CKCPJ PEACE Leaders

Chester and Ann Grundy: CKCPJ's 2014 Lifetime of Waging Peace Recipients

CKCPJ held its Annual Dinner on Sunday, March 16, 2014. At that dinner, Dr. Kerby Neill introduced the Lifetime of Waging Peace recognition, awarded to Chester and Ann Grundy. This text captures much of his introduction. We are very grateful to him for sharing these words with our readers.

Dr. Kerby Neill offered these words as he introduced the award

This year the Council’s Lifetime Peacemaker Award goes to a couple. In honoring Ann Misiba Grundy and Chester Grundy, we recognize over four decades of raising awareness, of work for racial justice, of community education and empowerment, and of building racial pride. 

 Few communities have been graced with a couple that so masterfully celebrates the art, intellect, and triumphs of the African American community while continuing to address the challenges of prejudice reduction and cross-cultural understanding. 

Kerby Neill and Chester Grundy pass the microphone during the awards presentation

For 42 years, Lexington’s Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration has been a major cultural event in Lexington, inspirationally choreographed by Ann and Chester Grundy.  The music and messages that resonate from this remembering of Dr. King never compromise his voice. In the call for justice to roll like thunder, the Grundy’s are noisemakers and rollers.

 Between Chester’s work with the Martin Luther King Center at UK and the Grundy’s joint work on the annual King celebration they have brought an incredible array of Black luminaries to Lexington—Muhammad Ali, and Maya Angelou, Spike Lee and Coretta Scott King, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nikki Giovanni, Alex Haley and the Boys Choir of Harlem comprise only a short list. The list of jazz musicians that Chester has helped bring to UK’s Spotlight Jazz Series is equally exciting. 

With roots in a vibrant black church in Birmingham Alabama, pastored by her father, the Rev. Luke Beard, Ann was raised in a tradition rich in music, biblical justice, and community awareness. While at Berea College she returned to Alabama with a group of fellow students to participate in the historic march led by Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery. As she taught music in a program for seriously troubled children and later directed the inner city tutoring and mentoring program at the Bluegrass-Aspendale Teen Center, Ann has always sought to level the playing field for the disadvantaged. Ann has evolved over the years in her advocacy for racial justice moving from anger to artistry, from confrontation to inspiration, from teacher to story teller using her dramatic voice in narrations of black history and in song as a member of the American Spiritual Ensemble. Her work emphasizes the wisdom of the militant Latin American journalist, Eduardo Galeano, who reminds us, “Scientists say that men are made of atoms, but I know that men are made of stories.”

Chester Grundy was raised in Louisville by parents committed to the education of their children. His father was alarmed at Chester’s college choice—the University of Kentucky. In the mid-1960s, UK was not a university friendly to blacks. There were about 50 black students enrolled in UK when Chester entered and about two-thirds of new black enrollees left after their first year. Chester joined the Black Student Union and began working to make the university a more hospitable environment for black students. It is a mission he has never quit. Later, as UK’s director of the Office of Minority Affairs (later the Office of Multicultural Affairs) and director of UK’s Martin Luther King Cultural Center, Chester placed himself on that difficult frontier where he sought to support and enrich the university experiences of minority students on the one hand and educate and advocate on their behalf with the University Administration on the other. 

Chester and Ann have devoted a number of summers to purposefully empowering and developing historical awareness among Lexington’s black youth through education and travel projects. They are cofounders of the Lexington’s Roots and Heritage Festival, a marvelous vehicle for building bridges of understanding and a festival that has received significant recognition locally as well as in the state’s tourism portfolio. 

We could spend our evening summarizing the Grundy’s accomplishments, but we will close by saying the Grundy’s are proud parents and grandparents. Their two grandsons, Gibran and Garvey, are the reasons Ann is in Omaha tonight and not with us. In the overall scheme of things, grandchildren trump Peace Awards and nothing stirs our passions for peace more than our children and grandchildren.

