David Grant

David is coordinator of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation's Nonviolence Education and Training. Based north of Amsterdam, Holland, the program consists of a global network of trainers in active nonviolence and reconciliatory mediation. Since 1996, David has presented trainings in the nonviolent transformation of conflict to political activists, NGO representatives, government officials, refugees and military personnel in Europe, Asia, North America and Africa. He contributes as well to popular and specialist literature on the subject.

Before coming to IFOR, David initiated Peace Troupe ("Nonviolent struggle using the cultural arts") in the southeast USA. The group mediated disputes and developed performance-based nonviolent interventions. For five years before that he was executive director and program director of US-FOR affiliate Rural Southern Voice for Peace which developed "The Listening Project", a community organizing technique.

During the 1980's he was an organizer of the Family Kitchen, a Zen-Catholic Worker Community serving free meals to 200-300 people weekdays in a downtown Seattle. He derived supplemental income as an ice cream truck driver and as a seasonal firetower lookout.

In the early 80's he was a Peace Corps Volunteer with the indigenous Ayta swiddenists on Mount Pinatubo, Philippines. He had prepared for that by rural homesteading the previous eight years. One year of that was as an agricultural community service volunteer at Koinonia Partners, Georgia, a forty-year-old Christian community for racial harmony and right livelihood. The other seven years was during the establishment of a 180-acre rural cooperative; building a house, becoming mostly self-sufficient through horticulture and animal husbandry. Concurrently for five of those years he was also a public television producer-director at WFSU-TV, Tallahassee, Florida. He produced and directed a wide variety of daily, weekly and special programs, especially local and state politics, consumer advocacy, cultural arts and public issues documentaries.

He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the Writer's Workshop, U. of Iowa. During the Vietnam War he was a conscientious objector and was incarcerated for his beliefs.