Welcome to Walking Distance

Steps Toward Peace

An educational nonprofit promoting peace and environmental equity through community building initiatives and university student mentoring.

Our Vision

We Cultivate Peacebuilders

We Cultivate Peacebuilders

We partner with community members and university students, transforming theoretical knowledge into practical wisdom with participation in and exposure to real life community
development issues and models.

Our Focus

We Promote
Environmental Equity

We Promote
Environmental Equity

We work with individuals and communities across the globe to transform conflict in ways that ensure sustainable and equitable access to environmental resources.

Our Approach

We Facilitate Healing And Transformation

We Facilitate Healing And Transformation

We take a systemic, inclusive approach to engage all community voices, utilizing a broad range of interdisciplinary processes.

How We Do It

The Five Pillar Walking
Distance Approach

Our work involves engaging university students with a global landscape of community peacebuilding models dedicated to environmental equity.

01

Community
Collaboration

02

Mindset
Development

03

Systems
Thinking

04

Place-based
Approach

05

Asset-based
Community Development

I’m Not Saying We Shouldn’t Be Angry

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be angry.
Anger seems reasonable. But perhaps
we will do what I’ve heard the Inuit do—

spend the emotion on walking, walk a line
until all the anger has left our bodies.
The moment the Inuit notice the anger is gone,

replaced, perhaps, by sadness or fear,
compassion or just a quietness,
they mark that spot with an object

to show the extent of their anger.
And perhaps, if we’re lucky, when we walk
this way, it will be a long enough walk

that we arrive at each other’s doors,
object in hand, and when the object
leaves our grip, we’ll be able to use our hands

to greet each other, touch each other’s faces,
point to the horizon to all the other places
we might choose to walk now together.

Our Approach

We take a systemic, inclusive approach to engage all community voices, utilizing
a broad range of interdisciplinary processes.