Perspectives on Peace: Transforming Tomorrow
Perspectives on Peace: Transforming Tomorrow is the podcast hosted by The M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence that seeks to inform & inspire a better future.
We are based in Rochester, New York and seek to cover topics that are vital to our community and serve as the launching point to transform tomorrow. We attempt to do this in a way that feels authentic & inclusive.
Join us as we investigate perspectives on peace so that we can work on transforming tomorrow!
About The M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence:
The M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence (MKGI) is a nonprofit that equips people to use nonviolence to create a sustainable and just world for all.
MKGI collaborates with local organizations, academic institutions, students, and committed peacemakers in these areas: Nonviolence Education, Restorative Practices, Environmental Sustainability, & Racial Justice.
We prioritize programming for people between the ages of 12 and 24. We offer training in skills such as Nonviolent Communication, meditation, cultural humility, de-escalation and experiential interconnectedness.
By serving as a physical manifestation of Gandhian principles and Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community, the Gandhi Institute seeks to advance the cause of peacemaking regionally and beyond from within a neighborhood challenged by poverty and violence.
Perspectives on Peace: Transforming Tomorrow
Perspectives: On Nonviolence at Work with Kit Miller
Discover how to foster more authentic, courageous, and nonviolent interactions in this episode of the Gandhi Institute podcast, 'Perspectives on Peace, Transforming Tomorrow.'
Host Erin Thompson discusses the release of Culture Shift: Nonviolence at Work with its author, Institute Director Emeritus Kit Miller.
The conversation covers the inspiration behind the book, its significance in promoting nonviolence in workplaces, and practical applications for fostering wholehearted and sustainable work environments. Kit shares her journey and insights into cultural humility, the importance of authentic dialogue, and the necessity of creating supportive structures for nonviolence.
Join us as we explore how nonviolence and community can lead to more fulfilling lives and a more compassionate world.
Let's learn together and start our own culture shifts!
Culture Shift: Nonviolence at Work by Kit Miller is available now on various platforms!
Links & Resources from the episode:
Connect with Kit and her work
Get your copy of Culture Shift: Nonviolence at Work
Pace e bene
Bookshop.org
Connect with the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence
Hello everyone and welcome to Perspectives on Peace Transforming Tomorrow. My name is Aaron Thompson and this is the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence podcast. We've got a special treat for everyone. Today we have the release of a book penned by none other than Institute Director Kit Miller. This book is called Culture Shift Nonviolence at Work. Having just given that introduction, I'm brought back to a conversation that Kit and I had before going live, where, in her gentle way, she was saying that she looked forward to doing a little bit of connecting before jumping in with both feet, and I think it only makes sense for us to honor that. So how are you doing, kit Miller?
Speaker 2:Blessed out right now. It's great to be here. It's good to talk to you. It's really fun to be on this podcast with this book, because some of my hopes for this project have to do with this work that everybody is doing here.
Speaker 1:This is like my favoriteholding this book in hand and, having gone through it a little bit, being able to connect different elements, different chapters, to things I have seen play out or part of, and on you to be working in these areas like to see this body of work kind of distilled into this book is remarkable, and to have it in a tangible form that people are going to be able to pick up, absorb and use, it's wonderful seeing it happen.
Speaker 2:We were together here for a long time. This is your story too. It's the story of the people who are here now. Hopefully it'll be the story of the people here. Well, you know, when nobody knows our names. That's always been my hope and, yeah, you know, one of the important parts of it was doing the interviews, talking to 19 former staff, current staff, former board members and current board members to check and double-check. I really want it to be authentic and sharing what is so special about this place and how hard it is to do these things and how very worthwhile it is to work in the way that we've tried to work, to stand for what we try to stand for here. It's so important in the world, so hooray for all of us.
Speaker 1:This book.
Speaker 2:Hooray indeed, kit. Who would you say that this book is intended for? You know, the backstory of this book precedes my time at Gandhi Institute. It dates back to when I started working as a teenager and noticed how people work together. It's always been a subject of fascination for me. My undergraduate was at Cornell Industrial Labor Relations Program, in part because I'm really interested in how groups do things, how people work, how we spend our time.
