Step 1
Build Your Expertise
The book has a study guide built into it that revolves around three exercises themselves based on three videos.
At the same time, you can use this guide to steer your way through the book, the discussions you have with friends (even if they don’t read the book themselves), and define how you will do your part in building peace here at home.
So, as with the book,
Set your goals. The first part of building your expertise if to define and then refine your definition of what you are for and stress it more than what you are against. I have found that this video by Australia reMADE is a terrific place to start.
Here are challenges to consider as you read each chapter:
Visualize your own “ordinary paradise” for the United States, considering “who we are now” and “who could or should we be,” focusing on “what we are for” rather than “what we are against.”
Define what the United States would be like if we acted as if there were “no frames and no boundaries” and we made our interdependence the starting point for what we do, not just in peacebuilding, but in every aspect of our lives
Explore how you own life would be different if you lived by the principles in Robert Fulgham’s All I Really I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Tom Paxton’s Peace Will Come, or more seriously, focusing on what you can control by following Rotary’s Four-Way Test in your daily life.
Identify an existing peacebuilding group in your community or take steps to develop one of your that could reach a significant number of people in the next few months and years.
Imagine how you could expand those activities beyond peacebuilding so that you could pivot and include one or more of the eight pillars of positive peace
Determine how you could work with others to get more Americans to adopt cultural norms and other values that undergird your ordinary paradise.
Pick your favorite Core Design Principle and explore how adopting it (and the rest of them) would change the way we govern ourselves in the “rooms where it happens.”
Think about how American reMADE can be a paradigm shift or the next step in humanity’s cultural evolution.
Figure out how to nail it. If you haven’t done so recently, watch Kelly Corrigan’s statement about “nailing it” when she made at the height of the COVID pandemic.
As with the Australia reMADE video, use Corrigan’s as a road map for thinking about how you would a major inroad while on each leg of the Peacebuilding Starts at Home journey.
Think about what it would take for you to “nail it,” on your own or with others in building an ordinary paradise in the United States.
Reflect on how systems theory, complexity science, and the like deepen your understanding of the need for a paradigm shift rather than a bunch of quick fixes.
Choose one thing you could do this week to address a minor conflict or tension in your daily life. Then ask yourself if you succeeded and why that happened.
Write a press release that you would issue on the day the initiative you choose to work for reaches one of its major goals that emphasizes how and why it succeeded.
Take any of the organizations discussed in the second half of Chapter 5 or another organization you know that doesn’t consider itself part of the peacebuilding community. Explore what it would take for that organization to work more effectively with the peacebuilding community—and vice versa.
Determine what it would take for one of the organizations discussed in Chapter 6 or another one you know about to become a household name and an organization that millions of people turn to when they are looking for solutions to wicked problems.
Do the same for one of the initiatives discussed in Chapter 7 and ask yourself what it would take for my community or my country to use that tool on a regular basis.
Use what you have learned about “nailing it” to figure out how we take the next evolutionary step and turn the principles in the Peacebuilding Starts at Home Loop into practices most of us solve most of our problems most of the time.
Sustaining your peacebuilding habit(s). If you haven’t done so recently, watch the last two minutesw of Jon Stewart’s monologue rom the night he returned to the Daily Show again so that you can be at you best once you realize that the paradigm shift is not going to come quickly or easily.
The whole thing is vintage Stewart. Seriously (pun intended), only the last two minutes or so are likely to \ prove helpful here.
Here, too, grapple with a dilemma growing out of Stewart’s monologue the emerges from each chapter in the book..
Sketch out a basic strategy to complete your version of his “lunch-pail f***king job” which you will have to follow and stick to if you want to build your ordinary paradise.
Define your North Star or long-term goal and pick one or two “bright spots” that you could use to design constructive, long-term projects that would help us “nail it.”
Reflect deeply and critically on what it would take to really keep you engaged for the long haul, especially when facing inevitable setbacks in your home, work, community, and country.
Develop a short strategic plan outlining how you might achieve the level of success you mentioned in your press release in the previous set of bullet points within the next five years.
Determine what the organization(s) you thought about earlier to sustain the active engagement of people like yourself for the long haul.
Focus on the networks that you are a part of and ask yourself how you could expand them and help the people you reach deepen their own involvement in all the ways discussed in Peacebuilding Starts at Home
Pick on of Ostrom’s Core Design Principles and ask how people like yourself can turn that general principle into a lifelong commitment.Reflect on the book’s final three words for everything covered so far in this study guide—rinse and repeat.