A Journey Called “Identities”
To start this post, I would like to provide a little bit of context. I participated in the online phase of the Rotary Peace Fellowship program with Class 32 in a country other than my own country of Brazil. I spent three months in Argentina and this experience strengthened my comprehension of my identity as a Latina. An identity being built since the very first moment I put a backpack on my...Read More
Leadership and Social Change
According to John C. Maxwell, one needs to discover and implement life choices that will take them beyond their talent. In order for a leader to be successful, he/she has to be effective in leading his/her team to think strategically, innovatively, and sustainably. About eleven years ago I started my leadership journey with a team of young people and we were all charged with the...Read More
Identities in Peace: Ties that Bind and Differences that Divide
“All conflicts are identity conflicts…” — John Paul Lederach, Conflict Transformation Class, 2005 Growing up in Australia, identity was always a perplexing matter for me. My parents had emigrated from Hong Kong soon after the formal abolition of the White Australia Policy under the Whitlam Labor Government. As the only Chinese kid at school, my early school memories...Read More
Rethinking Security to Reframe and Advance Impactful Peacemaking
I want to tell you about an incident that changed my outlook on security programs forever. And, I hope it does the same to you. After spending four years in the tech world working as a software engineer, I set out on a journey to become a peacebuilder some eight years ago. I was grateful to have found a way into the field I was always passionate about. However, I lacked professional...Read More
Our journey for lasting peace
As a teenager, I would impatiently wait for my father to return home after work – because we did not know where the next bomb would go off. Buses, trains, buildings – nowhere was safe. For most of my life, I lived in a country that was grappled with war. People lived in fear. Some were affected more than others. Some lost their homes. Some lost their loved ones. Some lost their lives....Read More
Environment, Natural Resource, and Forced Migration
Since prehistoric times, humans have been impacting the environment. Whether it’s hunting for natural resources of food and water, shelter, exploring new territories, exploiting, displacing, and replacing other life forms (humans, animals, and plants). Contemporaneous advancement has seen humans creating boundaries and destroying nature through urbanization and industrialization. The...Read More
Children’s Right Over Climate Change : Taking the case of Ethiopian Safety Net Program
In Ethiopia, many agriculture dependent families have a long history of facing the effects of extreme weather events and unpredictable rainfall variations. Disasters disproportionately affect family members including children in the crisis period and afterwards. Regular intervention of humanitarian food aid has offset various crisis levels in assisting vulnerable families with provision...Read More
Peace and Conflict Analysis for Better Programming and Impact
Insightful analysis is essential to any conflict transformation process, from prevention to mediation to reconciliation. A one-size-fits-all approach cannot be applied given, for some examples, root-causes and the interests of stakeholders differ in each conflict context. Effective conflict transformation approaches must be based on the comprehensive use and understanding of peace, conflict...Read More