Gaining Ground Viewers Guide
Voices from the Classroom

Catia Cecilia Confortini

Catia Cecilia Confortini is co-director of the Peace & Justice Studies Program, and an assistant professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She has used the film Gaining Ground in her class Introduction to the Study of Conflict, Justice, and Peace, for first and second year students.

In the final part of the class, Confortini uses DSNI as a case study to show students, who tour the neighborhood to see the various projects and sit-in on a planning session, that community activism can be a form of peace-making. The class looks at DSNI as an example of a community in conflict, with multiple groups in the neighborhood appearing to have incompatible political, social, environmental, or cultural goals.

Confortini says DSNI directly addresses these multiple layers of conflict. For example, it has a political system that includes all the various constituencies and works from the bottom up to understand the community’s problems, and think of solutions. It creates spaces for youth to have a stake in the community instead of being disenfranchised and joining gangs or engaging in destructive behavior. And it attempts to address economic injustice by establishing the land trust and community development without displacement.

“Students love the case study, love visiting DSNI,” says Confortini, explaining that it brings together many of the issues the students have studied in class, and it gives them a sense of hope. “In the first part of the class we talk a lot about the injustices in the world: we’re destroying the environment, all the social justice problems. It’s a real downer. Then we talk about DSNI, and it’s an uplifting story,” says Confortini. The key is to caution them that it’s not all roses, she says. “There are still problems; the community is still marginalized. But they’ve taken matters into their own hands. That’s another goal of the class—to show that poor people, people of color can analyze their own problems better than outsiders.”

Confortini has used Gaining Ground and its predecessor, Holding Ground, as supplements to the 1994 book Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood. Other resources she has used with the film include the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, and books on conflict transformation by John Paul Lederach.

See Confortini’s syllabus [here].