Nonviolence

Most co-ops strive to be places of care, community, and consensus, but even in co-ops, boundary crossings happen. How do we handle them in a way that prioritizes safety while treating everyone with fairness and respect? How can we create cultures where consent is so normal that major incidents are rare? We want to hear what happens in your co-ops, cross-pollinate ideas, and share our experience running non-punitive Consent Teams that provide communities with education, emotional support, and mediation.

In co-ops, we often pride ourselves on being inclusive and equitable—but what happens when harm shows up in the form of a joke, a question, or an everyday comment?

This session invites cooperative members to reckon with microaggressions as real structural cracks within our supposedly safe spaces. Drawing from personal experience navigating coded bias, racialized communication, and deflection within cooperative housing, the session will unpack how "small" slights carry big consequences—especially for marginalized members.

Together, we'll explore:

This is an overview of Co-op Conflict Support. In this slide deck, you will find the limits of conflict resolution, review proactive processes and tools for navigating conflict, and additional resources.

These activities and worksheets are from a workshop titled "Introduction to Accountability Models" presented by Evelyn Smith at NASCO Institute 2017.

These handouts were contributed by Will Travers for a two-part workshop on Land Rights and Nonviolence at NASCO's 2008 Cooperative Education and Training Institute.  Part One covers the Land Gift Movement in India and Part Two covers Nonviolent Action in Modern Movements.

Tips for having the hard conversations in your group, developed at the 2007 Anti-Oppression Action Camp

You can use this tool creatively, adapting the intensity of the 4 basic principles to different situations, depending on the level of risk being taken in each setting. Some components of these tools may be inappropriate for some settings, and invaluable in others. The more personal risk involved, the more carefully you want to frame the space at the outset, because a secure anchor is the only thing that will enable a process to fly to the heights of its potential.

This packet is full of useful tools for learning about and practicing nonviolent communication. This resource was created by: The Center for Nonviolent Communication (www.cnvc.org), 5600 San Francisco Rd. NE Suite A, Albuquerque, NM 87109, Tel: +1.505.244.4041. "We share our material freely and we appreciate donations. A contribution that reflects your appreciation of what we offer and the value you receive will be used to further the development and distribution of Nonviolent Communication.

A packet of resources to help facilitate conflict resolution in your co-op.