Pennsylvania, USA.

Recorded during December, 2008

Fee: $15.00 USD

In this course, we’ll take the first steps in exploring, via NVC consciousness:

Our vision for the world
How we can go about “being the change,” living fully in integrity with our values in our work, community, faith and social action groups
New ways to use NVC to support social change and creating the world we want to live in!

You’ll get a taste of the year-long Facilitate Change program that supports the development of social change leaders and their organizations to create the change they wish to see in the world. By applying the consciousness and skills of compassionate, Nonviolent Communication to social change projects, Facilitate Change fosters “compassion in action” at a personal, group, and international level, taking tangible steps towards creating a world where human needs are peacefully met.

Through sharing an NVC-based approach to social change with an ever-widening circle of activists, our goal is to transform societal beliefs, institutions and practices so as to create a partnership/power-sharing society where basic human needs are met, all needs held with care, and human beings can live together free of violence. Inspired by NVC principles, we seek to create a social activism that is holistic, sustainable, inspiring, powerful, and joyful—transforming hearts, minds, individuals and the world.

Questions to Explore to Facilitate Change:

What does a “partnership” or “shared-power” culture and society look like, both in our “own” culture/society/neighborhood/home and around the world?
How do we go about creating such a society in a way that’s already “creating the change” in integrity with our goal and vision?
How does the practice of Nonviolent Communication inform such social change, both in terms of vision and activism?
How, in exploring these questions, will the form and practice of our organizations and activism itself transform?

How Nonviolent Communication Supports Social Change

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) offers practical skills to support a consciousness where individuals, groups and communities can fully hear each other, restore care and connection, and discover new strategies that work for everyone. NVC training offers integrated practices (such as deep/empathic listening, group facilitation skills, needs-based decision making) that can support organizations in doing their work and achieving their mission with flow, effectiveness, integrity and ease.

On a larger scale, Nonviolent Communication offers an integrated practice to support the transformation of society and culture towards a “partnership” or collaborative paradigm where all human needs and the needs of all life can be held with care.

Our Philosophy

Our Beliefs about Social Change Inspired by the Practice and Principles of Nonviolent Communication that inform this tele-class and the Faciliate Change Program:

Social Change is the conscious, concerted, and strategic effort to transform society, including institutions, practices, policies and beliefs, so that human needs and the needs of all life matter and are held with balance, mutuality, interdependence and care.
Violence can be seen as a tragic response to unmet needs and/or the perception/belief that an individual’s or group’s needs do not matter or matter “less” than another’s; “justice” in this context can be seen as a restoration of human connection and a willingness to act on meeting everyone’s needs; true and lasting peace comes from acting on the belief that all human needs (and the needs of the planet and other living beings) are inter-dependent and of value.
In seeing how human needs can be met, we are not attached to any particular strategies; as Gandhi suggests, “That which meets the most human needs comes the closest to truth.”

To see more about our philosophy regarding social change and NVC, please visit www.FaciliateChange.org

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