Mobilizing for Nonviolent Global Liberation – Santa Cruz, CA

A Retreat to Co-create Personal and Collective Capacity

Offered by Miki Kashtan and other trainers and apprentices

Description

• Is the power of nonviolence – courage, truth, and love – deeply calling to your spirit?
• Are you longing for deeper alignment with your values?
• Are you eager for more clarity and inspiration about how you can respond to a world in crisis?
• Would you like to expose yourself to knowledge, principles, and practices that can support you in your work?
• Do you wish for more connection to your own power and ability as you deepen your capacity for a life of service?

Who?

This retreat is designed with the following groups of people in mind:

• Members of the soon-to-be-launched Nonviolent Global Liberation Apprenticeship Program and Learning Community (NGL) who want to be part of the annual in-person retreat
• People who want an in-person exploration of what NGL is about before joining
• People who resonate with any of the questions above who would you like to be immersed in a vibrant, thriving, co-creative learning community for a week
• NVC trainers, mediators, facilitators, managers, and consultants who want to enrich their work through learning about Miki’s approach to these areas

Why?

This retreat is designed to create the conditions that would allow all of us who attend to take a next step in our understanding, capacity for interdependent living, practice, service, and contribution to support the possibility of nonviolent global liberation.

In the short video clip below, participants at the first NGL retreat in Poland share what inspired them to come to the retreat and what they learned during the week spent with the NGL community.

What?

Our time together will draw from the following elements:

• Nonviolence: deepening understanding of the path and its implications for all aspects of life
• Internal liberation: transcending individual socialization and collective patriarchal patterns to reclaim freedom and collaboration for the benefit of all
• Leadership: willingly and unilaterally embracing interdependent responsibility for the whole
• Power and privilege: engaging with their causes and effects internally, in relationships, within organizations, and in society
• Organization development: applying a needs- and collaboration perspective to all aspects of organizational function, from the internal to the systemic
• Social change: fleshing out fully all aspects of the work, including vision, relationships, inner work, and strategic approaches to social transformation
• Facilitation: Basic and advanced elements of group facilitation, including Convergent Facilitation
• Principle-Based Teaching: understanding, living, and sharing NVC from the perspective of principles and practices rather than specific methods

How?

What of these will we cover at the retreat? This is where co-creation comes in. Everyone coming is invited to become an active part of shaping what it will look like.

Each day, Miki is planning to offer teaching, practice, and coaching in one or more of the areas named above based on her 21 years of experience sharing NVC, facilitating, and consulting with organizations and communities.

In parallel, others present, including in particular NGL members, are likely to present workshops, practice sessions, coaching, and empathy in their own areas of focus based on what they have learned from Miki and elsewhere. (Note: You will have an opportunity to name what you may want to offer after you register.)

Together, we can create a menu for the retreat in which everyone can find their place to contribute, to learn, to grow, to weave connections, and to dip into the vision of a world that works for all.

About the Team

Miki Kashtan has been leading workshops and retreats around the world since 1996 and applying NVC in working with organizations since 2001. She co-founded Bay Area Nonviolent Communication (BayNVC) in 2002 and the Center for Efficient Collaboration in 2015. She blogs on The Fearless Heart, where she engages with topics ranging from inner freedom to global governance. The Nonviolent Global Liberation project is her latest effort to contribute decisively to supporting a growing group of people, fully committed to acting in each moment, in full power in support of the vision of world that truly works for all life. She is from Israel and lives in Oakland, CA.

Uma Lo has studied with Miki ​since 2012 and has been actively ​integrating this approach in her own work doing facilitation, mediatio​n, and training. She works with ​ individual leaders, organizations and communities​, focusing on practical interdependence and increasing eco-social systems health through nonviolence, NVC and permaculture.

How Much?

Making the retreat sustainable for all is an art form, and part of the commitment to learning to create a world that works for all. We invite you to step into gift economy, where you will be asked to choose the amount you would like to contribute. In the context of a retreat, where there is some exchange and external costs built into it, the details of how we intend to apply this visionary frame to the realities of this retreat are complex. We plan to share them with registrants once we have enough data about registrations and other information, most likely in the last few weeks before the retreat.

