VFH Violence & Community Center
Surviving War
Surviving War, a collection of poetry, essays, and photographs addressing war experience, is designed to help active duty soldiers and veterans understand and accept their experiences in war, and to ease their transition into civilian life. More...
Violence And Spirituality
Violence And Spirituality - The The Hidden Dimensions of
Violent Experience
Narrated by Roberta Culbertson, this video explores how the humanities can be used in the wake of violence.
After violence, if survivors can take the matters that are most crucial to them - their experiences - and develop ways to think about them, they are well on the way to re-imagining, rebuilding, and re-creating their humanity together and individually.
The Violence & Community Center, a signature program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, brings the resources of the humanities—story, history, poetry, culture, arts, and reason—to communities seeking to rebuild after violence. These human creative “tools of thought” are the real roots of all recovery; they reassert and reclaim culture and humane values after these have been severely tested or destroyed. Culture, beliefs, and the yearning to be human again must not be overlooked in times of aftermath.
What We Do
The world, communities, and the wounded always try to use the humanities to better understand and cope with violence and other uncontrollable powers in the world—particularly afterward, when the pain is greatest. But too often their efforts are slowed by other demands, by a sense that such work is secondary in importance, and by the destruction that accompanies violence itself. In a destroyed world, sitting down to read or write, sing or draw, seems foolish and wasteful; in fact it is essential.
Expanding our Reach
After more than a decade of research, regional and international programming, and service (supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Commonwealth of Virginia, the United States Institute of Peace, private donors, and others), we are now expanding our outreach. We offer the fruits of years of humanities research on violence, a developing curriculum for community leaders, a large team of dedicated professionals and scholars, and the experience not only of academic experts, but of survivors themselves.
