STOP in Transition

Happy New Year from the StoryTelling & Organizing Project

As many of you know, the beginning of a new year is bringing some big changes for Creative Interventions.  We're closing down our physical office and wrapping up the pilot phases of our projects.  Here are some updates about what this will mean for STOP.

We're excited to begin a new phase of our work!  During the next year we're going to be hitting the road collecting stories by video and audio and documenting the ways that community, organizational, and family networks have confronted situations of violence without relying on police or traditional state agencies. We'll be convening a series of community listening sessions and discussions during which local community members and organizations can share lessons learned, strategize future approaches, and learn new skills to better share best practices from their communities with others.

 During these sessions we'll share story segments, best practices, and products from previous listening sessions with other participants, discuss a local story or story from the STOP story bank, and plan activities to transform that story into tools and resources that can be used to address interpersonal violence within that community's neighborhoods, families, organizations, and similar social networks.

We are moving from a period focused primarily on collecting stories to one focused on how communities are applying the lessons they have learned from STOP stories to situations of violence they face.  In sharing best practices across communities and facilitating hands on engagement with, and critical analysis of, community-based approaches to interpersonal violence, we hope to increase communities' capacities to take steps to prevent, interrupt, and repair from violence and to break down the isolation that leads many of us to believe that we are alone in these struggles.

This new phase of the project is dedicated to breaking down that isolation by facilitating exchanges between STOP participants and the communities in which they work and live. By documenting and producing materials from listening/discussion sessions to be used by future participants, this phase of the project is designed to connect STOP partners in different parts of the country and the world.  We hope communities will be able to share and publicize their work while contributing to a powerful inventory of tools. 

We also hope to expand STOP's scope to include ways people not only confront interpersonal harm but also ways they confront state violence, while also envisioning how these interventions help to build truly sustainable and empowered communities.

Please join us in supporting the work of communities like yours that are developing community-based approaches to violence and helping to make these alternatives sustainable, replicable, and regenerative. Together we can build community self-determination to shift balances of power and the world we want to live in. 

PLEASE NOTE OUR NEW CONTACT INFORMATION:

www.stopviolenceeveryday.org

stories@stopviolenceeveryday.org

510.978.4014

PO Box 24840

Oakland, CA 94623

 

Creative Interventions Toolkit Update. Creative Interventions continues to work on a toolkit based on work from the Community-Based Interventions Project, a collaborative pilot project.  The toolkit gathers up the community-based interventions model, tools and lessons learned from the project. The toolkit also incorporates stories from the StoryTelling & Organizing Project to illustrate the many ways that people have creatively challenged violence. For general information on Creative Interventions or more on the toolkit, please see www.creative-interventions.org or write to 4390 Telegraph Avenue, Suite A, Oakland, CA 94609.