This 20 call series is your opportunity to connect with NVC enthusiasts from around the world, featuring 20 calls facilitated by experienced NVC teachers.
Participants have free access to recordings of the calls. Income from your registration will help retire BayNVC debt, support the Presenters and Organizer. Join us in January! NVC and Social Change: From Overwhelmed to Empowered.
Please register now to make sure you get to attend all the presentations that intrigue or inspire you! (Click here to register.)
Telesummit Program: Presenters and Their Topics by Date
Week 1 (Jan 4)
- Friday: Miki Kashtan — Working for Change without Recreating the Past No amount of individual change alone will suffice to change the rules of the game, the way our institutions are set up that make it so difficult to live a life of integrity, meaning, and love. If we want to create institutions that are truly embodying a transformed consciousness, our way of working for change is equally important to what change we want to create.
If the task of living a full, human, nonviolent life as an individual in a world of separation, scarcity, and powerlessness is challenging, maintaining the commitment to nonviolence on the deepest level while attempting to transform institutions and establish new ones is truly daunting. This will require learning from Gandhi and others how to oppose oppressive structures without any hatred, and aim to create a world that works even for the former oppressors. We will need to completely rethink our models of power and leadership so that we can collaborate and attend to all needs and still be efficient. And, in order to prevent a recurrence of the structures of domination, we will need to learn how to transform the lives of children, so that one day, a generation will grow up without fear, without punishment, and with trust in their natural human generosity and care.
Week 2 (Jan. 7-11)
- Monday: Mel Sears – Presence Now We will tap into the wisdom of the participants for this interactive presentation. Mel Sears will answer questions, do role plays, or give empathy as requested by you
- Tuesday: LORAKIM JOYNER — Ecological and Social Change for Everyone: Having energy, compassion, and empathy for all beings. Humans who relate to and work for nonhuman species exist in a society that struggles to embrace an emerging paradigm that includes all species in a consciousness of collaboration, nonviolence, mutuality, and power with (as opposed to competition, violence and oppression, hierarchy, and power over). Today we explore this new paradigm, and how we can be nurtured and healed in our relationships to others so that we can nurture and heal our communities of many species.
- Wednesday: Irmtraud Kauschat — Moving From Within:Power-Over to Power-With Being part of the transformation process from a power-over to power-with NVC organization (how to create structures and decision-making processes in a legal environment that promotes power-over structures – creating a new kind of leadership AND membership.
- Thursday: Alan Seid — Make a Positive Impact: maximize the opportunity you have in social change situations In this practice-based and participatory call, Alan Seid will present 4 real-life scenarios (“social change situations”) that will challenge and invite you to push, expand, and grow your NVC skills.
During this call you will expand your notion of what it means to participate in Social Change, and come away with concrete examples of how to apply empathy, honesty, and self-empathy in high-stakes contexts where you stand to make a big difference. - Friday: Catherine Cadden & Jesse Weins — ZENVC: NVC and Forgiveness Practice As we all trudge this road of Being Nonviolence and wanting our speech as well as our actions to reflect our intention, we come to understand forgiveness as an invitation to know Acceptance, Belonging, and Understanding on profound levels…so that we might join alliances, at least in our heart, with even those we think impossible…and especially with ourselves. Join us for an introduction to Forgiveness Practice, expressing regrets that are connected to needs, and hearing other’s regrets with empathy.
Week 3 (Jan. 14-18)
- Monday: Bob Wentworth – Moving from Fear, Aversion and Lack to Love, Aliveness, and Inspiration It is easy for social change efforts to spring from and perpetuate the same energy that gives rise to much of the world’s suffering. Imagine building social change movements around an energy that is so compelling that people can’t resist contributing and barriers melt away. Let’s take some steps in that direction!
- Tuesday: Carol Chase & Mair Alight –Stuck? Trapped? Hopeless? Let’s Talk! We invite you to join us and let’s see what we can offer each other. We will bring our decades of experience working in prison and jails, with couples and children. Can role plays be far behind? Let us together explore what can set us free!
- Wednesday: Selene Aitken – Hanging Unto the Raft of NVC While Reaching out to connect with Our Adult Children A supportive group looking at issues of estrangement, worry, frustration, conflict, boundaries, and dependence — with the goal of finding strategies for empathic connection with ourselves as well with our sons and daughters.
- Thursday: Suzanne Jones — Translating Their Words Into Their Feelings.When working with Occupiers during 2011 and 2012, I found that they were often angry, scared, frustrated, exhausted – not uncommon feelings for people engaged in political activism and social change. When I fed back what I was hearing them say, using giraffe words rather their angry words, they were often surprised and grateful, believing they had been really heard for the first time. Rather than expect them to use a vocabulary that they didn’t have, I translated for them with very good results in creating connections and, at the same time, demonstrating how impactful NVC can be.
- Friday: Lisa Montana –Incrementality: Breaking Through Despair We all have big dreams. We all have overwhelming schedules. And we all get maxxed out. If we focus on the endless to-do lists, our sense of overwhelm can immobilize us. But if we take baby steps, we begin to move forward again. In this teleclass, we’ll practice using self-empathy to identify the needs behind our stuckness, and look for solutions to meet those needs and help us move forward–one micro step at a time.
