Returning to FOR's Roots: A U.S.-Based Strategy for Nonviolent Social Change by Reverend Kristin Gill Stoneking, FOR Executive Director
Local groups as source and sustenance of FOR-USA’s activism stretches back to our origins, when 68 people met in Garden City, New York in November 1915 to “establish a world order based on love.” The focus in the early days was largely domestic: against conscription and militarism, for economic justice and legal protection of conscientious objectors. In the nearly 100 years since, we expanded our outreach to create a presence abroad that included the meaningful work of sponsoring civilian diplomacy delegations to the Middle East and the Soviet Union, and providing protective accompaniment in Latin America. Yet, as FOR embraces the needs and challenges of the twenty-first century, we find the call to return to the work of building and tending to our national network and infrastructure. Throughout 2012, the National Council worked with then-Executive Director Mark Johnson to frame a strategy that could respond to this call. A model that organized activism into regions of the country was
constructed, repurposing staff from a predominately international focus to nonviolent change work that sees transformation in the United States as the highest priority for effectiveness. FOR announced this new organizational model in December 2012 with the hiring of Rev. Lucas Johnson as Southeast & Mid-Atlantic Regional Coordinator, the first position tuned to the new strategy. At the same time, Mark Johnson announced his forthcoming retirement. The search process that ensued for a successor prioritized capacity in grassroots organizing with diverse and younger populations while at the same time requiring expertise in organizational and financial leadership. I am pleased to be able to continue the work of Mark and the National Council as we transition fully into this new model, deeply committing our national programmatic efforts to strengthen and increase communications with our chapters, local affiliates, religious peace fellowships, and other grassroots-based initiatives. FOR’s theory of social change
understands our work as “a movement that begins at the individual level working locally through active efforts by dedicated, passionate people, many of whom act from spiritual leadings, whose clarity of purpose, vision and success actively moves through communities and structures representing wider and wider circles of peoples until systems are transformed in sustainable ways for the foreseeable future. Our field of intended effective social change is that of structural violence in the United States and propagated by the United States throughout the world.” Grounded in this regional strategy, we will be able to more fully live the tenets of this theory through our leanings and our learnings, through our actions and commitments, through our embrace of a nonviolent way of life that acknowledges first our responsibility to change ourselves as we ask the world to change. (continued on page 2)