The AVP Mission
To empower people to lead non-violent lives through respect for everyone, community building, cooperation and conflict resolution. Based on real life experience and a spiritual foundation, AVP encourages every person’s innate power to positively transform each one and the world around us.
AVP is non-religious and non-sectarian in its presentation while freely borrowing from any tradition that expresses kindness, compassion and non violence. AVP encourages every individual to transform themselves and the world around them.
The AVP Vision
We live in a violent society; the homicide rate in the United States is twice that of many developed countries. The US leads the world in prison population per capita. Prisons are consistently violent places. What is the result of this violence? Inmates learn more violence in prison. Many of them return to their homes more violent than when they were first incarcerated.
These facts suggest that something is terribly wrong in our society and how we view the purpose of our prison system. Why is there so much violence? Why have we put so many of our people in prison? Prison is often viewed as a way to protect society from violence while it also spawns more violence that eventually returns back to society.
AVP envisions prisons as truly able to be rehabilitative if society would put out the effort to make them so. A shift in attitude is needed on the part of everyone.
