Hands Across the Hills

Hands Across the Hills is a cultural exchange/dialogue project that has brought together two rural  communities with differing cultural, social, and political profiles – Leverett in western Massachusetts and Letcher County in southeastern​ Kentucky coal country. The first exchange in Leverett was Oct 27-29, 2017, and a visit by Leverett to Whitesburg, Kentucky, is slated for April 2018. Dr. Paula Green has 40 years experience as a psychologist, peace educator, facilitator, and mentor in the field of intergroup relations and the resolution of community conflicts. In 1994 she founded the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, a highly regarded US-based NGO focused on international conflict transformation, inter-communal dialogue and reconciliation. She is Professor Emerita at the School for International Training in the US, where she founded and directed CONTACT, the Conflict Transformation Across Cultures Program, with its two annual institutes and graduate certificate program for peacemakers from around the world. Her work has taken her to many regions of Africa, Asia, the Mid East, and Europe, as well as within the US, where she resides, consults, and teaches. In 2009, Paula received an award from the Dalai Lama as an “Unsung Hero of Compassion.”  The Unsung Heroes award is presented to “individuals who, through their loving kindness and service to others, have made their communities and our world a better place.”  She also won the  “Psychology of Peace and Justice Prize” from Psychologists for Social Responsibility, 2012, as well as a “Leadership and Service as a Peacemaker” award and a Human Rights award.  After the 2016 presidential election, Paula increased her focus on restoring US relations fractured by political and cultural divides. Engaging communities antagonistic to each other because of their political allegiances, she and other residents of her hometown of Leverett MA co-created Hands Across the Hills. Through this program, she now consults and mentors other communities that hope to bridge divides in their own cities or elsewhere in the country.