Bios

Yael Petretti‘s connection to the civil rights struggle grew out of her participation in the 1968 Poor People’s March on Washington, her life-changing experience of helping build Resurrection City, and her work tutoring children of color whose schools were being desegregated in southern Virginia. Certified as a Compassionate Listening (CL) facilitator in 2004, she led and co-led a number of CL delegations to Israel-Palestine, where she lived for 29 years. Yael co-authored Making Peace with Faith: The Challenges of Religion and Peacebuilding (Peace and Security in the 21st Century, 2018. She lives in New England where she facilitates CL trainings and volunteers as an Alternatives to Violence facilitator in a men's high security prison. Witnessing the “new Jim Crow” there has brought her around full circle to rejoin the struggle for racial/social justice here in the U.S. In January 2020, she initiated and co-led the first domestic Compassionate Listening delegation, “Listening in the Heart of Alabama”. She looks forward to many more such trips to explore the perfect “marriage” of Compassionate Listening and antiracism (and all other “isms”) work in the world.