The Common Ground Blog is an initiative of (Search for Common Ground), an international non-governmental organization (NGO), headquartered in Washington and Brussels, whose mission is to transform the way the world deals with conflict - away from adversarial confrontation towards cooperative solutions. (more info)
Dala Ghandour with supervisor Jeanne Isler, Project Director of SFCG on Race.
Interviewed by Audra Gustin, SFCG Communications Intern
Dala is a lawyer specialized in family status legal matters and a certified mediator, offering mediation services to the unprivileged populations in North Lebanon, Lebanese prisoners and as a family mediator for divorced couples in Beirut Sharia Courts. She aims to introduce mediation into the legal system and spread this culture of forgiveness and reconciliation in the Lebanese society.
Further, in the interest of empowering youth and women to participate in their own political process, she ran as an independent candidate for Beirut municipality elections in 2010. As she says, “I believe that politics should not be only left to politicians!”
She will be interning with the SFCG Race Project with Jeanne Isler for six weeks, ending on June 8th.
How did you come to be part of the Leaders of Democracy Fellowship program?
“I feel very lucky that I’m part of this.”
“LDF is a program that gathers 20 Arab leaders from the Arab world, as Arab activists; [it] takes us to Maxwell School at Syracuse University for a month so we learn about public administration, public policy, and of democratization and so on. Then we come and we apply what we have learned in one of the different NGOs in Washington,DC… Read more…
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Women in Solidarity for Peace: A radio campaign by N-Peace Sri Lanka gives hope for peace.
“Peace in the family is very important, because it can be shared with the community by the children and relatives of that family. This is an act spearheaded by women, a vital contribution of women to sustain peace in a society.”
“We need to create a society exempt from violence. Women have the strength to achieve such a status. Because they are capable, women need to come together and draw strength from being united to achieve this goal. ”
“If we want peace, we need to bring a shift in thinking and in the attitude of the people.”
These are the voices of women, women who wish for peace in Sri Lanka. They see numerous vital ways of building peace and transforming conflicts in Sri Lanka that Sri Lankan women can contribute to this long process. For a long time, their voices went unheard, lacking a space and acknowledgement.
The ‘Women in Solidarity for Peace’ radio campaign gave them the platform to express and advocate for their cause: sustainable peace in Sri Lanka. Read more…
Generation Grand Lacs includes Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
By Ashley Murphy
In today’s endlessly globalized world, people are becoming increasingly connected to each other, with youth at the forefront of this communication revolution. These new levels of connectivity can have potentially negative effects, allowing youth – a population both malleable and vulnerable – to take on the role of an agent of instability. Yet this connectivity can also be mobilized in a constructive way by helping youth be catalysts for change.
SFCG’s Generation Grands Lacs (GGL) capitalizes on the latter concept; it is a regional radio program connecting Great Lakes’ youth, which represent more than half of the regional population, via a positive outlet. The program seeks to break down ideas that fuel stereotypes about “the other” and in turn create a safe and expressive platform where youth can recognize commonalities that unite them across borders. Through such unity, dissatisfaction and unrest can be quelled to mitigate conflict and promote peace. Read more…
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Participants in a mediation session take part in a collaborative cultural performance after their training with Beinfait in the DRC.
The following blog comes to us from Mame N. Dieye. Mame (known as “Nini”) is from Dakar, Senegal and is currently interning with the Institutional Learning Team at SFCG while pursuing a Masters Degree in International Development Studies at Ohio University. Her research primarily focuses on the conflicts between market dominant minorities and the civilian population in Senegal.
“I am a witness to the power of healing and reconciliation.”
– Bienfait Muhigirwa, SFCG Program Assistant, South Kivu, DRC
Bienfait’s voice, energy and optimism are infectious even through a Skype conversation that dropped our connection at least 6 times during our afternoon chat. I couldn’t imagine any other person with whom I would have rather shared these technical difficulties. He dealt with them with grace, humor, and that oh-so-fleeting positive energy.
After one of the forums that SCFG and the center of Lokole organized, a chief in the town of Irangi said, “thanks to this training, we will now take over the reign so that peaceful coexistence will endure.”
Bienfait facilitates reconciliation activities between community leaders and local residents.
These are the types of testimonies and feedback that keep Bienfait going, that give him so much satisfaction. They give him confidence that his work makes a difference. Read more…
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The following blog was written by Jonathan White for SFCG’s Learning Portal for Design, Monitoring, & Evaluation for Peacebuilding. You can find the original post here.
Gender sensitive programming is, generally, a mandatory requirement of most international development activities, including peacebuilding. For example, USAID’s office of Conflict Management and Mitigation requires all projects demonstrate a unique gender element. More than a donor-mandated exercise in project equity, the increasing emphasis on gender is forcing peacebuilders to critically reflect on how our projects interact with local actors and context on a micro-level, and is challenging our assumptions on what it means to ‘do good peace work’.
But what does it mean to build gender into the design, monitoring and evaluation of peacebuilding projects? Read more…
Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka
Thank you to Ayodhya Krishani Amarajeewa from the SFCG Sri Lanka office for submitting this blog post about sports proving a path toward community empowerment for young people in Sri Lanka.
“The football team at Fordeys School in Nuwara Eliya in the hill country made everyone proud when they won the national level championship. This victory mattered a lot to the area youth groups. It is their effort in training the school football team even with few facilities that led the Fordeys School’s football team to victory. These young amateur trainers see a future in it.”
Everyone likes to win but success at sports was the least of what was achieved at the Fordeys School. Coming together to work with modest means prepared local youth to unite toward a bigger goal, one that would have a positive impact on their peers throughout the hill country. With a better feel for their strengths, these youth came ready with a solution in mind when they approached the Sri Lankan Minister of Sports to discuss their concerns about becoming professional athletes last month. Read more…
