Jenny Hartland, Development Worker for AVP York and a Member of York MM writes: AVP (The Alternatives to Violence Project) Britain was launched (literally) on the Woodbrooke lake over the August Bank Holiday in 1997, as the culmination of an inevitable and vital process. The organisation had to become non-denominational, learn to stand on its own feet and come out from that protective umbrella provided for some 8 years by QSRE and, right at the start, by NFPB.

Now, one year on, we we have just had our second AGM and National Gathering at Nottingham University in mid-September. The choice of venue reflects the spread of AVP northwards during a year when we have seen the establishment of new groups in Sheffield and Scotland, not to mention a few more areas dipping their toes in the water.

The 1998 National Gathering promised to be hard work for all. The legacy of those 8 sheltered years is an enthusiastic, growing, spreading movement in desperate search of some real order and structure, and some widely differing views about what we should be doing and how. We have had to put all our conflict resolution, and consensus-making skills into overdrive and prove that we can do for ourselves what we 'preach' to others. It felt as if it paid off, as if AVP had visited the osteopath and bones had been clicked back into place.

On the ground too, wonderful things are happening. Local groups have their own characteristic styles. York, entering its third year of a well-funded community development project which employs two part-time co-ordinators, is concentrating on taking AVP into the part of the community that AVP doesn't usually reach. Its biggest advance at the moment is through the York Domestic Violence Forum. The police are carrying AVP leaflets to domestic violence incidents and the Forum and AVP York are setting up a conference to explore the breaking of the cycles of violence. In Manchester there is more emphasis on prison work, with an ongoing programme at Risley and a first workshop at Buckley Hall, Rochdale. AVP is happening in various ways in the NFPB region on Merseyside and in Lancaster, Sheffield, southern Scotland, Nottingham, Carlisle, Grimsby, Hull ... where next?

So, what is this AVP? Well, its impossible to sum up in a few crisp sentences - and I for one have stopped trying. The only way to find out and understand is to come on a workshop - but I don't expect anyone to accept that kind of blind selling either. So, the answer is to talk to someone who has done AVP and hear from them the ways in which it has helped them to change and reassess their lives.