WHAT CAN YOU DO FOR YOUR
COMMUNITY
These are a few
suggestions from which you can expand. Hopefully, they will help you to
create new ideas how you and your community might be inspired to create new
ways of presenting Forgiveness as an essential as well as integral part of
non-violence in every area of our lives.
- Demonstrate to others that you are making
forgiveness in your life as important as breathing and eating.
- Become the catalysts for creating Forgiveness
Gardens in your homes, churches, and neighborhoods. Any size garden from a
flowerbed to a park is equally wonderful.
- Encourage schools and children’s groups of
different racial composition to create Forgiveness Gardens together.
- Reach out to Muslim individuals and organizations
and join with them to create Forgiveness Gardens to remind us to forgive
our misperceptions of each other.
- Share your Forgiveness Garden on the
ForgivenessWorks.org web site to inspire others.
- Create a Forgiveness Community Evening, Day, or
Weekend in your community.
- This could be an opportunity for community healing
where people share their stories of forgiveness and how it works in
their lives. Have children, teens, and adults involved in the story
telling. Share stories on how forgiveness can be an important stepping
stone to bring about non violence in our communities.
- Encourage others to share their forgiveness
stories for submission and publication on the web site.
- A panel could talk about the benefits of
forgiveness and the deficits when we do not forgive and just why it is
that we don’t want to forgive.
- Younger children and other individuals so inclined
can use the arts or music or drama to express their experiences of
forgiveness.
- Children’s Art Fair for expressions of Forgiveness
and Coming Together.
- Children drawing pictures of what forgiveness
means to them
- A mural on a major wall or building in the
community
- A bill board that would show this mural
- Connect with your local schools and help create the
possibility of motivating teachers to take the first five/ten minutes of
each school day to help guide children through their grievances and anger
and how they might use forgiveness in their lives. (See “What Schools
Can Do”)
- Read the book Forgiveness: The Greatest Healer of
All and pass it around to others and open a discussion group on the
subject matter.
- Do your best when having conversations with others
to share a forgiveness story of your own or of someone else a way of
raising the consciousness of Forgiveness in your community.
- If you wish to pass out the shoe inserts that
“heal your soul’ and states: May every step you take be one of
forgiveness, you can order them by phoning Jonathan Joseph at
510-570-0666, ext 243.
- Think of new ideas of how to spread forgiveness in
the world. For example, you can make your own “Forgiveness Tool Box.”
Put the Forgiveness book in it. Where there was a hammer, put an x and
state we are no longer going to hammer people, the same thing for the
chisel in that we will not chisel any one; the same thing for screwdriver
in that we won’t screw people any more. And put a mirror in to remind
you to forgive yourself. Pass on this idea and encourage adults and
children to create their own forgiveness tool boxes.
- Go to your local Public Television Station or local
Access Television Station and encourage them to put television programs on
the air that are related to forgiveness and non violence. Be willing to
help them create such a program.
- Interface with existing groups on as many of your
projects as possible so you can inspire each other.
- Ask for God’s Help in creating more forgiveness in
all of our lives and share your insights with others.