Peace Mural: Bridging Racial, Political and Religious Divides
Hands of Peace | Chicago, Illinois, USA
Peace Mural: Bridging Racial, Political and Religious Divides
Hands of Peace | Chicago, Illinois, USA
Gen Peace: I am the Change
Inspiring Development | Makassar, Indonesia
The Gen Peace participants worked in small group analyzing violent conflict in their university. They analyzed the root causes and the dynamic of the conflict in order to help them to design an effective intervention / follow-up project.
Gen Peace: I am the Change
Inspiring Development | Makassar, Indonesia
Group picture with the hosts Fajar FM of Makassar. Gen Peace participants visited this one of the largest local radios with the purpose to network and begin partnership. InDev believes that engaging media will help the participants to reach out to more people in spreading the peace values.
Growing Seeds of Transformation
Weaving Bonds Across Borders | Taunggyi, Myanmar
Exposure and exchange trip to Inle Lake Taunggyi
Hands of Peace is an interfaith organization that worked to develop peace-building and leadership skills among Israeli, Palestinian, and American teenagers through the power of dialogue and personal relationships. Forty-two Israeli, Palestinian, and American teenagers (ages 15-18) from Hands of Peace joined forces with 25 inner-city teenagers from the Chicago Freedom School to plan and create a “peace mural” in a low-income Chicago neighborhood. This activity was accompanied by facilitated dialogues, where participants from the Chicago Freedom School learned more about the situation in Israel/Palestine, and Hands of Peace participants learned more about inequalities and injustices within Chicago.
The goals included challenging stereotypes, inspiring interfaith cooperation and understanding, and building empathy for the injustices and violence suffered by civilians in the US and the Middle East. During the mural planning process, students learned from each other’s stories and felt deeply connected to one another’s suffering. Their mural also aimed to inspire Chicago locals for many years to come and serve as a lasting testament to the power of intercultural cooperation.
The direct beneficiaries of this project were the 42 Israeli, Palestinian, and American teenagers from Hands of Peace, 25 inner-city teenagers from the Chicago Freedom School (a cost-free program serving at-risk Chicago youth), and the residents of a Chicago neighborhood where the mural was painted.
The project took place in Central Africa’s Great Lakes region, where decades of conflict had created animosity between neighboring countries and high levels of distrust among the citizens of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. There, a university student organization sought to transform the conflict and distrust by bringing together peace-minded university students from across the region to learn and envision together.
Women’s Voices, a student group at Université Chrétienne Bilingue du Congo (UCBC), held a four-day workshop that brought six students from Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda to DR Congo. There, along with UCBC student leaders, they participated in experiential learning and facilitated dialogue. During the workshop, the participants worked together to find common ground and began transforming toxic perceptions of their neighbors into collaborative partnerships. The workshops taught conflict analysis and transformation, and how to make strategic plans for communicating their new learning to the campus communities they represented. On the third day of the program, UCBC hosted a university-wide conference for students and community leaders, where the workshop participants presented their learning and discussed collaborative responses to regional conflict.
The project directly impacted the six international participants, some 50 members of Women’s Voices, and an expected 500 students who participated in the university-wide conference on the third day of the workshop. As the participants took what they had learned back to their own communities, organizers hoped that the number of people ultimately touched by the project would exceed 1,000.
In Indonesia, the three biggest universities had repeatedly seen violent conflicts. Even a small incident between two students could trigger a massive violent incident involving two large groups where solidarity was based on ethnicity, affiliation, or friendship. This project aimed to reduce such conflict, create a network of student leaders, and develop a model for a student-led peace-building project that could be replicated as a regularly offered program.
A six-day workshop trained thirty student leaders from the State University of Makassar with skills, knowledge, and values that could actively defuse violent conflict at their university. The focus of the workshops was in-depth conflict analysis, comparative case studies, role-play dialogue, group-project planning, visits to historical places, team-building, and community-building activities, and the use of metaphor, rituals, and storytelling.