Speaker 2:I did my master's in social innovation and sustainability still looking at those kinds of questions functionally, so this book is in some ways an organizational memoir. It's about how we work in ways that bring as much wholeheartedness and sustainability and love into the world as we possibly can, and also to help people take a good second look at nonviolence, because we need it. I think this book could be for anybody who functions in a group, whether it be a faith community or for-profit or not-for-profit. A lot of the examples for me also came from being a parent and the learning of being a spouse, especially in a politically religiously divergent marriage like I have. It's been amazing. I learned a lot. I hope it's a useful book for a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily think it would be a book for them.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, one thing that I can say is that the book is relatively concise In total, 170 pages covering nine chapters, all of which have a number of topics. Was it tough distilling all of this down into chunks? There's some ground that you cover across the chapter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that book was written. This book was written and rewritten. I kept thinking, oh, it's done. And then, oh no, there's another rewrite in my future. I'm just so glad it's done. God bless this, you're all done.
Speaker 2:I wanted it to be super user-friendly. I know how busy people are. I know how short our attention spans have become, honestly, trained up through technology, and I also know how important it is for teams to learn together. So this book was created for teams to choose a little chunk, which could be like a page of text or two pages, some of the longer sections with reflection questions at the end. I kept thinking of teams like reading it together and talking about it. That would be like a little dream come true. If there's teams of people, this could be faith. Communities could be using this book for profit.
Speaker 2:I've had the good fortune of working both while I was at the Institute, before I was at the Institute and since I left, in many different settings education, healthcare, banking, the courts. I just haven't run across a place yet where people don't need more support than they get to be able to be human beings with one another in a really good way. There's a lot more fear now than there used to be, in more and more spaces, and I hope this book helps people to be more authentic, more courageous with one another, more willing to have the difficult, critical conversations. We need to have to do our best.
Speaker 1:So this book talks about nonviolence First. The opening bit is nonviolence at work. Are there some misunderstandings or misperceptions that folk sometimes have about nonviolence that you're open to address and clarify some of what you've written?
Speaker 2:what you've written? Yeah, definitely. One of the quotes from our colleague, alex that I really like is that people often think of nonviolence as moral perfection and that it's not that at all. It's a way of doing more and more good over time, less and less harm over time, and that we can make those small choices. The book talks again and again about the small choices we can make how we use our time, how we use our language, how we can step towards one another in difficult moments, the structures that we can set up so that we can help each other do that more. I want people to understand that nonviolence isn't just some realm of perfection that's disconnected from our lives. It's actually critical for us in a world with as much violence as the one that we have. We've got to start working out doing our reps with nonviolence.
Speaker 2:I was reading a quote from Amanda Gorman, the poet, recently. She said something along the lines of this country, it's way easier to ban a book than to ban assault weapons. You know, and we're talking to each other on the heels of yet another school shooting. I just keep thinking of the kids in these schools, you know, in the ones where districts where there haven't been shootings. Yet it's haunting schools now it's haunting children's lives. The idea that someone could come in and hurt them that way it haunts all of us. Buffalo and the Tops shooting, tops shooting. We have got to get a handle on violence. I want people to look at nonviolence much more seriously. It's not just some pie-in-the-sky perfection. It's what we can work towards, without being perfect, to make the world a much better place. And if we can't have the moral imagination to make it better for ourselves, think of some child whose life matters to you and do it for them.
Speaker 1:I am curious about the interview conducted with 19 people right, you and I sat together for Sure did. Did anything unexpected arise? Did anything surprise you in the process of these interviews? Anything come up that was a challenge or that gave you pause, as you were putting your thoughts.
Speaker 2:You know, especially as people who walk around in the world with black and brown skin, where the status quo protections actually don't work for you. They often work against you. So you know the need for self-defense, the need to not trust that the state is going to actually take care of you, your family, your neighborhood in the way that it should. If anything, it's going to come in and be an oppressive place, like has so often happened in the neighborhood in which we're all sitting right now, where the institute is located. I feel grateful to you in particular for how I tried to break violence and nonviolence down in the early part of this book. That really came a lot from the conversations not just one you and I had and really understand that we can't just be impractical about taking care of ourselves. There's all sorts of ways to think about nonviolence. If we think about nonviolence, we want to have it within ourselves. We want to be people who have less harsh criticisms and less imposter syndrome, less harshness towards ourselves. Anyone who's spent some time looking at that we know that harshness within just spills out. It just does. There's no way it doesn't. If it doesn't spill out on the people around us, it spills into our declining health mental or physical.
