OccupyForum // Resilience Resources in the face of "Slow Violence"

Monday, February 23rd from 6 - 8 pm at Global Exchange

2017 Mission Street near 16th Street BART



Information, discussion & community! Monday Night Forum!!


Occupy Forum Presents. . .


Resilience Resources

in the face of "Slow Violence"

and "Enduring Emergencies"



A Dialogue with Dennis Rivers
​ --
Writer, Activist

​and
Communication Skills Trainer



Many of the problems that we face are going to unfold over decades or even centuries, for example, climate change and radioactive contamination. But our models of political mobilization and participation are often models more of the hundred-yard dash than of the marathon. In this dialogue and discussion, writer and activist Dennis Rivers will explore ideas about resilience drawn from the work of eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, communication skills trainer Marshall Rosenberg, and the Appreciative Inquiry school of organizational development consulting

(as much as time allows).



According to Rivers, we need to be concerned about resilience because the crises of the world gradually become the crisis of the self. As we work on social problems that embody blatant insanities, such as nuclear weapons that are actually global suicide devices, we necessarily build mental models of those blatant insanities inside of our own minds, which can induce a disabling sort of mental and emotional indigestion.

Resilience studies focus on how people mobilize new inner resources

to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles.



Dennis Rivers is a long time antinuclear activist, nonviolence trainer, communication skills coach/author, and Internet publisher. In 1978 he was arrested for the felonious planting of wildflowers on a nuclear reactor site, and has been continuously involved in political protest and social change movements ever since. In the mid-1970s Dennis trained for the Unitarian ministry, but found it impossible to fit into the social role of a parish minister, and instead became a nonviolence trainer and informal chaplain for antinuclear and antiwar groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Dennis studied with Marshall Rosenberg in the 1980s, and with Joanna Macy from the 1990s to the present time.



Dennis received his MA in interpersonal communication and human development from the Vermont College Graduate Program, and has written several books. His workbook on communication skills, combining NVC with Appreciative Inquiry, is available free of charge as a PDF file at http://www.newconversations.net. The inspirations for his activist and scholarly work include Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Joanna Macy, Rachel Carson, Albert Schweitzer, Marshall Rosenberg, Carl Rogers, Archbishop Oscar Romero, and the Austrian Catholic conscientious objector and martyr Franz Jägerstätter.



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