How we serve 

We accomplish our mission by partnering with governments, businesses and other civil society organizations to:

• Gather change agents within specific communities experiencing destructive conflict
• Equip them with social technologies and skills to use them
• Create the opportunities, when gathered, to heal intractable conflicts amongst themselves and their communities
• Help them to create structures for collaboration and rapid prototyping of initiatives to address needs in the community that tend to be the sources of conflict
• Make them aware of resources to enable them to meet the needs
• Research the projects for transferable concepts and practices
• Publish the findings for the benefit of other communities we can directly serve

The following diagram describes this cycle of processes utilizing a familiar metaphor:

Supporting Infrastructure: Seed

Leadership Development Workshops & Peace Gatherings (hereinafter referred to as LDW) are conducted in rural settings of great natural beauty away from most of the distractions of modern city life.  Lasting from eight days to as long as three weeks, an LDW is intended to be  a safe space in which leaders from diverse backgrounds can undertake deep change processes individually and corporately in order to envision and build sustainable peace. In the LDW, participants are introduced to social technologies such as Appreciate Inquiry, Principled Negotiation, Generative Dialouge, and Theory U.  They learn and apply principles and practices that enable deep personal and collective transformation, reconciliation and generative dialogue.  The objective of every workshop is for the participants to form a relational container strong enough to hold their differences.  As they do, they learn how to resolve inevitable interpersonal conflicts and then move to co-create initiatives for solving some of the most complex problems in society.

Dialogue Projects are also conducted as an alternative to Leadership Development Workshops.  Our dialogue projects involve more mature leaders in communities.  Meeting regularly over periods of months, the participants build bridges of understanding across ethnic, racial or religious differences.  As with LDWs, our objective in leading facilitating dialogue projects is that the participants will go beyond developing friendships to creating initiatives for building additional bridges between their communities and for addressing needs within their cities or regions that all too often become the focus of violent conflict.

Supporting Infrastructure: Cultivate

Leadership Initiatives in Networked Communities (LINCs) Out of the Leadership Development Workshops it is our hope that the participants will return to their communities to form LINCs.  LINCs intentionally recruit members from all sectors of society: non-profit, business, and government.  A LINC intentionally works to create deep trusting relationships among its members.  Through generative dialogue and “presencing” they identify the most pressing needs of their community and then rapidly prototype initiatives for meeting those needs, thus alleviating many of the causes of destructive conflicts in their regions.  At the invitation of the LINC, the Institute aligns third party resources to help meet the emergent priorities. In conjunction with the initiatives of the LINC, for example the drilling of Peace Wells with a partner organization such as Living Water International, in an area short on potable water, The Institute provides conflict resolution training and additional Leadership Develop Workshops for inhabitants of the region. 

Overarching Strategies:

Focus on a few communities. In order to have more immediate, deep and lasting impact we will focus our efforts on specific communities within identifiable regions.  As our efforts bear fruit in specific communities, we will have proven models for positive change to share with others.  The work of the Institute will grow and we will be able to increase the scope of our work to include other communities.  As this occurs, we believe that others doing similar work will benefit from reading the published results of our work.

Build and strengthen partnerships and networks with civil society organizations.  We view other civil society organizations as collaborators and not competitors., and businesses as potential forces for good.  We will apply maximum leverage for deeper and broader impact as we continue to partner with indigenous organizations who know and have access to vital stakeholders in a community.  To the extent possible we will rely upon organizations operating in the community to provide most, if not all, of the logistical preparation for a project.  We will bring our distinctive strengths to a project and call upon other organizations to partner with us to do what they do best.  We will partner with our partners to seek and share grants to conduct projects.

Move beyond advocacy to collaboration with governments.  Most nonprofit organizations choose to be either service oriented or advocacy oriented.  As Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant reported in their book, Forces for Good, the nonprofits having the highest impact are those that are good at doing both. We view governments as partners seeking the common good.  We want to go beyond advocacy by including governments in the vital conversations and collaborations that we seek to enable within communities.  Instead of change agents in communities collaborating to find solutions and then lobbying or advocating for change, servants and leaders in government will have been part of the collaboration.

Leverage our organizational capacity by inspiring evangelists for our vision, mission and methods.  Our volunteers are more than a source of free labor, dues or donations.  They are themselves change agents in society and vital partners in doing our work.  We will continue to invite our volunteers to gatherings that are both opportunities for training and hands on service and that build a community of common vision.  Gatherings that connect volunteers, staff and participants at the levels of the open mind, the open heart and the open will are absolutely essential to the deep individual and collective transformation essential to societal change.

Work with and not at cross purposes to market forces.  We will work with businesses to help them do well by doing good.  We will include owners and leaders of businesses in the community dialogue and collaborations.  We will seek innovative ways to develop earned income ventures that have potential to serve our mission while also providing sustainable revenue.

Vision

Guiding principles

Team