Speaker 2:So we want to have a better relationship within ourselves. We want to have better relationships with the people around us. We want to be more loving people. We want to be more courageous people with our friends, our colleagues, our neighbors. We want to know how to do that. We want to have hope that the world can be a better place. So there's all sorts of ideas, I hope, in this book that will help people take a next step and then a next step after that. I hope in this book that will help people take a next step and then a next step after that. And I have a lot of humility about what it's like I can't speak for what it's like to walk in the room with your identity as a black man, and so I really get that. I want the world to be a safer place for you and I think that the ideas in this book could help with that. And I think that the ideas in this book could help with that.
Speaker 1:I am thoughtful about the pressures that we're under as a society. We feel limited in time. Sometimes there's a scarcity mindset that we adhere to. You know, the language in this book is accessible. The reflections and the thought experiments are practical. I really have the sense that if people give the minimum investment of reading through processing this, that it's going to provide value. Who is questioning the viability of folding in some of these changes to? They've got shareholders that they're responsible for? There's this gravity to kind of stay in the system as is and maximize the current system as is and not introduce a whole bunch of new elements to it to destabilize right? How do you create a bridge to non-violence, to the person who's deeply immersed in it? Trappings of society as it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if somebody was deeply invested in the story of business as usual and received the benefits of it meaning they were mainstream people who didn't experience any kind of harm or inadequacy as a result of systems not serving them well it may be very hard to see that things need to change. So what I'm interested in is the aspects of people's lives where they recognize and they can see where things aren't working well. That's one thing. If you have a kid with a learning difficulty or issue and all of a sudden you notice how the school doesn't actually help them in the way that they need to be helped, you've got higher issues with turnover in your area than you want to have and you've measured and noticed that the cost of bringing a new person onto your team and the loss of institutional knowledge from that turnover is creating actually way more pressure and lowering the effectiveness of what you could be making happen in the world. So that's also something that I thought a lot about in this book. I think it's just a question of what matters to you and what you want to improve. I also think that for me, one of the biggest gateways even if you're walking in the world with an identity where things are pretty well set up for you. One of the biggest gateways for me and again I talk about this in the book is learning people who are different from me like really loving people I'm so lucky to have and it's not just luck, it's cultivated luck too to have people that I really love whose identities diverge significantly from me because of their religion, because of their sexual orientation, because of their race, their ethnicity, their immigration status. When we love people who are not served by what's happening, then it's an invitation for us to use everything that we have, all the things that we are gifted with. Gandhi talked about that we are trustees of the gifts that we receive, whether our gift is music and art, like yours is Erin, or mine is sometimes like talking I don't know what my gifts are, I guess, but listening for sure. So whatever gifts we bring into the world, we can use them in service of life itself and we become more generous in what we want to do with those gifts when we have love for people who are less like us. Even someone who is working in a large organization, maybe they have one friend who has a story that's really different from them in terms of where they grew up or what their immigration status is, or they're just naturally curious. So I hope that people, regardless of where they are even if they're, they are seeing themselves as well-served. But again, I question anyone who could really see themselves as well-served?
Speaker 2:Every one of us reads news headlines and every one of us feels the terror of a school shooting in our neighborhood.
Speaker 2:Every one of us has to look at what's happening outside of this country that the United States has so much responsibility for. I was talking to a young friend of mine from Afghanistan this weekend about some of the new repression that is being put in place against women by the Taliban and he said shit, he goes. People in Afghanistan really hold the USA responsible for everything the Taliban is doing now, because USA just gave our country back to the Taliban, even though they fought them for 24 years and they knew what they would do. They knew what they. They got back into power, but US US just gave my niece, gave my wife, gave our daughter, gave my mother back into the hands of people that really oppress women. So you know, we all have responsibility for things, even if our lives are working well and we're one of the lucky ones who's got a job and a nice house and a decent bank account. I mean, don't even get me started on climate change.
Speaker 1:Kit. I am curious about the entirety of the impact. It's looking out a year, looking out five years. When, in fact, are you open to that? Thanks, cultishly.
Speaker 2:I would love to hear from a few or more people who say that their ideas about nonviolence changed as a result of this book. I hope I'll hear from people who are saying when I read this book, I have new ideas for how the work that I do in places that I work, worship and volunteer could become better. I would love to help that. I want to support people in being more wholehearted. I think wholeheartedness is one of the greatest assets to have. If we're divided and torn about what we're doing, we can't really get the joy of it. When we're wholehearted about anything, joy often tags along like a puppy behind you. So I want folks to have more wholeheartedness. I also hope that this book helps people to question the kind of conditioning that we've collectively received.
