The Gender Equity and Reconciliation International Project
Gender Equity and Reconciliation International, GERI, founded by William Keepin and Cynthia Brix, has convened hundreds of intensive workshops and training for transforming gender relations between women and men in nine countries over the past 27 years. Thousands of women and men have jointly confronted gender oppression and sexual violation in GERI’s programs and moved through the ensuing challenges together—to reach a rare place of mutual healing on inter-gender and community levels.
Gender Equity and Reconciliation International
by William Keepin, Ph.D.
Gender Equity and Reconciliation International offers multiple programs including the #MeToo to #WeToo training that focuses on transforming gender relations between women and men, as a co-gender response to the #MeToo movement. Other Gender Equity and Reconciliation International programs include dedicated training for LGBTQI populations and pilot pieces of training for People of Color. Guided by the twin powers of truth and compassion, GERI programs entail a process of collective healing and reconciliation, supported by skillful facilitation and post-workshop follow-up groups. The methodology is summarized in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s declaration that “Injustice and corruption will never be transformed by keeping them hidden, but only by bringing them out into the light, and confronting them with the power of love.”
Gender Equity and Reconciliation International ’s versatile and resilient methodology has enabled its successful implementation in highly diverse cultural contexts ranging from the United States, Canada, U.K., and Australia, to India, South Africa, Kenya, and Colombia. GERI has shown that, contrary to popular fears or misconceptions, when mixed-gender forums are skillfully convened and facilitated, they can become powerful crucibles in which men and women confront and dissolve old patterns of destructive gender dynamics, move through the pain and tribulation, and collaboratively forge a new culture of gender relations.
The Gender Equity and Reconciliation International process consistently produces remarkable experiences of healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness between the sexes. Participants move beyond habitual ways of relating and cultivate not only genuine compassion but also mutual reverence between women and men. Follow-up groups over time develop into on-going communities of practice that function like incubators for cultivating a “beloved community” in which women and men learn to reclaim our collective human birthright to dwell together in harmony and creative partnership. As the former Deputy Speaker of Parliament in South Africa, Nozizwe Madlala Routledge, expressed it, “I have been looking for a long time for a way to bring healing and reconciliation between women and men. This work is the answer.”
Key components of Gender Equity and Reconciliation International programs include bearing witness and deep truth-telling in shared community spaces; freeing ourselves from harmful gender stereotypes and conditioning; healing gender relations and emotional and sexual trauma; honoring and reclaiming the sacred alchemy of the masculine and the feminine; and interactive group work to support authentic empowerment and cultivate renewed gender relations. Working through the ravages of gender injustice with integrity, courage, and compassion, ordinary men and women discover a mutual liberation that enables them to begin anew and jointly reinvent inter-gender relations in a joyous, collaborative partnership. In the GERI transformational process, the shackles of patriarchal conditioning begin to crumble, and profound possibilities of Beloved Community are revealed.
A video is available here, and for more information, please visit our website (www.GRworld.org).
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