As regular readers know, I’ve been working with the Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) and others to expand and amplify the impact of peacebuilding efforts in the United States for a long time. My colleagues and I made huge—but by no means enough—progress along those lines last week at AfP’s PeaceCon and a separate session I pulled together on Friday to lay concrete plans for what my colleagues and I could do after the formal conference ended.

PeaceCon 2024

PeaceCon is the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s annual conference. Its 2024 edition was held last week at the United States Institute of Peace and George Mason University.

About 1,000 people attended the first day which was held at USIP and dealt with a variety of global issues. Somewhere between four and five hundred men and women of AfP’s member organizations and others spent the next two days at GMU’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Peace and Conflict Resolution at which we spent time on domestic as well as global conflict. Far more people attended the virtual sessions that we held separately.

Because I’m on AfP’s board and have been actively involved in its work for twenty years, I spend more time talking on the sidelines than I do attending formal sessions. Still, I was blown away by the amount of energy my colleagues seemed to have for doing work here in the United States. That was true even of the hallway conversations at USIP where all of the formal sessions dealt with conflicts outside the US.

I hosted a session in anticipation of the workshop that I will describe in the next section. It was a little chaotic. One of people who was supposed to participate was unexpectedly invited to lunch at the White House at the same time. Another had travel plans disrupted. Still, four of us talked about the grass roots efforts we were involved in.  More importantly, we found that the people in the audience were doing plenty of things, too, including a number of Rotarians, an Oberlin graduate who just finished a degree in theology, and a member of NAFCM’s board.

More importantly, I was taken by three sessions that I had nothing to do with. All of which deepened my understanding of the problems we face and my commitment to doing something about them, starting with that gathering I convened on Friday.

First was the presentation about the 2024 edition of Edelman’s Trust Barometer. Edelman is one of the world’s largest and most respected public relations firms that has been studying trust for more than twenty years on the assumption that trusting relationships are essential for everything they do as a company and we do as a society. Every year, Edelman surveys about 1,500 people in 28 countries on trust-related issues. Their findings have tracked the depressing news we have seen in other polls in the United States and around the world. Overall, trust has been plummeting from country to country and leadership group to leadership group. Until recently, business leaders have been able to buck the trend. Now, the data suggested that trust in business was declining, too, taking with it support for the kinds of innovation on climate change and other issues that the private sector has been spearheading of late.

Second,  AfP developed the theme for this year’s PeaceCon out of its budding partnership with Principles for Peace (P4P)—status quo no more. Its founder, Hibba Qasas, led a discussion of what groups of young Israelis and Palestinians were doing in the wake of October 7. Although the discussion obviously touched on the situation in the region, we spent the bulk of our time talking about what could be done to shift public opinion and, then, public policy, including on college campuses, including the work of the PeaceWorks Foundation.

Third, a smaller and more proactive discussion was led by my co-author Patricia Shafer and her colleagues from the University of Virginia on holding constructive discussions across ideological lines on campuses. AfP will be working with that team to expand its work beyond a couple of prototypes that we learned about.

Finally, I came away with more ideas from a session organized by the Carter Center’s project on democratic elections in the US. I knew that the project existed but hadn’t realized that it had made so much progress in its six pilot states and had begun making connections beyond them. The group has limited itself to issues involving elections for obvious reasons given the situation facing our country and the center’s long and celebrated history on voting integrity.

And Beyond

As regular readers also know, I’ve spent the last couple of years getting to know and work with individuals and organizations that don’t think of themselves primarily as peacebuiders—if they do so at all. Many explicitly said that they wanted to work with us as the Peacebuilding Starts at Home initiative unfolded.

To be honest, I was feeling overwhelmed. There was no shortage of potential partners. And, I was dealing with them one on one.

Then, one day in the spring, my new friend Aviva Lund of Optimal Work suggested that I take advantage of the fact that many of them would already be in town for PeaceCon and convene a smaller, invitation-only planning event for the following day. After I went through one of those all-too-frequent face plant moments, I realized that it was a terrific idea and began issuing invitations. I reached out to no more than 35 people before we got 25 confirmations which was just about all we could handle in a single one-day session in the AfP conference room.

I drew heavily on work I had done with Dick O’Neill on what we came to call catalytic convening. For years, Dick had run the Highlands Forum, a behind-the-scenes think tank for the Pentagon in wich he would bring together diverse groups of twenty to thirty thought leaders for two and a half days to think through issues that would help Defense Department leaders think outside of the clichéd box. After Dick joined the AfP board (he and I had been friends since nursery school), we explore ways of holding similar events but adding catalyzing projects to the mix, something Dick really couldn’t do with DoD.

A

Along with Aviva and David Sloan Wilson of ProSocial World, we put the attendees through a modified Highlands experience—two of the people with whom I am helping keep Dick’s work alive were in the room.

We started with people introducing themselves only using six words—a tool I had adapted after learning about Michelle Norris’s six-word Race Card Project which is spectacular in its own right. Then David and Aviva each led us through an hour-long discussion on their work and why it should be important to peacebuiders. We then spent about three hours brainstorming ideas we could do together and came up with a hefty list which we then narrowed down a bit over an informal dinner, something Dick always included in Highlands meetings. Now, three days later, we seem to have settled on the following ways of putting Peacebuilding Starts at Home into action and expanding its scope:

  • Starting at least one locally based and locally led action project that combines as many of the perspectives we discussed as possible. We have a number of places we could pick from where people in the room already have projects underway
  • Doing the same on college campuses
  • Strengthen civil society by working with organizations like Rotary (which was in the room) and building initiatives around showings of documtenaries like Join or Die or Undivide Us whose producers were not in the room but with whom we have worked
  • Explicitly creating and growing a network of people like ourselves who want to connect more of the dots as I’m inclined to call it that would loosely resemble what Dick did with Highlands but me more intentional in defining and reaching social change goals
  • All will require taking the small amount of seed funding that was pledged on Friday and raising the resources that we will need

Still More Words Than Action

I am excited by what we were able to accomplish, and we are already making plans on all four fronts.

I do have to admit, though, that we are still in the talking rather than the acting stage.

So, stay tuned here because my readers will be among the first to know what happens.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.