Attention all workers and volunteers who accompany vulnerable persons in potentially dangerous situations!
Welcome all people interested in preventing gender and election based violence nonviolently and supporting community healing and reconciliation.
Recognizing this moment of intense polarization, we invite you to come to Parkdale United Church for a Ploughshares Calgary Society conversation with innovative peace leaders. Quaker Pastor Parfaite Ntahuba from Burundi and the African Great Lakes Initiative and Madelyn MacKay from the Nonviolent Peaceforce and the Mir Centre for Peace at Selkirk College in Nelson, BC.
Hear about and examine the attitudes and skills that the traditional peace churches have developed to diffuse violent situations.
Madelyn MacKay is an instructor of Unarmed Civilian Protection and Accompaniment with the Mir Centre for Peace at Selkirk College, the first educational institution in our world to offer the curriculum developed by the Nonviolent Peaceforce for UNITAR and domestic and international peace teams. She is on the Quaker Peace Committee of the Canadian Friends Service Committee and a board member of Conscience Canada. She founded the Young Women’s Peace Leadership Camps across Canada with the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace and the West Kootenay Women’s Association to build capacity to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls for equal participation of women with men at all levels of the peace process and all tables of decision making creating peace. She co-founded the Shanti Sena (Gandhi’s term for Nonviolent Peace Armies) Network of Peace Teams in the US and Canada.
Parfaite Ntahuba, an executive board member of the Friends World Committee for Consultation Africa Section and a senior pastor in the Quaker community in Burundi, in East-Central Africa. For the last 10 years she has been the National Coordinator of the Friends Women’s Association, part of the African Great Lakes Initiative and Friends Peace Teams. A Peace Studies and Theology graduate, she adapts approaches such as Alternative to Violence, Trauma Healing, Healing and Rebuilding our Communities, and Unarmed Civilian Protection and Accompaniment, leading and advocating for healing and preventing gender- based violence through school presentations, premarital counseling, mediation and dispute resolution mechanisms among couples and polarized groups in the country, as well as advocating for equity, justice and women’s rights as a Peace Leader in Africa and as a member of the All Africa Conference of Churches General Committee.