Chester offered his own words in response to this award. The next post in this blog capture the written version of those remarks.

We are very grateful to photographer Rikka Wallin for permission to use these fabulous photos of our annual dinner. Click through to view her full Facebook album.

Chester Grundy's response to winning this award follows in the next blog post

The Science is in: Studies Describe Successful Youth Programs

Anyone remember the demand that youth “just say no” to drugs and the related Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program? The campaigns started in the 198o's with Nancy Reagan's efforts. Decades later, years of controlled studies have long discredited these misguided attempts to influence youth in meaningful ways.

Recently, Scientific American reviewed those studies and the failure of the "just say no" approach.  Article authors also provided a list of elements, identified by psychologists and epidemiologists, found in successful programs.  When supported by those key elements, children and youth can learn practical, real-life skills which help them navigate harmful influences. At LexingtonUnited, we were struck by those descriptions of successful youth program elements—we noted that they precisely match our own training and goals.

 According to Scientific American, "the most effective youth programs:

-"involve substantial amounts of interaction between instructors and students

-"teach students the social skills they need

-"give students opportunities to practice those skills—for example, by asking students to play roles on both sides of a conversation—while instructors coach them about what to say and do

-"unfold during many sessions—ideally, over several years (probably because they provide students with lessons that are reinforced over time, as children mature and encounter different environments)." *

The hula hoop is passed round a closed circle of friends holding hands

When LexingtonUnited trainers teach children cooperative games and use role plays, we’re creating small temporary communities that model workable nonviolent models and provide safe places for children to practice cooperation and problem solving.

During the winter break, our summer camp graduates and LexingtonUnited trainers led cooperative game sessions every day at East 7th St. Kids Center (participants pictured at right and below), and during the school year we’ll be there every week.  In just the few weeks of regular interaction, we are already seeing an improved climate, and are looking forward to helping to model, and thus cultivate, a culture of respect.  

Our children and youth want to be positive forces for good in their world. They are are more likely to be successful when they are provided the tools to reach creative resolutions to everyday conflicts that are a natural part of human interaction. LexingtonUnited trainers are dedicated to providing those tools.  We'll be posting details about our upcoming Spring Break Camp for middle school students soon! Send us an email at lexingtoncommunitybuilding@gmail.com to get updated information as soon as it's available.

East 7th St. participants begin "pass the can"

*For more information: You can read the original Scientific American article titled “Why ‘Just Say No’ Doesn’t Work: and what does” by Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz at http://bit.ly/SA_2013.)

 (author credit: Gail Koehler is a lead trainer at LexingtonUnited.  A version of this article will appear in the February 2014 issue of  Peaceways newsletter, a publication of the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice [CKCPJ].  LexingtonUnited is an initiative of CKCPJ.)

Central Kentucky Move to Amend and CKCPJ Bring "Why We Fight" to Lexington

guest post by Joy Arnold of Central Kentucky Move to Amend

Come out Sunday, January 19 to watch "Why We Fight" and join a panel discussion afterward to consider: Why do we fight?

An immediate answer is: To protect and spread democracy, silly. 

That's what we're told, over and over. Well, how's that going for us?  

All things being relative, perhaps by comparison to many other nations, through most of the last century we could still claim democracy was the basis of our form of government; some would debate how much democracy we've ever had. As the fitness buffs tell us, if you don't use it, you'll lose it, and through our neglect, we have.  In hindsight we are now learning that the government we thought we had was methodically being turned into what we now see as a plutocracy.

 Jan. 21 marks four years since the Supreme Court of the United States' (SCOTUS) ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.  Organized the following November, CKMTA is part of a coalition of organizations building a democracy movement which will, along with increasing participatory government, result in a Constitutional amendment declaring; CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE; MONEY IS NOT SPEECH.

This year to mark the day, CKYMTA determined to focus on one of the corporate industries that cripples our attempts at self-government and CKCPJ, recognizing our common interests, joins us.

