This is Part II of my interview with author and nonviolent trainer and activist, Rivera Sun.  Please listen in on how her novels promote nonviolence and for more of her powerful guidance on how to begin taking nonviolent action in the real world.  This episode also includes great advice about how to engage with diverse others to bring on her optimistic predictions for our collective success as a human race.










RIVERA’S SOLUTIONS (continued) When we left off, Rivera was talking about her advice and experiences helping people create nonviolent solutions to injustice.  When people seek Rivera’s advice on how to use nonviolent action to solve a problem plaguing them, she guides us to begin by looking around the community and seeing if there are others already organizing on the issue of concern.  By pooling energies and resources, nonviolent action can be even more powerful. She advises doing research to discover what others have already done. Looking into nonviolent leaders throughout history, like Dr. King, we have the opportunity to rely on tried and true processes that work.  Dr. King’s four steps to nonviolent action include 1. Collection of the facts, 2. Negotiation, 3. Self-purification and 4. Direct action (https://medium.com/@revlmorris/what-martin-luther-king-jr-said-about-civil-disobedience-9f935f60dee6).These steps can be applied to most issues in almost any setting. By first finding out everything we can about the issue, the conflict surrounding the issue and about potential solutions, we set ourselves and our issue up for success.




Rivera advises establishing the “non-negotiables” early on reminding us that Gandhi teaches us that if we give up on our fundamentals during negotiations we are not negotiating, we are losing.Where are you able to negotiate and where must you stand firm?  These are critical questions for every issue requiring action.  When protesting about water, is drinkable water really negotiable?  If you’re a teacher on strike, an ideal raise might be negotiable, but a living wage is probably not. Before diving into direct action, Rivera suggests starting with dialogue whenever dialogue is possible. She says that, while most groups have tried that step before moving to active nonviolent strategies, she’s been surprised that this step is sometimes forgotten. In her Maine hometown, there was a man who posted an offensive and discriminatory sign at his home reading “No ‘this kind of person’ and no ‘that kind of person.’” Many community members were angered and wanted to start a letter writing campaign to force him to take the sign down.  Rivera recommended a conversation with the man as a starting point. Her sister soon reported on what she discovered during a forthright interchange.  The man’s intentions from his point of view had been to protect and make peace, not to offend.  Once he recognized his goals were not being met by the sign at all, it was removed before her sister even had time for the return phone conversation with Rivera.Nonviolence International’s website. https://www.nonviolenceinternational.net/ comes highly recommended by Rivera who refers to it often for fundamental concepts about how to organize, how to use a set of actions to “build cumulative campaigns to achieve your goal” and how to understand the, sometimes subtle, differences among types of actions.“A protest is not a strike is not a blockade and they all act a little bit differently.” Along with strategy work,