History
Those of us involved in the leadership of the Center have been involved individually in peace-and-justice education and action in a variety of areas of the community during the past two decades. Some of us have worked in the educational systems (e.g. mainstream K-12 and post-secondary institutions; Adult Basic Education). Others have worked in community-based organizations (e.g. domestic violence shelters; food shelves; legal services with people in marginalized groups). Still others of us have worked in faith-communities. The "Center" provides us with the opportunity to collaborate more extensively, and to promote the systemic development of such learning-and-action.
The Center also emerged from the vision and work of its founder and current director, Kevin LaNave. Kevin was a teacher of peace and justice and a coordinator of service-learning programming at Cathedral High School/John XXIIIrd middle school, a Catholic school in St Cloud, MN, from 1985-2003. Beginning in the early 1990s, the school's service-learning program annually received state-level awards for its quality. Kevin also received an increasing number of requests to do presentations and workshops at a local, regional and national level, and authored several articles.
In 1993, St Mary's Press in Winona, MN (the largest publisher of religious education resources to Catholic high schools in the country) hired him as the teacher-consultant for the development of a new peace and justice text, and the author of the accompanying teacher's manual (first published in 1995, and revised in 2001). From 1995-2001, he was a member of St Mary's Press' workshop team that provided an annual national-level summer workshop for educators; service-learning and peace and justice programming were his areas of expertise. He also authored a monograph summarizing the workshop team's vision.
In 1997, Kevin was hired part-time by the Julianne Williams Foundation for Social Justice, a local organization named after a former student, to be its program coordinator. (See article "The Life and Witness of Julianne Williams" for more information.) Requests for his involvement as a mentor in Foundation-sponsored projects went from three in 1997 - including Seeking HOPE (see article "Seeking HOPE") for more information -- to more than twenty in 2001, including the beginning in 2000 of an annual area-wide "Social Justice Conference for Youth" (which our Center now coordinates).
Because the Foundation was unable to afford to keep up with the trajectory of these developments, Kevin took a year-long sabbatical to form the Center as a separate endeavor in the fall of 2001. He did a number of presentations and workshops, mentored other educators, served as leader of the planning for the Social Justice Conference for Youth, and collaborated in the development of curriculum resources through the University of St Thomas (St Paul, MN) and the Institute for Peace and Justice (St Louis, MO).
While he returned to teaching part-time the following year, it became clear that the Center's development was limited by the demands of the classroom. In the summer of 2003, Kevin left his teaching-position at CHS/J23 to devote greater time to the work of the Center.
In December, 2003, the Center became formally established as a 501(c)3 organization.