Welcome to Turning the Tide

If you are interested in

• positive change through nonviolent action,
• nonviolence training,
• information and resources on nonviolence,

then we hope you’ll find our website useful.

We are discovering new material and workshop activities all the time, so keep checking in with us.

Nonviolence for a change

All over the world, people join together to challenge injustice, overcome oppression and make a more just and peaceful society.

Turning the Tide promotes the understanding and use of nonviolence to help such groups become more effective.

Active nonviolence is a way of confronting injustice - not doing nothing, not responding violently, but struggling creatively to transform the situation.

Turning the Tide takes its inspiration and learning from effective nonviolent movements including those of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, Greenham Women, environmental and economic justice movements, land rights nonviolent activists and many more. We offer workshops, speakers, literature, a journal and advice.

Principles of nonviolence

We don't have a definition of nonviolence because we've learned it means different things to different people, but we use the following principles of nonviolence as the basis for our work:

• respect and care for everyone involved in a conflict, including the opponent
• a willingness to take action for justice without either giving into or mimicking violence
• refusal to harm, damage or degrade people / living things / the earth as a means of achieving goals
• a belief that everyone is capable of change and no-one has a monopoly of the truth
• how we act must be consistent with the ends we seek
• necessity of training so that nonviolence thinking and behaviour become part of our everyday lives.

Turning the Tide is a programme of Quaker Peace and Social Witness (QPSW). QPSW works with and on behalf of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain [off-site link].