Week 4 (Jan. 21-25)
- Monday: Tod Kington John Lash –Restorative Seeing and System Blindness: The roots of nonviolence in NVC and the call to action. As practitioners of NVC we search out, inquire into, name and bring into intention the areas of our inner life and relationships that are limited or held back by personal systems of oppression like judgments, shaming, othering and shoulding. We unpack deeply held assumptions and beliefs to see if they are serving our needs and are congruent with our values. We use our tools to reveal meaning in our lives while literally seeking a restorative solution in our struggle for self-determination, personal acceptance and peace of mind. In this call we will turn our lens outward and apply our tools more generally towards society. We will invite a restorative dialogue into searching out, naming, and bringing into intention the structures and areas of society that suffer from the same systems of oppression which we struggle to resist in our inner lives.
- Tuesday: Pan Vera — Liberating Creative Potential: Creating a more wonderful life through the creation of Living Economies, Living Politics, and Living Cultures.Imperial societies maintain their dominance structures by consolidating control over three areas of public life: economic, political, and cultural—thus limiting people’s families and communities to whatever options the institutions of empire find it in their interest to offer. Having little control over their lives and struggles to make ends meet, people, withdraw from active engagement in civic life, causing the creative problem-solving capacity intrinsic to a vital community life to atrophy from neglect. The basic framework for the work of birthing Earth community is simple: make the life-affirming values of Earth community the values of the prevailing culture; renew the democratic experience to restore to people, families, and communities the power to give expression to those values; and do it all on a global scale. An immodest agenda, this requires, in the words of Francis Moore Lappe, that we take democracy where it has never been before. This discussion reviews our options to create the world in which we want to live.
- Wednesday: Newt Bailey — “Don’t just do something – sit there!”In all areas of life, and perhaps especially in areas where there’s an inner drive to make change, the list of tasks before us can be truly overwhelming. It’s easy to get demoralized, and even to start to question the approach we’re taking. Are we effective? Are we reaching the people we want to reach in the way we want to reach them? Newt will present some NVC-inspired personal practices to help with procrastination, focus, motivation, and appealing to our innate wisdom on how to communicate with those who are most difficult for us to connect with
- Thursday: Mitsiko Miller & Mali Parke –Andidotes to Bullying & Violence Mitsiko shares her own story about how advocating for her child’s safety at school has made a significant shift in school policies. She’ll share with you practical ways in your daily life that you can contribute to the self-empowerment, confidence and well-being of your children. Mitsiko offers peaceful parenting workshops and talks in Montreal, Quebec.
- Friday: Meagan Fischer –Tigers & Tibet: Grieving Global HeartbreakDo you find yourself heartbroken over the world’s overwhelming pain, wanting to do something about it but barely able to keep your own life together? Using a blend of NVC and EFT we will find solidarity with others who care this deeply, mourn until our hearts break OPEN, and explore ways to get proactive.
Week 5 (Jan. 28-31)
- Monday: Peggy Smith –Only Humans Here. Does parsing out if needs are “met” or “unmet” in any situation actually help us connect?
Come explore how going right to the beauty of needs – with people incarcerated -or who live on opposite sides of a war zone – or on your block – moves us away from duality and toward our universal human connection. - Tuesday: Aya Caspi — Being With Our Broken Hearts – practicing connecting with our care for the world, and discovering our own way of living that care“It is only through letting our heart break that we discover something unexpected: the heart cannot actually break, it can only break open… To live with a broken-open heart is to experience life full strength… When the heart breaks open, it marks the beginning of a real love affair with this world. It is a broken-hearted love affair, rather than conventional kind based on hope and expectation. Only in this fearless love that can respond to life’s pain as well as its beauty can we be of real help to ourselves or anyone else in this difficult age.”John Welwood, from his book, Love and Awakening
- Wednesday: Pamela Beck – Embodying Phoenix Rising: Finding the Embers of Renewal from the Ashes of Despair How to ‘be the change’ we wish to see in the world when instead of inspiration and vision we find ourselves consumed by despair and/or judgement? Drawing wisdom from the Joanna Macy’s Spiral (of her Work that Reconnects) we’ll explore the cyclical stages of: 1. Opening to Gratitude; 2. Honoring our Pain for the world; 3. Seeing with New Eyes; 4. Going Forth.
- Thursday: Godfrey Spencer — Burn-out: prevention rather than cure.We can so easily slip into overwhelm. Unwittingly we descend into depression, and from depression to burn-out. How we can become aware sooner rather than only once the damage is done..
Read the biographies of the presenters here!
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In devotion,
Mair Alight
Aya Caspi
Bob Wentworth
Carol Chase
Catherine Cadden and
Jesse Weins together, both Certified CNVC Trainers, facilitate individuals and communities in the learning and real-world application of practices such as meditation, conflict transformation, and the principles of nonviolence in a lively, experiential, and integrated way. You can find out more about their work at 
Enthusiastic and empathetic in spirit, 
Peggy Smith
Irmtraud Kauschat
LoraKim Joyner is a Unitarian Universalist minister, having served in parish ministry for 10 years in North Carolina, Minnesota, Texas, and Florida. Currently she serves as a community minister in Multispecies Ministry and Compassionate Communication. She is also a Certified Trainer in Nonviolent Communication, and a wildlife veterinarian working actively in Latin American avian conservation where she emphasizes the human dimensions of conservation.
Alan Seid began studying with Marshall Rosenberg in 1995, and in 1999 attended an IIT (10-day intensive) and served as Dr. Rosenberg’s Spanish interpreter in South America. Alan is a self-described “sustainability geek,” has a certificate in Permaculture Design since 1999, lives on 25 acres where he practices humanure composting, micro-hydroelectric (small-scale, renewable) energy production, and ecological forestry. He has been a devoted student of tools, processes, and methodologies for positive social change since his teenage years, and has been a CNVC Certified Trainer since 2003.