With the Citizens United SCOTUS ruling, more of us than ever realized what the majority of that body intends for us to be -- a people whose lives are controlled for the pleasure of international mega-corporations and their stock holders who pull the strings of our elected so-called representatives.

We've seen our food supply adulterated; our medicines monopolized; our health relegated to insurance profits, not care; our environment all but used up; our news services pasteurized to the point of little more than entertainment; our educational system narrowed to preparing students to score well on questionable standardized tests and denying them access to problem solving life skills. 

Sunday afternoon offers the central Kentucky public an opportunity to look closely at another industry which is in place more for the profit of private corporations than our security or democracy.

Why We Fight, the 2005 film, describes how the military industrial complex has functioned to enrich a few while it destroyed the reputation of the United States around the world  and killed unknown numbers of innocent people and our enlisted troops.  Surely it would grieve President Eisenhower to know that he had so accurately predicted what would happen if we did not control that industry of which he had first hand knowledge.

Our purpose is to help our friends and neighbors come to grips with the fact that we have not learned an authentic history of our country and we've neglected our civic duty by thinking all there was to it was to vote.  So, it's up to us to re-educate ourselves; film is a painless vehicle for this education.  And education is the foundation for a growing democracy movement beginning to catch hold around the world.

A movement takes more people than are currently involved -- some say 25 to 30 percent of the population.  Come on out Sunday afternoon to learn about one example of why  you'll want to  join the movement to create democracy.  In the tradition of each of the movements before, education is the indispensible ingredient -- not just our individual, personal education with which we can be very self-satisfied, but the education -- indeed, the re-education of the people most harmed by the control of mega corporations around the world.

LOCATION: The Central Library opens at 1:00; the program begins at 1:15 and there will be a panel discussion and a reception after the film.  (Check the Facebook event page for updates)

Panel participants include Nancy Jo Kemper, pastor of New Union Christian Church, Richard Mitchell, life-long peace advocate and CKCPJ board member, Peter Berres, Viet Nam veteran and April Browning, student, democracy advocate, and CKCPJ staff. Let's watch, listen and then let's talk.

Rebecca Ballard DiLoreto, CKCPJ Co-Chair, on Panel for training for Family Court professionals

CKCPJ Co-Chair Rebecca Ballard DiLoreto has been invited to serve as a panelist on the role of alcohol in domestic violence during a training for professionals associated with Family Courts in Kentucky.

The training session will take place on Friday, January 31, 2014, and the event is intriguingly titled: "Dangerous Cocktail Shaken and Stirred: Mixing Alcohol, Anger, and Aggression Equals Complications for the Family Court." The panel discussion will be moderated by Judge Timothy Philpot. The panelists are professionals whose expertise is in domestic violence, substance abuse, and the law include:

Carmella Yates, PhD:  Director of Clinical Services, Chrysalis House

Teri Faragher, MSW:  Executive Director, Domestic Violence Prevention Board; has worked as an advocate to stop interpersonal and family violence for over thirty years.  She is the Director of the Domestic Violence Prevention Board, a local coordinating council on family violence in Lexington, Kentucky.  She is also the co-founder of OutrageUs, a web-based nonprofit that offers multi-media resources, tools and research informed strategies to focus attention on partner violence and help communities build on their strengths to stop it. Teri has spearheaded a variety of interdisciplinary, collaborative community projects aimed at protecting and supporting victims and holding offenders accountable.

TK Logan, PhD:  UK Professor in Behavioral Science and Researcher, author of over 130 research articles and 2 books: Women and Victimization and Partner Stalking; international presenter on violence against women and stalking.

Mona Gallo, Ed. D., LPCC, NCC, BIP:  Autonomous Provider, Counselor and Professor; practiced in 3 states with batterers and victims for over a decade; specialist in addictions and working with people who identify as LGBT.

Rebecca DiLoreto, Attorney and  Litigation Director for the Children’s Law Center, representing the interests of children.

