How ECAN began

Imagine that from these conversations we develop a stated united purpose and definition of a City of Peace that will be fully funded and supported in public/private partnership to provide experiences that transform every neighborhood of the City, giving voice to the voiceless, tools of self-assessment and right relationship, whereby every child and every adult is unafraid to be seen for who they truly are. Eugeneans are welcoming to all with joy and gratitude for the vitality of the place that their city occupies in the ecosystem of this planet.By getting people involved in dialogue, immersed in thoughts of creating a solution, we are promoting a living laboratory of democratic learning and civic engagement. We do not present a solution. We intend to avoid institutional or political answers, but instead focus on the process of discovering the needs that ordinary people have, the strengths they have for working together, and the ways in which they can collaborate to create a city that works for everyone. What might happen if there were a local non-governmental agency facilitating the definition of peace? What might happen if all of the 500-plus compassionate organizations in Eugene came together under one tribal banner?"Building peace means living it, noticing it, and encouraging it. I often think it would be good to have people writing letters to the editor frequently, opinion pieces, or getting on radio programs, pointing out acts of kindness, peaceful responses, and efforts to better work with and connect to those we often disagree with. These are all part of building a City of Peace. All the best."

-- Kitty Piercy, Mayor of Eugene

Although the Eugene city government hasn’t created an official declaration or office for peacebuilding, I and other team members have been busy. I had to go back through the eugenepeaceteam.org website and files to remember what all we had done since Feb. 7, 2009, when a group of about 20 people gathered to brainstorm the idea of a City of Peace. Two months later, we had a conference of 60 people and then in November, 2009, another event, titled “Each One of Us Matters,” attended by 139 people. I built the website, started publishing the newsletter, and with a small team began two initiatives to intervene on multi-generational poverty by increasing local circulation of money into the hands of the poor. We started F.E.A.S.T., Financing Eugene Area Sustainable Talent, a series of fundraising dinners, and an experimental patch of potatoes planted in leaves collected from city streets. 

In 2011, I created a database of 75-plus local peace, justice and sustainability groups, which was useful in drawing out 20 organizations and over 200 people for a Peace Feast and Walk on the anniversary of the Iraq war. That was the first year we organized a celebration of the International Day of Peace (which continued annually to 2014), building awareness of the significance of Sept. 21. We networked local schools with peace teaching resources, and the mayor proclaimed Sept. 21 to be “Peace Day Eugene.” In October of 2011, we helped to convene an outrageously successful problem-solving meeting between representatives of Occupy Eugene and the city’s police and government.

I’ve attached at the foot of this page a report to the World Bulletin for a Culture of Peace written in 2013 which samples all the peacebuilding actions taking place in Eugene that year, plus a letter explaining the benefits of the International Cities of Peace network.

In 2015, we shifted our focus to education concerning strategic nonviolence, promoting Michael Nagler’s “Nonviolence Handbook” and hosting a workshop by Rivera Sun of Campaign Nonviolence. We also documented a forum on youth homelessness and began to recognize the faith community as a potent resource for changing cultural values. We collected socks from 7 different churches for distribution to the homeless in February of 2016, changed the name of Eugene Peace Team to Emerald Compassionate Action Network, and held our first interfaith event in September, focusing on the issue of homelessness. 126 members of 53 different congregations attended, and since that time there have been two, smaller follow-up events. The database and map of local peacebuilding efforts has been greatly expanded.

Two events strongly shaped my optimism that a community "team" identity focused on security, prosperity and quality of life could be realized:

(1) I adopted the Map Your Neighborhood (MYN) program as a way of preparing for disaster emergency situations. I brought my neighbors together to show them a video on how to prepare for the first 90 minutes of response to an environmental crisis, like an earthquake. Some of them had never met before, and they loved it. Now they meet for 3 potlucks in the park every summer. I learned that most of us crave a sense of belonging in our community but were never taught how to create it.

(2) My church set a goal for a fundraiser to support 3 local nonprofits who serve the unhoused. We overshot the goal by nearly 30%. I learned that most people who are able to help will be immediately generous if you offer them a pathway. There is no shortage of generosity.

There is a shortage of systems thinking.

We are unavoidably immersed in a slow-moving, large-system, environmental and economic disaster emergency with some fast-moving, shocking parts. Our preparation planning is woefully superficial and inadequate. All the resources we need are close by, and there is no inventory of them. It is tragic that those resources are, and will be, wasted unless we build a connected community.

Another way to think about the "joy, wonder and power of community," is to imagine us moving from individual acts of charity, which are valuable in themselves, to an all-inclusive group solidarity in which everyone is regarded as a valuable team member for accomplishing security, prosperity and quality of life for everyone all at once.

This implies major advocacy for the replacement of what are now punitive justice policies with restorative justice.

In more detail, it means:

• working through government and legal systems to protect human rights, gender equality and participatory democracy

• building access to food, shelter, and medical care

• promoting healthy families

• teaching literacy and peacebuilding skills

• improving the social responsibility of businesses

• inspiring the best in people through the arts and cultural exchange

• advancing scientific and technological applications to human harmony

• facilitating appreciation for diverse spiritual practices and exploring their underlying unity

All of this together is a culture of peace!

Gratefully,

David Hazen

President & Founder, Emerald Compassionate Action Network