Peacebuilding Tools
Through activities in sport, arts, advocacy, dialogue, and empowerment, GFP stimulates the leadership of youth and the building of peace. The skills acquired by Pioneers and volunteers in these processes build towards the six expressions of change: building acceptance, fostering cooperation, ensuring inclusion, developing respect, taking responsibility, and building trust. They are then passed along to one volunteer after the next, creating a range of sustainable relationships, partnerships, and exchanges across conflict divides.
- Sport For Peace
- Arts For Peace
- Advocacy For Peace
- Dialogue For Peace
- Empowerment For Peace
- Media For Peace
Sport For Peace has an important role to play in providing a space for opposing groups to meet each other in a neutral location, a “safe space,” with pre-defined rules and set codes of behaviour. It allows social contact between communities in which relationships have been severed through war and other forms of destructive conflict, helping children and youth overcome negative images and stereotypes about those who have different abilities, religions, and backgrounds to build acceptance and tolerance.
With the aim of reshaping prejudices, expectations, and attitudes, Sport For Peace programmes are uniquely designed to fit the context and culture of the local communities in which they are implemented. Key outcomes of Sport For Peace include building trust and acceptance, developing respect, ensuring inclusion, and encouraging greater cooperation that tears down barriers between groups and replaces them with bridges.
You can learn more about Sport For Peace here.
Activities in the arts are broad, leading Generations For Peace to implement projects targeting specific groups facing distinct conflicts. Painting and music, for example, have been found to be effective with children and those suffering from traumatic experiences, while interactive role-play drama is especially effective with youth and adults.
Arts For Peace activities help bring to surface many issues of conflict and violence existing in local communities, securing acknowledgement that they are happening, identifying possible responsive actions, and generating collective commitment to actively following through on agreed-upon steps. These programmes are effective both for psycho-social healing after violence and trauma, and for building trust, developing respect, and ensuring inclusion across previously divided social groups.
You can learn more about Art For Peace here.
Advocacy is about making something important more widely known – and that is exactly what Generations For Peace’s Advocacy For Peace aims to accomplish. From print, social, and broadcast media to rallies, marches, demonstrations, and special community events, Generations For Peace works to build support amongst different groups for change in local communities, starting at the grassroots.
The objectives of Advocacy For Peace are what make it unique. Other advocacy campaigns may be aimed at a variety of objectives – for example, advocating for better food or water. However, Advocacy For Peace campaigns must always aim to transform conflict in the communities in which GFP programmes are held, creating awareness of issues of conflict and violence in communities, shifting local perceptions, changing individual attitudes, and influencing overall behaviour.
Additionally, Advocacy For Peace serves to help raise awareness about GFP and proposed programmes, as well as to attract stakeholders, partners, and potential volunteers. From the grassroots, it is an important step in educating and recruiting volunteers, connecting with others and communicating a particular cause, and building and maintaining relationships and partnerships.
Learn about one of our Advocacy For Peace programmes here.
Embracing the principles and practices of “transformative dialogue,” Dialogue For Peace programmes create a safe space in which participants can engage in an honest exchange of ideas, all while remaining neutral, non-directive, and non-prescriptive. The end goal is not necessarily settlement or complete reconciliation, but rather the very significant step of transformation in conflict interactions between the parties.
As the newest addition to the Generations For Peace toolkit, Dialogue For Peace helps participants share their own perspectives and develop a better understanding of themselves and each other. What makes Dialogue For Peace a vehicle of peacebuilding is that verbal exchanges among individuals – though not guided in a pre-determined direction – are aimed at conflict transformation through improved relationships in the community.
Learn more about one of our Dialogue For Peace programmes here.
Empowerment For Peace is first and foremost a vehicle for peacebuilding, meaning that any activities must contribute to a peacebuilding objective. These activities can include education, vocational training, or income-generating techniques that are combined with conflict transformation education to reinforce personal responsibility, individual capability, and group cooperation. Situations addressed by the programmes include gender inequality, domestic violence, gang crime, or violence as a means of earning money or protection.
Working both from the grassroots and through partnerships with local organisations, Empowerment For Peace provides participants with the appropriate technical capacity-building inputs and secure viable economic opportunities while engaging them with the opportunity to build connections between otherwise divided groups, prompting support for long-term peacebuilding activities
You can learn more about Empowerment For Peace here.