David Waters, MSW, CSW, CADC:  Serving in the field of clinical social work for over nineteen years.  He is a Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor, and a State Certified Provider of Batterer’s Intervention Programs.  In addition to his twelve years experience working in domestic violence, he has also served as the chief administrator for a number of non-profit drug and alcohol rehabs, serving homeless, forensic, and veteran populations.  He is currently working with Crossroads Counseling as a staff therapist, as well as the Nest Center for Women, Children, & Families, as the Parenting Education Coordinator.

Dr. Alberto Carrillo, DCC, DCPC, DVOT-P:  Certified Family Therapist and Counselor; Batterers Intervention Program Provider; working with victims and batterers and families; offering services in Spanish and English.

Pati Coulter, Advocate, Therapist

Barbara Norris, MA, MSW, CSW; Domestic Violence Specialist, Office of the Friend of the Court, conducting Risk Assessments for Timesharing in Domestic Violence cases; 40 years in Social Work working with trauma, violence and dysfunctional families, Certified in Prevention Research Institute Lifestyle Risk Reduction; Certified Bavolak Nurturing Parent Instructor; Certified National Coalition Building Institute leader.

Danielle R. Sanders, Program Supervisor, Fayette County Drug Court, working over 12 years to develop a holistic approach to meeting the unique needs of its participants.

Sergeant Kevin Huddleston, Lexington Police, Special Victims Section.  Supervisor of domestic violence investigations and has 14 years of law enforcement experience.

Scott Lancaster, BSW, Child Advocate at Greenhouse 17 (formerly BDVP) since 2006;  formerly Family Program Supervisor at Pathways Drug & Alcohol Rehab. Center (Annapolis, MD); previously Residential Support at various group homes for Maple Shade Youth & Family Services (Eastern Shore, MD).

 

When you are looking for a home, sometimes you need an advocate!

During Lexington's "Looking for a Home" Posada procession (Tues. Dec. 17), one of our stops was at the Herald-Leader offices, because: When you are looking for a home, sometimes you need an advocate!

CKCPJ co-chair David Christiansen spoke appreciations and a call with these words: 

“We have a number of stops on our journey this evening.  As we walk...

-We are asking the business community for living wages for those who work hard to provide for their families.

-We are asking our city officials to pass an Affordable Housing Trust Fund so that everyone in our community has an opportunity to live in safe and affordable housing.

-We are asking our state officials to stop a lifetime of discrimination by restoring the voting rights of those who have paid their debt to society.

-And we are urging our federal government to reconsider how immigrants in our country are treated.

 “But this stop is different.  For here we come to praise the leadership of the Lexington Herald-Leader!  Our community newspaper has indeed been a shining example as they seek to represent the interests and concerns of ALL members of our community.

 “In particular, we would like to note the excellent reporting on the issue of homelessness.  The recent series of articles by Beth Musgrave helped us put a face on homelessness and highlighted the need for action by local officials.

"For all this we thank those here at the Herald-Leader and ask everyone in the community to listen to their voice as the newspaper steps forward by affirmatively supporting the immediate passage of an Affordable Housing Trust Fund."

Note: all photos in these recent posts were taken by CKCPJ board member Steve Pavey.  For a full album of the evening's activities, click here.

R.A.C.E. Forum Follow-Up

Realizing Accountability Creates Equity

R.A.C.E. Forum Follow – Up

Those who gathered at Imani on November 16^th, 2013, to discuss recommendations for reform of service to families and children of color who have engagement in the child welfare system agreed that reasonable next steps for action included the creation of work groups dedicated to the following topics:

1. School Engagement in Child Welfare

2. Recruitment of Foster Care Families

3. Building support for natural families and extended families

4. Improving Legal Representation for parents and children

5. Eradicating Racial Disparity from the Removal Process

To make progress in these areas that impact our system, our children and our families, we invite all present to sign up for one of these work groups by emailing Marion Gibson at marion.gibson@kysu.edu. Please advise if you are willing to chair or co-chair the particular work group that you want to sign up for.

