By George Lakey
August 2002

How to take the nonviolent direct action experience gained from toppling dictator Slobodan Milosevic and apply it to cleaning up a polluted Serbia? This is the question of four young Otpor activists who are launching the new movement "Greenfist."

For a Roma activist the task is rebuilding relationships between younger Roma (formerly called "Gypsies") and their elders. For two students at the University of Bulgaria, the challenge is bringing together Albanian and Macedonian young people who fear and distrust each other, while a team of four from Croatia are campaigning to democratize the University of Zagreb.

The nearly forty young adults worked on seventeen projects, supporting and challenging each other with guidance from seasoned organizers. The workshop participants themselves were from ten parts of Southeast Europe. We worked in the town of Brasov, Romania, near the Transylvanian Bran Castle made famous in Bram Stoker's novel. Participants were competitively selected by the sponsors, Youth Action for Peace (Europe) and Johns Hopkins University Bologna and the University of Bologna (Italy).

Is reconciliation happening?

Even though the challenges in the region are enormous, we saw changes. In July 2001 TfC Board member Claudia Horwitz (director of stone circles ) and George Lakey traveled to Vukovar, Croatia, and then in October led a follow-up train-the-trainer program in Bologna. Today, while Milosevic is on trial at the Hague for war crimes, while United Nations troops hold sway in Bosnia, and while an alarming brain drain of talented young people seek jobs outside the Balkans, we were amazed to find the youths in the Romania training showing a remarkable optimism.

In contrast to the despair of a year ago and the open animosities of October, this group was eager to put what they called "the old mentality" behind them and create new structures for living.
One of the group's many signals of this was in the culture-sharing evening. Young people from parts of former Yugoslavia acted out their recent history: sitting in small circles defined by nationality they portrayed growing suspicion and hostility, peaking in a mock war, then exhaustion, then the ringing voice of a Roma man singing an old song everyone knew which was picked up first hesitantly then robustly. The skit ended with Balkans youth singing arm and arm.

That's where these young people want to go. Our challenge as trainers is to give them tools to get there, including the tools to address the pain of the journey. As humanistic psychologists sometimes say: "The only way out is THROUGH!"

THE FEAR OF DIFFERENCE

Find the common ground among people in conflict: that's a popular currency in conflict resolution. Unfortunately, common ground is only half the coin. The other half is: "Acknowledge the differences!" Until a group (or a couple) engages difference, conflict transformation is not possible.

Yugoslavia itself provides a tragic example. Decades of Communist Party rule led by Tito stressed the common ground approach. As long as the one party-state remained dominant, Yugoslav differences were muted. The world knows what happened when the lid was taken off. The fear and distrust buried along with the differences were called forth by nationalist politicians grabbing for power, and neighbor turned against neighbor in "The Killing Time."

We trainers were empathic with the participants' reluctance to engage difference, given what they've been through. After all, even conflict resolution professionals, Quakers, and others are known for conflict aversion and an emotional attachment to harmony. Nevertheless, we designed a series of steps leading away from the initial garden of our common ground into the wilderness of difference.

First, the Celtic Wheel of Being, a way of understanding different personal temperaments as they show up in work groups and teams. In doing this exercise we supported participants to voice their irritations at the temperaments different from their own.

We then created "dialogue groups" of six from different nationalities and religions, staffed by process observers who gave feedback to the groups each day on their risk in venturing beyond common ground.

The next step was an awareness exercise sometimes called Step Forward/Step Back, or Power Shuffle, in which participants translate multiple differences into bodily movement and end up arranged across the floor.

Gradually increasing the risk, we did two role-plays. The first was in the parallel lines format in which each participant is working with one other. The task was to stop an angry parent from beating their child. This role-play challenges most participants' wish to avoid conflict, and builds skills in the application of nonviolent action we call Third Party Nonviolent Intervention. The second role-play scenario suggested by the participants was a community group's protest which is set upon by police; here the skill-building dimension was nonviolent tactics in campaigning for social change.

After sharing in small groups stories of incidents when participants had stood up for themselves without using violence, we added to their tool kit the well-known "I-Statements" (also known as "X-Y-Z Statements"). Immediately they used the tool to confront their roommates of the week regarding points of irritation or resentment. (By this time in the week, most participants had them!)

Again stepping farther into the wilderness, participants were ready to acknowledge more difference in the room. We asked them first to clap in unison with a facilitator. They did so. We then asked them to clap freeform, listening to each other as they created rhythms. This may be the shortest diversity exercise yet invented! The debrief noted the positive value of difference in supporting interest and creativity.

The mingle was next, an exercise which creates a series of one-on-one encounters. The task: one participant acknowledges a difference s/he notices between them. The exercise allows a range of risk and self-disclosure, enabling each participant to venture outside their comfort zone as bravely as they can. This also was debriefed, including both affirmation and challenge, following the experiential learning model which TfC trainers use (Experience, then Reflect, then Generalize, then Apply.)

By this time the group's courage was still higher and Claudia invited volunteers to come to the front of the room and be interviewed by her on a difference they have. She used the classic three questions as the basic structure of each interview: "what do you find positive about your difference? What's hard about it? If there are people here who would like to be your allies, what do you want them to know?"

More participants volunteered than we had time for. Those who shared, did so movingly, including the four women who came forward to share about sexism.

ENGAGING DIFFERENCE BACK HOME

While participants were visibly moved both by the information and by the vulnerability shared by those who were interviewed, we wanted to be sure that everyone could apply their growing capacity to engage difference back home in their organizations and in their divided communities. We therefore moved to a TfC-invented exercise, "Mainstream/margin," a complex sequence of activities in which the participants themselves generate specific tools and practice using them.

Psychologist Arnold Mindell has expressed the organizational development assumption which underlines the exercise. He believes that an organization grows through its mainstream's engaging with its margins and re-negotiating its relationship with them. The Youth Organizing Institute consists of young people who are in various ways on the margins of their own societies, yet also share mainstream characteristics AND define the mainstream in their own grassroots organization.

The exercise provides internal leadership development (managing the mainstream and margin aspects of themselves) and at the same time gives them tools to grow their own organizations through engaging differences which have been marginalized there.

SHARPENING THE PROJECTS

Since these young organizers came to the Institute with projects in mind, the staff worked intensely with them to strengthen their work. Assets Based Community Development (ABCD) gave us our basic model. Vision, message, and mission were honed. Staff challenged the teams and individuals to revise their projects in light of best practices both internationally and in SE Europe's own experience of nonprofit and grassroots groups.

On the final day the projects were presented one by one, exposed to challenge by other participants as well as staff. From Albania to Serbia, from Romania to Turkey, from Montenegro to Bulgaria, the teams shared their visions and timelines.

To facilitate this Institute Claudia and I joined Todd Waller, director of the Hopkins/Bologna youth leadership work, Valery Rey Alzaga (Mexico), and Sandra Palong (Romania). Five experienced young people from four countries created a back-up team to support the entire training and its logistics.

TfC supports the Balkans work also by inviting young Balkans activists to its Super-T in Philadelphia each June; the invitee in 2002 was a trainer for Otpor who participated in Vukovar and Bologna in 2001.