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AVP's first logo (right) was designed by a prisoner to show a closed fist changing into the dove of peace
The Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) is FHM’s top priority among its practical projects. What is AVP? Three years before FHM was founded, AVP trainers went to Moscow to train facilitators. The new faciltators, with the support and involvement of FHM, went on to form the AVP Moscow Council and ran further workshops. Several years later, two more groups started holding their own workshops: AVP Dzerzhinsk and AVP Lipetsk. All the Russian groups have now merged to form AVP Russia, with a part-time co-ordinator paid by FHM. Workshops have also been held with refugees in Chechnya and Ingushetia. More recently a new group, AVP Odessa, has started holding workshops, including workshops with prisoners in Ukraine. Participants from the three Baltic States have been trained by the AVP Russia.
One of the most effective features of AVP is that participants, having gained experience from attending the three stages of workshop (basic, advanced and training for trainers), can then go on to train more groups of facilitators and so the project has a potentially unlimited capability for growth. All these regional groups developed as a result of the first workshops held in Moscow thirteen years ago. Several AVP
groups
AVP workshops have been held worldwide for over thirty years and it has been shown that the workshops provide people with the skills to lead nonviolent lives, based on respecting one another. The workshops allow people to experience and deepen their understanding of
They prove particularly useful for people who have resentments that become grudges, who get upset at being ignored, who have difficulty with anger or who bully or are being bullied.
More about AVP Russia (in Russian) at http://www.avp.inrussia.org/ and AVP Dzerzhinsk
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FHM
and
AVP
FHM
set up the AVP Council and has always had more than a funding relationship
with AVP. FHM staff and board members take an active role in the project’s
development and a member of FHM staff who is AVP trained serves on the
Council.
have
held workshops with conscripts in the army (pictured here doing a "blind
trust walk"). Feedback from these workshops has shown that the men found
this work useful in helping them deal with the difficult situation they find
themselves in. Several conscripts said that the workshops allowed them to
‘remain human’.