Alternatives to Violence Project - Sioux Falls

The Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) was founded by prisoners in the NY prison system in collaboration with Quakers in 1975. Now it has local chapters in 40 states and 20 countries. Here in South Dakota, the Alternatives to Violence Project celebrated its 100 th Workshop back in 2016, and is still ongoing. We do workshops and refreshers at the prison, and we also hope to expand AVP into the community at large.

Our workshops are experiential: we don’t lecture, instead we do exercises, brainstorms, and role plays so that the workshop participants can work things out for themselves. What you learn by doing generally sticks with you longer. We have basic, advanced, and training workshops for facilitators, and we have both inmate and outside facilitators.

Alternatives to Violence Workshops make a tremendous difference. Prisoners are able to actually have real friendships inside the prison, develop accountability for slips and/or violent behavior, and AVP has been proven to reduce violence and recidivism significantly.