John V. Wilmerding – Curriculum Vitae as of June 2012

1966 – Graduated Harborfields High School, Greenlawn, NY. New York Regents’ Scholarship awarded. National Merit Scholar alternate.

1968-69 – Founder of Psychology and Social Action Council, Hiram Scott College, Scottsbluff, NE. Completed project: organized a new child care center for children of low-income Chicano and Native American families.

1970 – Graduated Hiram Scott College with major in Psychology and minors in Sociology and History. Dean’s List attained in 5 of 9 trimesters. Concentrations in Developmental and Experimental Psychology.

1970-71 – Nebraska Panhandle Community Action Agency, Gering, Nebraska. Held positions of Community Organizer and Planner/Trainer. Followed the Saul Alinsky school of community organizing. Successfully grant-funded new programs in Emergency Food and Medical Services, Housing Services, and Head Start.

1971-72 – Member, Association for the Help of Retarded Children. Attended Nebraska state convention.

1972-73 – Founding Executive Director, Commack Teen Center, Commack, NY. Funded and located new facility.

1972-73 – Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY. Completed 12 credit hours’ graduate studies in Social Science.

1974-75 – USARER-qualified and funded entertainment of US troops in Germany. Singer-Songwriter-Guitarist.

1976-78 – Social Worker, Department of Social Work, Government of the US Virgin Islands. Intake casework. After promotion, managed a demanding caseload of persons with chronic alcohol and substance abuse problems.

1977-78 – In-service training for academic credit, Adelphi University School of Social Work, Virgin Islands extension. Casework in Needs of the Aging and other social work courses. First certified in CPR.

1979-81 – MBA studies, Binghamton University (NY) School of Management. Course work included organizational behavior and philosophy, in addition to the standard 2-year management curriculum. Graduated in June 1981.

1981 – Internship with the International Music Council, Paris, France. Traveled in 15 countries, researching and executing a situational management study for the organization.

1981-82 – Friendship Ambassadors Foundation, Upper Montclair, NJ. Organized cultural exchanges of concert choirs between the US, Romania, and the Soviet Union. Traveled to the latter two countries.

1983 – First trained in the Alternatives to Violence Project method by its founder, Lawrence Apsey, and others.

1983-84 – Community Organizer, Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, Long Island, NY. Represented three congressional districts. Successfully organized and raised funds to support a pro-Freeze candidate, Robert Mrazek, in New York’s Third congressional district.

1984-85 – Co-organizer and fund raiser, The Ribbon, a nationwide cultural arts project wherein the Pentagon and the Capitol were encircled with thousands of contiguous arts and crafts works hand-executed in cloth, over 14 miles in length.

1985-86 – Development Officer, Friends World College, Lloyd Harbor, NY, a Quaker international college.

1986-87 – Charles Webb Company, NY, NY. Consulted on multi-million-dollar capital campaigns for arts, cultural, and scientific institutions. Executed feasibility studies, set campaign goal amounts, scripted audio-visual presentations. Traveled to interview campaign principals in the northeast, Florida, and the mid-west.

1986-91 – Continued professional Fund Raising activities. Became professionally certified by the Association of Fund-Raising Executives (CFRE), documenting over $20,000,000 in funds raised. Served on the New England chapter’s ethics committee.

1989-90 – Major Gifts Officer, Peace Development Fund, Amherst, MA. Worked with major donors. Preliminary studies of the feasibility of a capital campaign.

1991-92 – General Manager, Brattleboro Music Center and New England Bach Festival. Set up new systems for tracking charitable gifts. Worked with renowned Bach interpreter Blanche Moyse, the founder.

1992 – Became accredited as an Alternatives to Violence Project trainer, Brattleboro, Vermont. Lead organizer of the workshop at SIT / World Learning where this occurred.

1993-94 – Major Gifts project officer, the Community Kitchen (food relief organization), Keene, NH. Raised the leadership gifts ($250,000) in this successful $800,000 campaign to secure a home for the organization, its current building on Mechanic Street.

1995-97 – Reparative Programs Coordinator, Vermont Department of Corrections, Windham County, VT. Lead organizer of Restorative Justice programs for our County, including Reparative Probation, Victim Impact Panels, Victim-Offender Mediation, and Family Group Conferencing. About 28 months’ tenure in the position. Reparative Probation, as a new program, won the Innovations in American Government Award of the Ford Foundation and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

1996 – Published paper ‘Community Justice Planning’ in a national corrections journal, contributing to the later inception of Community Justice Centers in many towns in Vermont.

1997 – Invited to lecture on Restorative Justice at the Carr Center for Human Rights, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, by Samantha Power, later the Pulitzer prize winning author of ‘A Problem from Hell – America in the Age of Genocide’, and more recently affiliated with the US National Security Agency.

1997 – Founding organizer, Campaign/Coalition for Equity-Restorative Justice (CERJ), an international NGO, at the Dag Hammarskjold Conference Center, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York (see entry below for John Woolman College of Active Peace).

1996-97 – Secretary, United Nations Working Party on Restorative Justice. Presided over meetings at United Nations Headquarters in New York, NY.

1998-2010 – Partial career hiatus for family duties as a single father, raising three sons though childhood & teenage years.

2001-2005 – At-large Quaker member, Advisory Board, National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Served under appointment by, and at the pleasure of, Methodist minister Robert Edgar, former 6-term US congressman (D-PA) and now President of Common Cause.

2003 – Founding organizer, John Woolman College of Active Peace, an unconventional international circle of scholars, practitioners and activists supporting one another in the global struggle for peace and social justice. [This grew out of the former Campaign/Coalition for Equity-Restorative Justice, an international NGO which I founded at the United Nations in 1997.]

2004 – Project PACT (Peacemaking and Conflict Transformation), USP Leavenworth. Conceived and organized a pilot program of five days’ conflict transformation training in the flagship Federal maximum-security prison. Seven trainers, including myself, taught a curriculum in Alternatives to Violence Project format, including advanced workshops in Restorative Justice and traditional Navajo (Dineh) peacemaking. Training was funded by a $10,000 grant from the White House Office on Faith-Based Initiatives.

2007 – Organized the innovative ‘Remembering Peacemaking’ workshop at SIT World Learning, with the renowned torture survivor and author Hector Aristizabal as lead trainer. Other trainers included Luz Elena Morey and myself.

2007-08 – Observed and partially co-trained two Spanish-language Theater of the Oppressed (Augusto Boal school) workshops, with Hector Aristizabal and others, at Roca community center in Boston.

2009 – Organized a very successful workshop in The Circle Way (Native American peacemaking) at SIT World Learning, featuring Manitonquat (Medicine Story) and Ellika Linden as lead trainers.

2009 – Published ‘Theory of Active Peace’ on the Peace and Collaborative Development network. [ Internet addresses: http://www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org/
http://www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org/forum/topics/the-theory-of-active-peace ]

2012 – June publication of scholarly paper ‘Justice as Active Peace’ in Contemporary Justice Review, the journal of the Justice Studies Association.
[ Internet address: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10282580.2012.681162 ]