In 1975, inmates at Greenhaven prison asked some visiting Quakers for help in preparing a program for teenagers, and from their collaboration grew the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), originally a project of New York Yearly Meeting and now an independently established not-for-profit corporation. AVP is committed to reducing violence by encouraging and training people in the use of creative nonviolent strategies for handling situations in which people often resort to violence. Alternatives to violence, like violence itself, are responses to conflict. The strategies are non-manipulative because they require, knowingly or unknowingly, relying on that Transforming Power which is present in all people.
The key idea here--that violence is most often resorted to in situations of conflict--might be challenged on the grounds that it overlooks a whole range of other situations which typically provoke violence. There are, for example, situations in which one feels powerless, situations in which one cannot obtain a desired end without violence, situations in which one feels powerless, situations in which one's security is threatened, and situations in which one is being unjustly treated or oppressed. The challenge, then, is to alter the range of responses to conflict rather than to eliminate conflict itself. AVP certainly recognizes all of these situations as able to inspire violence. They can, however, be understood as either involving a certain kind of conflict or emerging out of conflict. Thus one central mission of AVP is to encourage and train people in the use of nonviolent conflict-resolution techniques. The main mission, however, is to invite people to change themselves, so that they become AVP people (AVPers) in their everyday lives and in the way they habitually respond to tension and conflict.