The program directly benefited thirty student participants from the State University of Makassar. Indirect beneficiaries included the larger student body of the State University of Makassar as well as the communities around the university.
In Burma’s conflict zones, communities were deeply affected by years of military dictatorship and armed conflict. Due to years of conflict, in Mong Pan (Shan State, Myanmar), there was a lack of trust among youth and a division in the community. To address these problems, this project provided a 10-day intensive training to 15 diverse political youth leaders from different groups in Mong Pan.
The focus of the workshop was to help the youth build trust in themselves as leaders, learn skills to heal the trauma they had experienced from the military conflict, and rebuild their trust in each other and their community. The project aimed to enhance the leadership skills of the participants by training them as trainers so that they, in turn, could teach others what they had learned. To further extend and consolidate the impact of the 10-day workshop, the organization planned to create a long-term leadership school, which would hold weekly meetings with the youth throughout the year.
Direct beneficiaries of the program were the fifteen young participants. Organizers hoped that once the youth leaders started working together to improve and advocate for the community, the project would also benefit the broader Mong Pan community. The organization planned to use this pilot program as a model to share with other conflict-affected communities in Burma as well as in other countries. The model would address the issues of recovery, healing, and empowerment for communities impacted by violence.
It was one more little circle in Lisle’s long and storied history: since Uncle Si and Aunt Edna started their journey working with youth in Burma, this project, in a way, seemed to bring us full circle again.
This project established a pen-pal exchange via letters and Skype between elementary and secondary students in Sierra Leone and the US to empower the children by fostering empathy and international connections. The primary school activities took place between a primary school in the Western rural area of Sierra Leone and McCleery Elementary School in Aurora, IL. Each group of students faced its own unique challenges: The students in Sierra Leone confronted poverty and lacked access to basic educational materials, while many of the students at McCleery came from immigrant families grappling with social and economic challenges of their own.
The secondary school activities involved teenagers from the Pikin Padi Youth Empowerment Program (Sierra Leone) and students at Highsight, a Chicago-based program for disadvantaged inner-city youth. Here too, each group faced its own challenges. In Sierra Leone, adolescents had to contend with poverty, child labor, and early marriage, while in inner-city Chicago, teens confronted community violence, poverty, and immigration issues. The students were paired with a pen pal from the other country, exchanging letters and sharing pictures. They learned how to write about their lives and discussed differences in cultural practices.
When possible, Skype was utilized so that students could directly communicate with their pen pals. The project directly impacted the 50 primary school students and 36 teenagers in the two countries. Additionally, four high school students in Sierra Leone and four college students in both countries mentored the pen pals. The project also impacted those who viewed these exchanges online, increasing their intercultural understanding.
The Ebola crisis presented a particular challenge to carrying out this project. The Lisle board was hopeful that the schools would open so that the project could proceed. The Ebola crisis itself demonstrated the need for more cross-cultural community initiatives.
While agriculture has not been an area of Lisle’s funding previously, the Board was persuaded that this creative project that would bring together poor farmers of four ethnic groups for the purpose of increasing agricultural productivity could extend cross-cultural exchange and learning into a new field. The focus of this project is to bring together farmers from different tribes to exchange agricultural practices that will improve agricultural output.
The project will train 200 farmers from the Lango, Acholi, Iteso and Kumam tribes of Lira district in Uganda, on good agricultural practices as poor farming practices and the loss of traditional crops has harmed health and economic success of the communities. To do this, organizers intend to enlist the aid of village elders and doctors and nutritionists (who can speak to the nutrition and health benefits of various crops) as well as agricultural experts.
Participants will also tour different tribal farms. In this way, members of each tribe will be able to benefit from the knowledge and traditions of the other tribes. While 200 farmers will participate in and directly benefit from this project, organizers expect another 200 to benefit indirectly through the experience of the farmers who participate. The village elders, doctors, and nutritionists are also expected to benefit as they gain a greater understanding of the cultures, their farming traditions, and agricultural practices in general