About
Association Building Community
because how I connect becomes who we are
Please visit our Newsletter Archive to learn a bit more about our history.
Who Is ABC?
Community On Purpose Building community on purpose leads to humanity becoming more humane. Association Building Community is a modular intentional community providing peace training, learning "conflict done well", and developing the process arts, the field of group process study, design, and facilitation. We provide strategic consulting and professional leadership training, develop community resilience projects, and support associated colleagues in creating and sustaining community-building initiatives. We are committed to practicing these values and sharing them with decision-makers, children and the adults who help them grow, and opening doors of opportunity so that conflict-process skills may be developed both locally and internationally. Mission
There are at least two more ways of responding to the question "Who Is ABC?"
One response draws the boundary of our identity firmly at the core group--those who meet regularly and create the consensus decisions which move us in a particular direction. This voice might also add, "and ABC projects are those in which the core group collaborates". In this way, the Community Building Facilitator Training we offered, and may again, was an ABC project.
Another response draws the ABC circle more widely to include those who have been an active part alongside those who have expressed interest or contributed every now and again over time but are not connected on a daily basis. This voice might speak of ABC in a way that values its function as a process arts aggregator and include in its scope those projects which include only one or two ABC members, because it is through those members that any other ABC contributor might become connected with related work. In this way, the work of individual members in the world, often supported in one way or another by other ABC members, is related to ABC because we tell each other what's going on and invite each other to participate. In this way, ABC includes the potential to follow Leon into a connection with an East Bay meditation group, or emeritus board member Iris into supporting local disabled activists, or Brandon into the group practicing aikido at UC Berkeley or Martial Nonviolence through Free Aiki Dojo.
Read what others are saying about our work
Our Team
Here are the people with official and informal responsibility, who have agreed to work to build community and the process arts in a structured way, including Board members, administrators, interns, and volunteers.
If you'd like to join our team, please investigate our available opportunities here.
To explore our workspace (online work area), please click here.
Board & Officers
Team+President - CEO
Peace practices, community building and conflict facilitation; mediation and negotiation; social benefit organizing and administration, ensemble creation, and team building; spoken and media-based communications and performance; academic learning and administration; supervision and management.
Team+Board Chair
Founder, President, and CEO of Emminger Commercial Interior Fabrication and Fine Millwork
Emeritus Board Member of Aiki Extensions and Project Manager for innaugural Training Across Borders seminar in 2005.
Team+Board Members
Leon was born near Cleveland as the Great Depression was getting underway. His family moved to Palestine for several years but in 1936 returned to settle in The Bronx. At age 17 Leon entered the military for a short tour. He has worked and made his home in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1950's. When Berkeley was becoming known for growth of the counter-culture he was drawn further into meditation, activism, and the campus milieu. He entered the conscious search for a way of being in the world that accepts the individual and invites loving co-creation of relationship and has been a part of personal and collective transformative efforts ever since, including: the Community Liaison Group (1967-1968), the Cultural Integration Fellowship (1971-), the Pea Soup Community (1972-), the World Citizens Assembly (1974-), the International Cooperation Council (1975-1977), Communal Grapevine (1981-), PeaceMAP (1984-1985), Peace and Environment Coalition (1984-1985), ongoing Community Building circles, and the Dedicated Weekly Group (1997-1998).
Not belonging to organizations but exploring individual paths of growth developed his sense of the necessity for inclusivity and the individual in co-creation. Through all of these things Leon was looking for something and becoming disappointed. A longing for "something really decent, without all the skeletons in the closet," and disinclined to unravel as a result of relational glitches. Trying to find peace happening within peace-making organizations seemed more and more unlikely, activists displaying an inclination to "fight like cats and dogs" within their ranks. The foregoing resume suggests some "flashes of glory" but misses a central theme from Leon's life - the longing for deeply rewarding relationships, community, and the co-creation of a more decent world. He is particularly drawn to combining the uses of silence with applied communication skills.
Administration
Team+Book Keeper
Naomi Keepin, following professionally in her mother’s footsteps, began her bookkeeping career while still in high school. After graduating from Mills College in Oakland, California with a B.A. in Economics, Naomi specialized in accounting work for nonprofits and fiduciary attorneys. A Vermont native, she is pleased to assume her new role, leading the professional staff at Even Keel and supporting the businesses and organizations that make Vermont’s economy vibrant.
Team+Data Manager
We are looking for a Data Manager. If you, or someone you know is interested in this work, please visit our invitation here.
Team+Web Developer
We are looking for a web developer. Please contact us at administration [at] abcglobal [dot] net if you would like to know more.
Instructors
Peace practices, community building and conflict facilitation; mediation and negotiation; social benefit organizing and administration, ensemble creation, and team building; spoken and media-based communications and performance; academic learning and administration; supervision and management.
I began practising Aikido at the age of 11 and quickly grew to love the rigorous yet welcoming culture of the Dojo. Within a few years I found myself assisting with the children's classes, and by the age of 15 I regularly taught at least two of the three children's classes each week. In contrast with my own intense and often chaotic learning process, learning how to work with and teach kids served to ground my ambition, humbling me and forcing me to refine my own practice again and again. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been afforded such a privileged opportunity so early in my Aikido career and I am excited to renew this passion as an assistant and instructor with Peace Practices under Brandon WilliamsCraig.
History
Formed in 1999 and incorporated in 2001, Beamish Process Arts d.b.a. Association Building Community has put its mission into practice by offering strategic consulting to professionals in positions of leadership, coaching, professional referrals, and conducting private and public dialogues and deliberative processes. ABC also connects process arts practitioners with individuals and groups ready to work through conflict toward defining peace as "conflict done well". Every minute and dollar donated to ABC deepens and strengthens communities responding to difficulty and difference in ways that make daily life more humane.
Ideas
Caveats
Welcome
Building
Community
Community is the supportive web of relationships that happens when people are at peace because they choose to do conflict well.