In a bold new program that calls upon the power of prayer, meditation and intentional consciousness to reduce community violence and build peace in our cities, the Gandhi King Chavez Season for Peace and Nonviolence task force leaders in Dallas have been invited to interface with civic leaders and municipalities to create sacred service partnerships for peace.
“We now know that we can share our collective intention for reducing violence and healing discord through city-wide collective prayer, meditation and directed consciousness experiences that honor all paths and exclude no one,” write organizers from the Peace Project Foundation. “It is now possible to track and measure the effect of our collective efforts on concrete conditions and events. You are on the cutting edge of this breakthrough moment in which technology joins with our hearts’ desire for a flourishing and harmonious city.”
Along with their peers in other major cities nationwide, task force leaders associated with the project’s conveners, the Association for Global New Thought, are cultivating relationships with city officials, political representatives and law enforcement agencies in order to obtain necessary measures of quality of life improvement (crime statistics, emergency call data, domestic violence reports, etc.). This will provide the study with the dynamic “quality of community” data necessary for analyses by world-renowned scientists, mathematicians and criminologists.
This program will reach out to diverse communities in the Dallas area, including faith-based organizations, in a variety of city-wide collaborative events. Prior studies have shown that 20% or more reduction in violent crime as a result of the studied intervention and are part of the archive providing scientific basis for the program, which includes over three decades of peer-reviewed, published studies conducted in cities around the world. Dallas will be included in the program at no cost by working with us to provide non-private emergency call center data and statistics so we can assess efficacy of the studied intervention.
While study methodologies may differ in order to reflect the unique characteristics and needs of the specific community engaged, the basic design involves the systematic participation by people from all faith traditions, spiritual practices, as well as those whose belief systems may be based on humanism and secular ethics, or nature philosophy. A process for reaching a collective intention for reducing violence and promoting peace in the city of Dallas will be agreed upon with the help of trained facilitators and study developers. This collective intention will be activated by participants through the lens of their particular sacred and ethical practice during a prescribed period of time over the course of several months. Researchers will collect and compare date from a variety of historical and real-time data, taking care to control for as many variable contributing factors as is realistic.
Preliminary results of the study will be shared at an interfaith celebration to take place on Thanksgiving Day, 2008. The location is to be determined.
Citizens of Dallas can Assist Season for Peace and Nonviolence (S.P.A.N.) task forces by:
- Receiving specialized training about the project (at no charge) from Donna Collins.
- Making critical introductions at municipal agencies (law enforcement, mayoral offices, board of supervisors).
- Acting as municipal liaison prior to, during and after community studies.
- Interfacing with community leaders and groups in implementing regular community meditation-prayer studies.
For more information, please contact Donna Collins at (214) 352-5005; Robyn Short at (214) 350-2663.
Photo by Ava Lowery on Flickr via Creative Commons.
