Opening to Quaker Conciliation

Conflict can have huge impacts on families, faith communities and whole countries. What is the role of a conciliator? What is it like to actually try using conciliation skills? What are some of the pitfalls we want to try to avoid as a conciliator? Why is an awareness of power important for a conciliator? How might you be able to use basic conciliation skills in your family, your meeting or even further afield? These are some of the questions we will explore during this 6-week online course.

This course will be led by Quaker conciliators with experience of supporting people in conflict to move towards finding their own solutions in contexts including London, Myanmar and Yemen.

We will use a mix of experiential exercises, individual reflection, somatic/ body-based activities, group discussion and input.

In this short time, you will not be experts by the end of the course, but you will hopefully have an understanding and the beginning of some skills that may enable you to be in service to transforming conflicts, whether that is between people close to you or in more complex situations.

The QPSW International Conciliation Group (ICG) is seeking to begin to build the capacity of a new group of Friends to be ready where we are invited to support peace efforts. This course will serve as one part of that process.

There will be some material to look at before the first session. We will email you around one week prior to the course with information about accessing the course, including this material, on our online learning platform (Moodle).