Speaker 2:You mentioned earlier about time and I really question. I mean, we have the most labor-saving devices in history, yet we tell ourselves we don't have a lot of time. I think the way that we've been trained to think has a lot to do with the sense of scarcity, so that we're not deeply reflective. We don't honor relationships in the ways that we could. We don't honor ourselves in the way that we could. We don't honor ourselves in the way that we could, and I hope that interrupts a lot of people who regularly schedule programming and helps them to think like is it true that there's not enough time? Is it true that it's okay for us to treat each other like objects? I hope it stirs up some good trouble.
Speaker 1:Do I so, Kit? I am wondering about the folks who enjoy receiving book content via audio. Any plans potentially in the works, or could you see yourself adapting this to like an audio book format or something?
Speaker 2:There's an e-book.
Speaker 1:There is an e-book Okay so folks can get it digitally. Yep, okay, excellent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I've already talked to a couple of friends about doing translation. It would be super cool, maybe Turkish, maybe Deutsch, german. Yeah, and I've already talked to a couple of friends about doing translation. It would be so cool. Maybe, Turkish, maybe Deutsch, german, okay, who knows, I don't know. Not an audio book, but I'm massively motivated by requests. So a couple of people say I have an audio book, probably figure it out.
Speaker 1:Where can this book be found?
Speaker 2:People can go to bookshoporg. We talk a lot about alternative economics in this book, so I try to keep it off of the usual suspects.
Speaker 2:But I'm finding that the book is actually on the usual suspects website. Bookshopsorg is a great place to give money to. The publisher is Pache Bene, who's a fantastic nonviolence organization that's partnered with Gandhi Institute and continues to partner with them in so many ways, and so, yeah, you can go on the Pache Bene website and money from this book is going to go to support nonviolence and through their work, and I hope people will also choose to look in on Gandhi Institute. You know, check out more and more of what we're doing here. I hope it attracts a lot more financial support to the Institute. I hope foundations come and find you from reading this book.
Speaker 2:There's project stories in the back of this book about the different kinds of projects we've gotten up to. I hope people read those projects and stories and get inspired by not just what we did, but also the times when we chose to let things go. That's a natural kind of life cycle of learningutors in Australia and in Europe for IngramSpark, who's a publisher, so it's not going to be tons of money to get it of money to get it All right?
Speaker 1:Any opportunity folks may have to hear you talking about the book, or are you fielding open to us to kind of share about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would have lots of fun doing that. Made a little website called nonviolenceatworkorg. People can reach me through the Ghanian Institute website Pachabeni website. You can find me through the Gandhi Institute website Pachabeni website. You can find me. I'll be here.
Speaker 1:I'll just say, for my part, this is an approachable book, a readable book. It's a very fulfilling read. There's an intentional aspect to the writing and a poetic side. The words sit together in a way that feels good, absorbing, for everyone. Listening to this podcast, I recommend you find a way to read this. There's a lot of surface area to respond to a lot of people's particular interests and circumstances. You can almost open up the book to any page and something thought-provoking, meaningful, probably applicable to your life. Highly recommend it.
Speaker 2:I did not give him money to say that or anything.
Speaker 1:It's the plain old truth Kit, anything that you would want to leave people with part of this conversation that you would Well, I'm inclined to just open the book randomly right now and see what the book has to say to us.
Speaker 2:There's a whole section here on cultural humility, which has been a really important part of my journey and the Institute's journey. Who said culture is a reflection of what we value, of what you value, and what existed in the culture of the Institute was dedication to looking at what was real. So I like that idea that we be in more and more places where people are dedicated to looking at what's real and that we can talk about things so that we're not just sitting there in so many meetings in different parts of this country in this world keeping our truth to ourselves because we're afraid to speak. The world desperately needs people to be authentic, to bring their full gifts online, for a future to be possible, even and I'm just bananas about feedback, which I talk about in the book too. So, yeah, very curious to hear. Including I don't like this book. Tell me why, and thanks again for the opportunity to speak about it on the big day where it gets released into the world.
Speaker 1:It's an honor this time with you, kit. My guest is Kit Miller. The book that she is releasing today is Culture Shift Nonviolence Work. This has been Perspectives on Peace. Thank you very much for listening.
