Helen Park
"I come from a middle-class background, but I've always been drawn to human experience other than my own," says Helen Park, founder of Eugene's Wellsprings Friends School in 1994 and currently a GED teacher at LCC. Park is Oregon chair of the Alternatives to Violence Project, started in 1975 by a group of inmates at Green Haven Prison in New York in collaboration with the Quaker Project on Community Conflict. The AVP offers workshops in prisons, in communities around the US, and in countries around the world that have experienced violent conflict. "Everyone has within them the capability to change a violent situation into a non-violent one," says Park, a member of the Eugene Friends Meeting for 33 years and an AVP facilitator. "We see it happen in prison. We've trained hundreds of inmates at the Sheridan Federal Correctional Institution." AVP Oregon will present a basic-level workshop, titled Making Peace Here and Now, in Eugene on the weekend of December 5-7, an advanced workshop on MLK weekend in January, and a training for trainers on Presidents' Day weekend in February. Contact Ethen Perkins at 345-3944 for details, and learn more about AVP at avpusa.org.
happening people
photograph and story by Paul Neevel
Eugene Weekly / 30 October 2008
|
|
archive
contact