War-Impacted People’s Dialogue Project: Research & Development

Claire Bates

I was in the middle of graduate school when the idea for my Pickett Endowment funded project took root. “I just want the world to be a more peaceful place,” many refugee individuals said, through interpretation in many languages, as I co-facilitated group sessions helping refugees set future goals as part of my Master of Social Work degree. What did it mean to have future goals so huge, especially in a place and time where many refugees in the United States must usually focus hard on putting bread on the table, keeping electricity on and a roof above their heads?

Toward the end of my degree, interning with GI rights work of Quaker House in Fayetteville, I came to understand ways in which military veterans and families in the U.S. have been significantly impacted by the military habits of this country, similar to the refugees I had worked with before. Come to think of it, we all have. All of us have seen funding for public education and other public benefits stripped over the years. All of us have seen our earth polluted by byproducts of military (including nuclear) manufacturing and testing.

So why aren’t we more actively talking about war and our own participation in keeping it going or helping it fade? Why aren’t more of us working together to end war? So began the seeds of the War-Impacted People’s Dialogue Project, a program meant to connect people across the U.S. in dialogues analyzing the impact of wars on their lives and finding ways to activate together for change.

Late March 2018

I’ve spent three months interviewing people in touch with the impacts war has had on their lives (including refugees, veterans, activists, and related nonprofit leaders) to get input in deciding whether and how to do this group dialogue project. These voices will last on and guide me in my head. I’ve found out that the Clarence and Lilly Pickett Endowment for Quaker Leadership will fund me for a Research, Development, and Piloting Phase for this project—to read, to interview, to seek mentorship, and to create and run a pilot dialogue series using a new method to help people explore the impacts of militarism on their lives and involve themselves in activism from there.

I’ve also learned I will have to move to an unexpected area to help care for an ill family member. This will make the first few months of my funded period intensively internally focused: on reading, grasping mentorship, interviewing, reflecting, and plotting out plans . . . probably just what I need.

I’ve gathered an amazing support committee of Quakers (mostly from Chapel Hill Friends Meeting, my Meeting during graduate school) who will join me monthly by videoconference throughout the project’s beginning and who give me insight from their own journeys and perspectives that help me move through.

Late July 2018

The four unexpected months in Michigan have been fruitful. I’ve read broadly—from Macy’s work about raising group consciousness regarding harmful systems to which we’ve grown numb, to Freire’s work on empowering dialogue, to Mindell’s work on leading transformative conversations in situations of inequality—and I feel ready to start. I’ve learned from regional political actions led by others about ways to approach direct action. I’ve drafted a dialogue method for this project that combines Nonviolent Communication, Freirean Popular Education, and Restorative Circles methods. And I’ve piloted the approach in 3 dialogue sessions I hosted from my family’s house in Michigan.

I pack my belongings in my car and move across the U.S.—to Northern California, where I’ve identified mentors who will help me in the process of launching this project: some, through their expertise in facilitating connective dialogue focused on social change; others, through their history of working for peace through putting their bodies on the line.

In my ideal situation, I will host one 6-week dialogue series engaging people from multiple backgrounds in the U.S. (including refugees, peace activists, veterans and military families, and other concerned community members) in analyzing ways war has impacted their lives, learning from one another, planning ways to start or join existing efforts for change. I will test and improve this approach, and share it with other regions – both facilitating the dialogues myself and sharing it with others to lead them.

Late September 2018

Settling in California has been challenging. I have been impressed by the variation in cultural emphasis and regional interrelatedness we have in different places in the U.S. I am building connections with local and regional activists and refugee- and veteran-focused groups, and I am learning that it takes time to do so and to plan, advertise, and implement logistics of this pilot 6-week dialogue series in a way that responds to strengths and characteristics of the local and regional environment.

The Pickett Endowment has extended my timeline to complete the initial pilot 6-week dialogue series in a way responsive to partners here. I refine the series’ content plans as I work on planning for logistics. My support committee via videoconference has agreed to extend their commitment to this project until the end of the initial piloting period.

Sometimes—in discussion with individuals and activists here, in mapping out the landscape of where people with various sorts of impacts tend to live and how to connect this work with them, in considering ingrained patterns of U.S. militarism—I feel hopeless or overwhelmed. But tonight, for dinner, I cook from a recipe for stuffed vegetables taught to me by women from the Middle East and think about their lives. Tonight, my mom—who has been drawing poster art for flyers for the War-Impacted People’s Dialogue Project—tells me on the phone that through creating these drawings she has considered more fully the impacts of war on service members and refugees. That is and will be the point of the entire project: to make the experiences of loss caused by war more tangible and present to each of us, motivating us to action.

C