M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence – Helping communities achieve a nonviolent, sustainable, and just world.

Nonviolence in Action

The M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence is a nonprofit located in Rochester, NY that embodies the vision of its historic namesake.

Support Our Garden

Help is needed cleaning and refitting our basement as a grow room to support our community garden and food share program.

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Gandhi Nonviolence Cards

Order our Gandhi and Nonviolence Cards to help your friends and family learn and teach nonviolence.

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Nonviolence is shaped by principles that guide our actions as we work for change.

From small acts of kindness to mass movements for change, nonviolence moves our care for other people into action.

Nonviolence helps us organize our community to refuse to cooperate with injustice. It gives us ways to engage our community in solutions and alternatives.

Nonviolence offers practical and effective tools to achieve justice in a way that breaks the cycle of violence.

It takes courage to stand up for peace and justice. Nonviolence unleashes that courage within us.

Our Mission is to help individuals and communities develop the inner resources and practical skills needed to achieve a nonviolent, sustainable, and just world.

Our Four Pillars

Restorative Practices

We practice and preach culturally informed restorative practices that are a hallmark of Gandhian and Kingian nonviolence as well as many Indigenous cultures worldwide. These restorative practices save money, reduce trauma, and are often more effective than our current justice system.

Sustainability

We enact the connection that Gandhi saw between nonviolence and sustainability by growing our community garden for and with neighbors, by making conscientious purchasing and financial policies, and by keeping vegetarian at the Gandhi House.

Racial Justice

We work to recognize, interrupt, and undo racism – a systemic form of dehumanization embedded in U.S. economic and social systems – in order to stop violence at its root. We enact anti-racist practice in our staff and board as well as in our work and community engagements.

Nonviolence Education

We teach the critical skills of nonviolence by serving youth ages 12-24 through school programs and adults through workshops, presentations, and book groups. We also spread nonviolence through our “Gandhi and Nonviolence” cards and our Nonviolence Now media project, in partnership with Nonviolence News.

Student conversations

Families connected to the garden

Events and workshops

Youth and adults trained

Leadership

Stretching into Leadership

May 12, 2022

Last week, I was invited to speak at a banquet for student leaders at Paul Smith College on the topic of leadership. Below is the text for the talk, offered …

We acknowledge the land on which we gather is the treaty territory of the Haudenosaunee Peoples.

Nonviolence is shaped by principles that guide our actions as we work for change.