If you are not quite ready to step into the full gift economy, we are quite confident that choosing any amount within the sliding scale of $850-1700 will work for us and will support sustainability while allowing others to attend who may not have the capacity to contribute a fully sustainable amount, sometimes nothing at all. Any amount above $1050 can be tax deductible and will support others in attending.

If this sliding scale does not work for you, you are welcome to choose any amount that works for you as part of the gift economy we are setting up. It is our intent to make this training available to anyone regardless of their financial means.

Upon registration, all participants will be asked to give a deposit of USD $400, plus the cost of their room and board (or less if you are unable to provide the full amount at the time of registration).

We would like to make it clear that tuition is in addition to and separate from room and board costs, and is given to different organizations.

Venue

The workshop will be held at Ben Lomond Quaker Center in Northern California, which is located near Santa Cruz and San Francisco in beautiful surroundings. It is an amazing place with forests to walk in, a labyrinth, and great food. It takes about an hour and a half by car from either the Oakland or San Francisco airports. Ride shares will be organized, when possible, to transport you to the center.

Physical address:
1000 Hubbard Gulch Road
Ben Lomond, CA 95005

Lodging and Food

Room options – We will be staying at the Redwood Lodge and Orchard Lodge at the Ben Lomond Quaker Center.  You can see pictures of the accommodations here. We’ve sold out of private rooms at the retreat center, but there are a few hotel options within a 5-10 minute drive, the nearest and cheapest being Quality Inn & Suites Santa Cruz Mountains.

Room and board costs are in addition to the tuition amount. These are non-negotiable and required by our host venue. You will pay via PayPal, cheque, or credit card when you register. Room assignments are subject to availability and are first-come-first-served.

Please see options of food and accommodation for the whole retreat. The prices below reflect arriving on August 23rd (check-in at 5pm or later) and leaving on August 30th (we need to be cleared out by 3pm, you can leave earlier if you need to). Packages include meals starting from dinner on August 23 ending with lunch on August 30. The content of the retreat will begin at 11:00am Friday August 24th.

All prices are subject to change.

About the food – The food will be 95% organic and natural ingredients.  The other 5% is for random items that the chef prefers to use that he either can’t find organic or uses in small amounts. Our chef is able to accommodate omnivore, vegetarian, vegan, dairy-free, and gluten-free diets. The meat he will be using will be either organic or “natural” (no hormones). Most of the meat will be chicken and fish but he does, on occasion, serve beef, pork, lamb, seafood, etc. In addition to those main dietary categories, he always has plain food options available by request in the kitchen, e.g. plain chicken, tofu, eggs, nut butters, vegetables, salad, for every meal.

Breakfast service is always the same: toaster station, some type of egg dish, fresh fruit, yogurt, hot and cold cereal, coffee and tea. Lunch and dinner menus are organized according to the basic categories of carb, protein, veg, salad, drink. Dinner will also include some kind of dessert.

If you have any dietary restrictions above that go beyond what is specified above, please email Heather.

How to Register

To reserve your space please pay the cost of your room and board choice plus a tuition deposit of USD $400 by picking from the drop down menu below. Or pay less by entering a different amount in the “pay alternative amount” box if you are unable to provide the full amount at the time of registration. Please also fill out this Accommodation, Meal and Transportation Options Form, where you will be able to let us know about your preferences, so that we can take care of you.

See BayNVC’s policy about cancellations and refunds here. Please see below how it works in detail for this retreat:

• If you cancel by July 13, 2018  , we will gladly refund what you have given minus $100 to cover our administrative costs.
• If you cancel after July 13, 2018, but before August 3, 2018, we will refund what you have given minus $400 to cover venue costs in addition to administrative costs.
• If you cancel after August 3, 2018, we can offer no refund; however, you may transfer your registration to someone else.

Contact

Questions? Please e-mail a member of our Organizing Team:

• For items related to Registration and Logistics, email Heather Austin, BayNVC Event Coordinator, NGL Liason
• For questions regarding the content of the program , email Leonie Smith, BayNVC Programs and Organizational Development