The next meeting of the RCCW is slated for December 13^th. We will plan to spend the first thirty minutes of that meeting in these work groups for those who can be present. A chair or co-chair will be selected for each work group. Discussion will be held in the work groups on work group action steps and reasonable timetable for implementation. We will then share the discussion for action steps/proposed timetable for implementation with the larger group and incorporate the ideas generated into work group proposals to share with the larger membership and all who attended the R.A.C.E. forum. That communication will be emailed out by the New Year to all who signed up for attendance at the R.A.C.E forum and all on the RCCW email list.

The January meeting of RCCW is slated for January 24^th. We will ask that the work group chairs/co-chairs convene their work groups by person, phone or email once before the January 24^th meeting. On January 24^th each work group will then be asked to present further developed action steps for their work group with a proposed timetable for implementation. We will offer further refinement of those plans as a large group and then together establish RCCW’s plans for the year based on the actions of the individual work groups. Decisions made at the January 24^th RCCW meeting will then be shared with all who are on the RCCW email list and all who signed up in attendance at the R.A.C.E forum.

We appreciate your commitment and act in hope that we can bring better service to all our families in Fayette County and in that process eradicate the continuing vestiges of racial disparity that all of us stand opposed to.

Sincerely,

Fayette County RCCW Co-Chairs:  Marion Gibson and Rebecca Ballard DiLoreto

R.A.C.E. Forum, Nov 16, 1-4 p.m., Imani Church and Family Life Center

You’re Invited to Attend the

R.A.C.E. Forum

Realizing Accountability Creates Equity

November 16^th, 2013

Imani Family Life Center, 1555 Georgetown Road, Lexington, KY

A Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice VOICES Event

 Frederick Douglass, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” (1857)

Let us educate our selves about the harm caused to children and families by racial and ethnic bias in our community's institutions and together identify those steps we can take to improve the future for all of our children. Join with other committed Fayette Countians to build a network of compassion and erect bridges between gatekeepers and the community to serve all children and families more effectively.

Fayette County has had a Race, Community and Child Welfare Committee [RCCW] in place for the past several years. This committee, comprised of those who work with families and children in the child welfare system and interested community partners is devoted to eradicating racial disparity in our child welfare system with solutions that improve services to all children and families in our community. The Fayette County, RCCW Committee will be co-hosting a community forum to permit dialogue and recommendations for reform of service to families and children of color who have engagement in the child welfare system.

The forum will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. on November 16, 2013, at Imani Family Life Center, 1555 Georgetown Road. Several community partners are working with RCCW including the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice, the Children’s Law Center, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, the NAACP, SKY Families, Kentucky State University and Imani Family Life Center.  We invite all who want to learn more about this challenge or help to create solutions to attend.

The problem is readily identifiable. For example, in 2010, the population of youth ages 0-17 in Fayette County was identified as 68.9% White, 18.0% African-American, and 9.3% Hispanic. Yet, African-American youth represented 38.8% of children in out-of-home care in Fayette County and 36.3% of all youth referred to the Department for Community Based Services for alleged abuse and neglect.  In CY 2012, African-American youth represented 27.0% of all youth that exited out-of-home care in Fayette County, while making up 34.8% of youth that emancipated or aged out of care. (All data secured from the Cabinet for Health and Family Services through a contract with Kentucky Youth Advocates).

Educator and historian, Dr. Michael Washington will begin the event by educating us on institutional racism and the role of the gatekeeper in our community.  We will then participate in a guided conversation between community members and key gatekeepers who provide services to families through our local child welfare system.  Gatekeepers who assist families in working through the child welfare system include court staff, social workers and mental health service providers.

