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BY AARON WASSERMAN

In print | April 21, 2005

Peace Week Swarthmore, a week-long interactive program promoting the prevention of violence in local and global communities, begins tomorrow afternoon with an open-mic session on Parrish Beach, the first among many planned activities.

The Peace Week Swarthmore planning committee, featuring several student activist groups, academic departments and administrative offices, have all organized the week’s events, but the main protagonist among this group is Students Against Violence Everywhere Are Us and its founder, Brandon Wolff ’08.

Peace Week Swarthmore is inspired by Wolff’s work in high school organizing a similar event for Bucks County, Pennsylvania, also called Peace Week. That program focused on combating high school violence, but Wolff said this year’s edition was designed specifically to use Swarthmore’s resources in order to create a more global affair featuring multiple activists’ voices and opinions.

The program, which continues through next Friday, bears the influence of its many sponsors, incorporating multiple formats and perspectives and the issues that pertain to their respective organizations into a unified, anti-violence theme. Peace Week Swarthmore will feature several lectures and panel discussions, and present students’ and academics’ research, but also seeks to strengthen community activism by encouraging wider participation in the activities and inspiring audience members to begin working for a certain cause.

“We’re providing a forum to become more knowledgeable and to hear a different side of an issue,” Wolff said. “We want participants to become more empowered and become more involved.”

The events will highlight work being conducted by student groups and non-profit organizations to resolve international conflicts, including that of Swarthmore Sudan, Dialogue for Peace Initiatives and Nonviolent Peaceforce, but also will feature presentations from local activists, including Leap-Kids, the Coalition for Peace Action and the Nonjustice Foundation, both of which are based in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. The enormous cast, Wolff said, will help show how different activist organizations use different platforms, perspectives and media for peaceful change.

After Friday afternoon’s opening event, the Friends Meeting House will host a potluck dinner followed by “Peacemaking in the World,” a discussion led by David Hartsough and Erika Shatz, the co-founder and Major Donor Development Officer of Nonviolent Peaceforce, respectively.

Nonviolent Peaceforce’s mission is to facilitate the creation of a trained, international, civilian non-violent peaceforce. The organization employs a peaceful monitoring corps to protect human rights workers in militarized areas whose personal security is endangered by armed groups. “We make the safety for local peacemakers to do their work,” Hartsough said, adding, “The world doesn’t yet have a mechanism to respond to non-violent movements and we’re trying to help organize that.”

On Sunday afternoon, Peace Week Swarthmore’s flagship sponsor, SAVE R US, founded by Wolff, will host a “Walk for Peace.” The walk features nine “action stations” hosted by local and student organizations that seek to inform walkers and encourage them to become involved in peace-oriented groups.

Friends Historical Library’s curator Chris Densmore will provide a historical perspective of Swarthmore activism on Monday night, in his lecture “Nonviolent Resistance: Swarthmore’s Founders and the Underground Railroad.”

Densmore said his talk will explain how the college’s founders, including Edward Parrish and Edward Magill, Swarthmore’s first two presidents, and James and Lucretia Mott, early friends of the college, worked in Philadelphia’s abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad, described by Densmore as “one of the first massive, nonviolent, civil disobedience actions.”

He said that the founders still serve as the historical base for the college’s tradition of activism and “people working out their convictions nonviolently.”

Wednesday night features a lecture by Jim Kimmel, the founder of the Nonjustice Foundation and author of “Without Lawyers, Guns or Money).” Kimmel, a practicing lawyer for many years, recently reversed career paths to begin promoting conflict resolution through personal and civil, not legally retributive, means.

Through his writing and activism, Kimmel is working to create a grassroots campaign of “non-justice.” Kimmel described “non-justice” as the effort to restore personal happiness and to abstain from seeking vengeful justice, which he described as the root cause of violence escalation. “There is a craving for justice itself that sets into motion our own suffering,” he said.

Kimmel recently donated $45,000 worth of non-violence books to the City of Philadelphia’s Gun Buyback Program, which he believes is a way to “change dialogue within the city — resolving conflicts peacefully before picking up a gun.”

The members of the organizing committee for Peace Week are SAVE R US, DPI, Swarthmore Sudan, Student Council, Ruach, Rhythm and Motion, Swarthmore Friends Meeting, Peace and Conflict Studies Committee, Latin American Studies Committee, The Friends Historical Library, The Admissions Office, The Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility and The President’s Office.

The complete schedule of events can be found at the group’s Web site, www.saverusinternational.org.

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