11 WAYS TO INSPIRE THE PEACE ALLIANCE
From David Hazen via the iPeace website

[NOTE: Comment by D.Hazen - Perhaps this list could be the starting point of a document that we all can work on. I feel it's incomplete.]

1. Share personal stories. Use them to build bonds and strengthen ties between tribe members, stories of what their life was like before and after joining the Dept of Peace campaign, any shifts in attitude they have experienced, what gratitude’s they have, what their core values are.

2. Introduce Members to “Each Other Teach” listening skills (we've forgotten how to listen!), use a talking stick, set time limits, encourage people to interview each other, using appreciative inquiry -- Listen, Learn & Introduce people to each other. Make connecting people a priority. One of the biggest fears in life is rejection. If you can help eliminate that fear you are helping somebody.

3. Educate your members to help them see things in ways they never imagined. Use simple concepts to help them understand complicated ones. Break things down and explain what is under the hood. Explain how social change and evolution actually takes place. Explain how not knowing and surrender to the process is essential lubricants to moving forward. They'll be forever grateful someone took the time to do this for them.

4. Process grief as Joanna Macy recommends; we cannot be truly motivated until we feel the full depth of our despair and stuckness as a species, the full terror of extinction, and then begin to question it, "Is this really true? Am I really complicit in the atrocities? How did I decide to not be part of the solution?" The inability of Western culture to unstuff their feelings and allow the grief to flow, erupt, explode and dissipate is a huge stumbling block. The energy we expend denying our grief only prolongs and magnifies the agony of its final expression. Our power to create derives from the release of our grief and guilt.

5. Create a sponsorship system, a buddy, mentoring, or co-counseling system that is entirely voluntary and self-selected. This is all about learning to trust somebody outside yourself, someone who can reflect you’re "trauma-drama" as well as your core values like a mirror, which can draw you out, who can keep you mindful of the big picture and the baby steps, which can track your progress and cheer you on. As excruciating as it may sound, it works best if a sponsor never call a sponsee, that the initiative rest with the sponsee. A sponsor never gives advice, either, but simply shares what has worked for them in their experience.

6. Be authentic, keep no secrets about yourself, your doubts and struggles, except when to do so would involve and damage others. There needs to be a standard of no gossip or criticism of each other.

7. Keep it simple and do-able Selling peace could become an extremely simple process of allowing individuals to respond to their own need for peace as they define it, and show by example how that can be done. ( "...better public policy might be forged from less--not more--government action." -- TIME, Barbara Kiviat, Monday, Jun. 29, 2009 ) What this means to me is to act "as if," to begin generating a local culture of peace at whatever level you can imagine doing it. We have begun to do so at the city level here in Eugene, and the first responses have been enthusiastic. Why not create a shadow (positive shadow) Department of Peace at the national level? "On the first day of operations for the new Dept. of Peace, the Secretary of Peace issued a statement, held a news conference, initiated a national poll of the public's definition of peace, met with the Secretaries of Defense and State, and directed the assistant Secretaries to address the following priorities... "

8. Create instant recognition Use imaginative and creative ways to display the beauty of the truth contained in the Department of Peace through symbols, sound bites, art, music, theater. Make it attractive, sidestep all the verbiage, and get to the image, the bottom line. People smile when they see a couple on a tandem bike because it is an icon of partnership, cooperation, and joy. In a parade, a giant white dove puppet with a green branch in its mouth gets smiles, too. No explanation needed.

9. Invoke the warrior-monk prototype in which participation in the campaign becomes a tool of self-development, of self-awareness and service for the highest common good. "Slowing down your internal voices, re-discovering who you really are, and relating to the world from a place of Being and Knowing." (http://www.warriormonk.org/Home.html) The warrior-monk does not fight unnecessary battles, but deliberately chooses the time and place to intervene with the minimum necessary force to redirect a conflict, creatively using whatever tools are lying about to draw forth negative energies into the light where they evaporate from exposure. The warrior-monk never gives up, never quits, never slows down, never speeds up, just finds the supportive pace that will last to tunnel through mountains and bring them down.

10. Crank it up, E-mail has become dull, noisy, and easily ignored. The verbiage on TPA website is too much, and the site has become overloaded, difficult to navigate. Audio/video communicates with more impact, should be the first thing people see, followed by a link to the DoPeace site. Webinars, audio conference calls, video conference calls, YouTube videos, all have more impact, especially when creative young people are making them. There is a clever Department of Peace Commercial by Jill Francke, posted on YouTube in February of 2007 that is now very difficult to find. And whatever happened to the good old phone tree? Word of mouth is powerful; we need to re-learn how to use it.

11. Use Appreciative Inquiry to focus on the solution, the solution, the solution, and not the problem. Ask the right and powerful questions to evoke strength, teamwork, hope, imagination, and genuine excitement. (read: peak performance) Get David Cooperrider into the middle of the room, no matter what it takes.

Twelve Festive Tolkien Facts - Did You Know
1. Born in South Africa, J.R.R. Tolkien's earliest recollection of Christmas was of a "blazing sun, drawn curtains and a drooping eucalyptus".

2. In 1895, a three-year-old Tolkien moved to England with his mother and brother and enjoyed his first wintry Christmas with a real Christmas tree.

3. As a young man Tolkien used to spend part of his Christmas holidays with his Incledon relatives, whose custom was to perform theatrical entertainments, some of which were written by him.

4. In December 1913 Tolkien announced to his friends his engagement to Edith.

5. On 9th December 1936 Tolkien delivered his lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

6. Christmas 1920: Tolkien wrote his first illustrated letter as 'Father Christmas' to his children.

7. This first letter was written to Tolkien's eldest son, John, then aged 3, after him asking what Father Christmas was like.

8. Four days after being asked by his publisher, on 19th December 1937 Tolkien wrote the first chapter of the sequel to The Hobbit - it would eventually become the beginning of The Lord of the Rings.

9. Christmas 1943: Tolkien wrote his final letter as 'Father Christmas', to his daughter Priscilla.

10. On 3rd December 1953 Tolkien delivered the typescript of The Return of the King to his publisher.

11. A selection of Tolkien's Christmas letters was first published in 1976; a new paperback edition containing nearly all the pictures and letters is published in 2009.

12. The Hobbits' name for Christmas is Yule.