Following  meaningful dialogue, designed to advance our mutual efforts to reduce racial and ethnic disparities that negatively impact children and families, we hope to identify several strategic areas that require joint action by the community and system employees. We will conclude the afternoon with small group discussions designed to flesh out action steps that need to be considered by the Fayette County RCCW Committee.

The RCCW Committee will then bring these proposals to its January meeting and determine steps that may be taken to accomplish the identified reform. The event offers a way for concerned and compassionate members of our local community to join together and determine how we can effectively remove bias that can be so harmful to children in Fayette County and improve services designed to help.

For more information, or to be a co-sponsor, please contact Shanee Walker at shanee.walker@kysu.edu, or marion.gibson@kysu.edu, or call 859.253.1500.

Download the CKCPJ VOICES RACE Forum - Fayette County_2012 handout with statistics and graphs explaining the disparities by race (.pdf file).

University, Community Collaborate for Peace

CKCPJ Board Member and Peace Educator Dr. Kerby Neill  was one of four men on a panel, “Strengthening and Celebrating the Ties between UK and Lexington,” on September 18, 2013, 7 p.m., at the Marksbury Auditorium at the University of Kentucky. The other men (pictured here, left-right) were: Dr. Eli Capilouto, President of the University of Kentucky; Roshan Polli, President of the UK Student Government Association; Dr. Neill; Lexington Mayor Jim Gray.

The panel was introduced and follow-up comments were facilitated by CKCPJ co-founder and department chair of UK Political Science, Dr. Ernest Yanarella. Dr. Yanarella can be seen in the background of the picture below with CKCPJ Co-Chair, Dr. Richard Mitchell. (Dr. Mitchell's gesture accompanies his remarks about how UK faculty and researchers too often just "helicopter in" with projects and then leave without establishing long-lasting improvements in the community.)

An abbreviated version of Dr. Neill's story about the origins of the UK Peace Studies Undergraduate Certificate is available on page 2 of the September 2013 issue of Peaceways. Here below are Dr. Neill's remarks he read to a large group of community members, UK students, staff and faculty on Wednesday.

*****

While we are excited about the development of Peace Studies at the University of Kentucky, we are still a seedling of a program.  

We need to encourage other faculty to join us in teaching peace related courses and we aspire to grow from a certificate program to a level where students can minor in peace studies.  

We  also need to work out how we relate to existing programs from which students will be entering UK, especially the exciting peace courses that have been developed at our local Bluegrass Community and Technical College.  

Of special importance to Peace Studies and to this evening’s forum is the question of how Peace Studies students can simultaneously gain practical experiences of peacemaking and be of meaningful service to the campus and Lexington communities.  How do we facilitate the acquisition of personal, social, and global awareness that enables our growing peacemakers to appreciate the perspectives of others and to grasp the historical, cultural, economic, and structural conditions that ease or exacerbate problems?  Where on campus and in the community do they ply the skills that empowers them to work towards just, nonviolent, and transformative solutions to local, regional, and global conflicts?  I think the possibilities are many and I would like to share some thoughts about our opportunities and challenges.

We can certainly learn from existing peace studies programs.  Faculty at the new Peace Studies program at the University of Louisville took the initiative to gather representatives from peace studies programs in the tri-state area of Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio earlier this year to share ideas and explore ways to support one-another.  We learned what was happening in Louisville, at Columbus, and Cleveland. We discovered that Bellarmine in Louisville offers a course in peaceful communication where half the class, comprised of local students, interacts via satellite with the other half, comprised of students in Lebanon.

As we were developing the Peace Studies program at UK there was a parallel University/community effort to create a Peace House, on campus where students from areas of national and international conflict might choose to work together in an enriching living/learning community.  That initiative is currently side tracked.  Earlier this month, former Lexington Mayor, Teresa Isaacs, approached a faculty member who was working on that wonderful project to express her hope that it might be revived.  We certainly share that hope.

