Open Your Mind and Your Heart to Peace, Spirituality, and Nonviolence
Avila University’s Center for Truth, Racial Healing, and Social Justice, CSJ Center for Heritage, Spirituality, and Service, and the Buchanan Initiative for Peace and Nonviolence focus on the core components of our mission, including:
- The heritage and charisma of Avila’s founding Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet,
- Excellence and continual growth in teaching and learning,
- The worth, dignity, and potential of all humans, and
- Opportunities for understanding and justice in our global community.
The Centers and Buchanan Initiative are integrated throughout our curriculum and student experience. They provide opportunities that empower students, faculty, and staff to develop lifelong learning, a global perspective, and service to the dear neighbor.
The Buchanan Initiative for Peace and Nonviolence (BIPN) engages Avila’s academic community and stakeholders throughout the region to interrogate harms and injustices, elevate the voices of the marginalized, and apply methods for building positive sustainable relationships. The Buchanan Initiative brings students, academics, and activists together to raise a generation that has the nonviolent tools it needs to make peaceful social change possible.
The Center for Truth, Racial Healing, and Social Justice has the unique vision to provide a safe and private place for students to gather, relax, reflect, meditate, pray, and hold honest conversations about societal healing, unity, and acceptance. Also, a place to challenge and understand intolerance in its many forms. This space will be reserved for respectful reflection and communication about issues pertaining to increasing awareness regarding privilege, power, prejudice, implicit or explicit bias, microaggressions, and blind spots.
