Alternatives to Violence Poject was started in 1975 by a group of inmates at Green Haven Prison as a workshop in collaboration with the Quakers. As success breeds success, it spread from prison to prison, and was brought into main-stream society. AVP is a nationwide and worldwide network of volunteer groups, whose goal is to reduce the level of violence, by providing workshops in which people can learn nonviolent methods of resolving conflict; based upon the techniques that were used by Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.