Still, peace does break out on campus. Even as our Peace Studies program was wending its way through the approval process of the Faculty Senate last year, many UK Students with faculty support were tackling problems of global justice.  One particularly dynamic group of UK students opposed to sweatshops sought to improve the University’s process for vetting corporations who might make UK apparel.  The students organized, demonstrated, and did their homework.  As a result Dr. Capilouto accepted their recommendations for the University to ally with a vetting organization with stronger ties to worker rights than the industry group with which UK was previously allied. .  CKCPJ was honored to recognize those students last year with their Sohner award for advancing workers’ rights.    

During the past 2 years, CKCPJ developed a capacity for teaching conflict resolution skills to youth through creative games and we are working hard to expand our capacity to offer experiential learning in areas of conflict resolution, prejudice reduction, and coalition building.  As our capacity grows we hope we can partner with both the University and the community in developing peace leaders.  

In 2011, several members of the Lexington community expressed a concern about the declining opportunities for Lexington’s poorer youth.  In response, the Lexington Youth Initiative of the CKCPJ met on 4 occasions with over 30 youth to seek their input on what issues were of primary concern to them.  We turned their concerns into a survey of 1,209 of Lexington’s middle and high school youth and channeled the results to Mayor Gray’s Commission on Youth Development and Public Safety, a commission set up in response to an outbreak of gun violence in Lexington.  Part time and summer jobs was the primary need given by the surveyed youth.  The youth who helped us frame the questions and collect and enter the data were able to see the City Council respond to their efforts by adding 75 new youth jobs to the city budget.   The University also engages in such classic action research and has enormous capacity to inform action on many local problems. In retrospect, we could have all used more help from UK in the work of that Commission and we must be sure we are more conscious of one another when we tackle community problems.

The sustainability of local initiatives is always a challenge.  As a current example, I might cite the efforts by John Kim of St. Joseph’s hospital in the Winburn neighborhood have helped strengthen that community and provide new youth programs. Alliances between Community Action programs, schools staff, churches, and the neighborhood association offer the promise of this grant driven initiative to persist, but it will not be easy. The UK College of Social Work has been a player in this process, but it is not clear whether this involvement is ad hoc or systematic.  I have little idea how we develop commitments to communities that move beyond the current interest of particular faculty or students and still capture the potential creativity of all the players concerned, but the rules of community engagement must attend to what is left in place when projects run their course, if University/community ties are to be most fruitful, progress must be sustainable, and citizens must not to feel like laboratory subjects.     

Finally, I would like to suggest an area of fruitful community/University partnership that is dear to CKCPJ.  We are now located in Lexington’s East End about which we learn more each day.  Just north of our offices lies the William Wells Brown neighborhood—a new grouping of attractive homes and apartments for low income families.  I hesitate to call it a neighborhood because the residents are still in the process of getting to know each other and the community’s potential for mutual support is hardly tapped.  In the Center of the new houses is the beautiful William Wells Brown Community school where the majority of the children are still on the low side of the notorious “achievement gap.” Less than 10 minutes away at the University of Kentucky are so many faculty and students versed in all the research that tells us what predicts low achievement, family stress, and potentials for violence.  Over the past few years several members of the CKCPJ Board have worked with community groups committed to addressing the needs of the East End or of Lexington’s at-risk youth.  Lisa Higgins-Hord, UK’s Assistant Vice   President for Community Engagement, has been an active player in these efforts.  This is one of many areas of Lexington rich in opportunities for the application of peacemaking skills and multidisciplinary support.  I would hope we can strengthen this relationship, not with the band-aid approaches of encapsulated service learning or research projects, but with a holistic and sustained, multidisciplinary effort in respectful partnership with community stakeholders.

Last Spring I was walking through the bright halls of the William Wells Brown School when a little black girl standing in line waved to me cheerily.  I responded with an upbeat, “Good Morning.”  She quickly moved her index finger over her lips to let me know there was no talking in the hallway.  We are welcome there but we must follow the rules--we must empower those we serve and respect the strengths of the existing culture!    We must be Peacemakers.