About the Authors

John Townsend Looney (1916-2005), graduated from Case College of Applied Science in 1938 and DePaul University College of Law in 1944. He and his wife Adele had a growing family and he owned a successful machine tool business in Wadsworth, Ohio in 1970 when he was prompted to sell his business and devote his energy to preventing nuclear war. John organized both the Ohio Nuclear Freeze and the Northeast Ohio Office of the American Friends Service Committee.

After Dr. King was murdered, Looney was amazed that Dr. King’s obviously successful methods were not being taught in schools. Looney surveyed the curricula then available for nonviolence education, and finding none aimed at adults, he pioneered development of a course entitled Alternatives to Violence, an intensive comprehensive conflict resolution program. Many northeast Ohio church groups were recruited to help develop and test the course, and the first workbook appeared in 1984. In 1985 Looney and Danene Bender of Akron incorporated a nonprofit, Peace Grows, Inc. to promulgate the Alternatives to Violence course. This course was taught in several Ohio colleges and universities for the next twenty years, primarily because Looney spent almost all his time personally visiting educators and training his students in an advanced course so they could teach it to others.

He was planning a handbook for the general public when he died in 2005. This book is the outcome of that effort. Looney’s legacy to the peace movement continues to grow in the second decade of the 21st century: Danene Bender, his student and colleague who co-founded Peace Grows, Inc., funded an ongoing internship in his memory at Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee in Akron. Mentored by Ms. Bender, to date five John Looney Memorial Interns have published the entire Alternatives to Violence course on the web. Readers of this book are encouraged to visit the site, alternativestoviolencecourse.org, for more information. The website not only makes the course available free worldwide, but facilitates discussion among groups of students who are using it as a guide or virtual teacher. Thus Looney’s mission “to spread nonviolence” continues to grow.

Kezia Vanmeter Sproat (1937 - ) graduated from Laurel School, Vassar College, and The Ohio State University, where her 1975 dissertation, A Reappraisal of Shakespeare’s View of Women, won an award for feminist criticism from the Modern Language Association of America and prompted a revolution in Shakespeare studies. From 1979 to 1985, Dr. Sproat was Editor for the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience (NLS) at Ohio State. The annotated bibliography she initiated in 1985 to facilitate analysis of a huge and growing body of NLS-based research is still updated annually by the U.S. Department of Labor.

From 1987 to 1990, Dr. Sproat served as Writer/Editor in Biomedical Publications for Abbott Laboratories, who published and distributed several million copes of a parent education book she edited, among many other health education materials. Her most significant education, however, began in 1988, when she signed up for a nonviolence class taught by John Looney. In 1993, Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith of Harvard School of Public Health chose Peace Grows, Inc’s Alternatives to Violence course as one of the nine most effective anti-violence programs in the United States and invited John to work for a week with other program leaders in Washington, but he was teaching the course in Chicago that week. He asked Dr. Sproat and his wife Adele to represent Peace Grows, Inc. at the initial meetings of the Children’s Defense Fund’s efforts to establish a National Anti-Violence Network. In 1994, Dr. Sproat opened Highbank Farm Peace Education Center in Chillicothe. The Center hosted intensive advanced Alternatives to Violence courses during the 1990s and today supports studies and creates educational materials in nonviolence.

In 2002, Dr. Sproat was honored by Morehouse College for her response to 9/11, “A Short Course in Nonviolence,” which condensed Looney’s basic lessons to 271 words. A copy of “A Short Course” was given to all Morehouse students and she was inducted into the Board of Sponsors of the Martin Luther King, Jr. International Chapel.