About Us

BayNVC is home to a number of projects and groups working under the same umbrella to apply and promote the principles and practices of Nonviolent Communication. Most of these are operated and run by BayNVC staff and trainers and include private sessions, classes, organizational services, retreats, and a variety of projects designed for social transformation. In addition, BayNVC provides fiscal sponsorship and financial services to other relevant projects by request.

VISION:

PURPOSE:

To resource, support, and nurture liberation for individuals, communities, and organizations, as a pathway to transforming global systems and to creating a world where all needs are visible and attended to.

REGIONALLY:

• Events for the public: We offer workshops, series, intensive retreats (for individuals, couples, and whole families), and practice groups.
• Leadership development: We offer a variety of ongoing intensive 9- or 12-month programs.
• Working with organizations: We offer a range of services to such organizations as churches, businesses, schools, and healthcare institutions, sometimes on a pro-bono basis.
• Support for individuals: We provide NVC-based counseling for individuals, couples, and families.

A large BayNVC workshop in Oakland in February 2015.

NATIONALLY and INTERNATIONALLY:

• Our trainers travel to other locations to offer workshops, retreats, longer programs.
• The BayNVC Leadership Program attracted participants from throughout the U.S., Canada, and a dozen other countries.
• Graduates of the Leadership Program teach in diverse locales such as Estonia, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
• Miki Kashtan travels regularly to share NVC in other countries.

Miki Kashtan (center back row) led a 4-day training in Convergent Facilitation in the West Bank, attended by Israelis and Palestinians, in December 2013.

Values at BayNVC

Our values emerge from our deep commitment to continually increase our capacity for nonviolence. We aim to act, with each other and with the world at large, with the courage to speak truth with love. We aim to Integrate power with love in all we do. We strive to integrate the Core Commitments into our living and working. 

Systemic Orientation  

We are committed to stepping into leadership and taking responsibility for the whole at all levels. We seek to understand the interrelationships of all things and our interdependence with each other. We aim to expand our view beyond the individual level and to grow in our awareness of how economic, political, and cultural systems impact and shape each of us. We aim to attend with more and more clarity and understanding to differences emerging from where we are each placed in the power map of the world and within the organization. We aim to make visible what may not be and use our existing access to resources, both as individuals and as an organization, to act within all our spheres of influence for the benefit of all. 

Aligning Means with Ends 

We are committed to individual and collective practices, agreements, and procedures that reflect our vision within the world as it is now. We aim to operate with full transparency about our decisions, our experience, our needs, our ideas, and our concerns regarding others’ actions. We aim to do what we do based on wholehearted willingness to do it and sufficient resources for it. We aim to step into full choice and use our power with others, within and outside the organization. We aim to sustain togetherness through dialogue and shared commitment to purpose. 

Regeneration

We are committed to cultivating a flow of generosity within and around our organization that effectively moves resources towards need in service to our purpose. We aim to operate from a baseline assumption of innocence, and with care for the impact of our actions both within and outside of the organisation. We aim to mourn when we do not manage to live in line with these principles, acknowledging our limits, and celebrate when we do as part of restoring togetherness within the human family. 

History of BayNVC

BayNVC was created in January 2002 to formalize a collaboration that had already begun among several of the locally certified CNVC trainers. We chose to come together because we believed that, by working together, we would be able to reach many more people and bring NVC more powerfully to the world.

Three of the four BayNVC founders in the early days. L to r: Miki Kashtan, Julie Green, Inbal Kashtan

The fourth founder, John Kinyon, today.

Some highlights from our history:

• January 2001 – Our first residential retreat and, to our knowledge, the first NVC residential retreat in the U.S. or maybe in the world other than CNVC’s International Intensive Trainings (IITs). We have since conducted more retreats than we can count, well over 100.
• 2002 – The first year of our NVC Leadership Program, which annually attracts people throughout North America and from around the world who are interested in learning and teaching NVC, especially within an ongoing community setting. This program continues to this day.
•  2002 – First NVC classes offered at San Quentin. Our offerings there have grown, and we now offer 7 weekly classes to inmates.
•  2003 – NVC Diversity Project founded, aiming to reach people of diverse background to increase the spread of NVC everywhere and equip more people with skills for leadership and making peace. Graduates of our Leadership Program initiated the first retreat on this topic in the summer of 2007. Co-founder John Kinyon left BayNVC and developed with Ike Lasater a mediation-training practice.
•  2004 – We began offering Foundations courses — 8- or 12-week series that have become among our most popular offerings.
•  2004 – Julie Greene, one of our founders, died, and Kit Miller joined us as executive director.
•  2005 – First “Speaking Peace” fundraiser drew 450 people and launched a more dedicated effort to increase awareness of our work and support for it. We held “Speaking Peace” events through 2010.
•  2006 – Two programs launched: the early version of our current Immersion Program, and the Parent Peer Leadership Program.
•  2006 – We hosted a gathering of NVC trainers and organizers from around the U.S.
•  2007 – We engaged in significant work on strategic direction, which helped us define four areas of focus aside from offering workshops: leadership development; diversity; peaceful families, peaceful world; and safer communities.
•  2007 – We began offering retreats outside the U.S. and expanded our services to include facilitation and consulting for organizations.
•  2007 – One of our founders, Inbal Kashtan, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Her involvement with BayNVC  came to a halt and was never fully resumed until her death in September 2014.
•  2008 – The last year Marshall Rosenberg came to work in the Bay Area.
• 2009 – Training of Trainers retreats began, and the TV version of the “Conflict Hotline” started and continued through June 2011.
•  2009 – Kit Miller, our beloved director, returned to her hometown of Rochester, N.Y., to become director for the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence.
•  2010 – Miki Kashtan’s Fearless Heart blog launched. We hosted a national conference on collaboration in the workplace that attracted presenters and participants from many states, and a yearlong program on a similar topic deepened our understanding of the vital role of transforming organizations  to create a world that works for all.
• 2012 – Launched the Leveraging Your Influence program and retreats, focusing on supporting people to find the inner strength to bring NVC into their lives and to become agents of change and hope.
•  2012 – The worldwide financial crisis resulted in our staff laying itself off. We revamped our operations to become an organization run collaboratively by the group of trainers.
•  2013 – Started working with the Minnesota Child Custody group to find a collaborative solution to a multi-year acrimonious debate about child-custody legislation in the state of Minnesota.
•  2014 – Miki Kashtan published her first two books, “Spinning Threads of Radical Aliveness” and “The Little Book of Courageous Living.” Our circle of collaborative trainers expanded for the first time since 2012.
•  2014 – Inbal Kashtan, one of our founders, died in September. Roxy Manning, one of our collaborative trainers, took on the role of Executive Director.