What is Peacebuilding?

In this episode of Ordinary People, hosts Hannah and Nayeli discuss the pressing issues of war, violence, and the importance of peacebuilding with special guest Elizabeth Hume, Executive Director of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. They explore the humanitarian principles that guide peace efforts, the role of women and youth in peace processes, and the need for open discussions about peace in society. The conversation emphasizes the importance of integrating peacebuilding into various sectors and the challenges of measuring its impact. Listeners are encouraged to take actionable steps towards promoting peace in their communities.

Transcript

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Welcome friends, and thank you for joining us on Ordinary People with Hannah and nai. I'm Hannah and I'm nai. As we were recording our first episodes, we were seeing intense news coverage on gore protests and peace visuals. The increased number of death, especially of children lives feeling powerless. Watching the images of families being ripped apart, children dying, children losing their parents, what life is like in a war zone, watching humanitarian aid workers dying. There's just this raw emotion that comes from seeing that. There was one day I was watching real images of the deaths and I turned the TV off and just thought it's a privilege just to be able to turn the TV off. Yes. Because for a lot of people, they can't escape it. This has become their permanent living situation. It has even become generational for so many families. They are in survival mode on daily basis, and they don't see any sign of peace in their future. Even though there are a lot of anti-war protests, anti-violence, protests, protests to release hostages, I feel like ordinary people have no power. When I'm watching the news coverage, I see a small group of people on both sides who are in positions of power that are making decisions about where to drop bombs, how to cut off food supplies, how to retaliate to stop the enemy, what to do with hostages. These few people at the very top in power are the ones who decide how to handle conflict, whether they choose systematic discrimination against that includes everyday acts of violence or retaliatory acts of violent rebellion or disregarding the lives of innocent men, women, and children as just casualties of war. It's a small group of people in power who are making the choices that affect the majority. Just imagine right now according to the Geneva Academy, there are more than 110 armed conflicts around the world, and some of them have been happening for over 50 years. But violence conflict is not just international wars. Violence happened at every level, like domestic violence inside the privacy of somebody's home, neighborhood, gun violence, government sanctioned violence, domestic terrorism committed by extremists are all type of violence that prevent us from feeling safe or achieving peace. You bring up a good point, NAI right here in the city of Richmond, our youth experience gun violence at three times the national rate on the local level. In the past three years, almost 30 Richmond City School students died in gunfire. According to the school system, on a national level, gun violence is now the number one cause of death for American children and teens. And as I mentioned it, violence happens inside homestead. 25% of women and 14% of men have been victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime. And also there are 3.6 million cases of child abuse that are reported every year just in the us. Hannah, you mentioned early about retaliatory violence in places pledged by war. On the micro level, abuse and neglected children are 11 times more likely to engage in criminal behavior. As an adult, about 80% of 21 years old who were abused as children meet criteria for at least one psychological disorder. So violence at all levels is more likely to lead to more violence in the future because of the impact and of the trauma on. Children. But in all this devastation, there is hope. The vast majority of people just want the ability to live in peace and prosper. We don't want to live in an endless cycle of retaliatory violence. At some point, we have to come together and say, enough, no more violence. So after all that difficult research we did, we became convinced we needed to focus this episode on peace. But peace From a humanitarian perspective. Yes, there are four fundamental principles of humanitarian law. They are humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence. Humanity is alleviating human suffering. Impartiality means providing assistance based on need and not discriminating based on race, religion, or political affiliation. Neutrality means not taking sight independence from political government or economic interests. So we start with these humanitarian principles in mind and then we both have a lot of questions about peace, like what is peace and how do we promote it? Who steps in and tries to negotiate peace? Have we learned anything from past peace negotiations? What makes a lasting peace agreement Right away? What we found was peace is not an easy thing to research. There is so much information on war. There was a lot of information. On other episodes, we have research, but there is not much information out there on peace. It was not an easy research, but among the agencies who are doing the work to try and achieve peace, we came across this term that they use a lot. It's called peace building. I never heard that term before. Our research, and I mentioned the word to a few friends and family, none of them had ever heard that term either. Me either. The Alliance for Peace building define it as peace builders analyze violent, conflict, violent and fragility to understand what is driving it, preventing it from breaking out and trigger it. Additionally, it is vital to understand who can mobilize violent or peace, a conflicts trajectory, and most importantly, what works and doesn't work to prevent and reduce it and build sustainable. Peace. I looked at the list of Forbes top 100 charities in the US to see if there are any peace building charities on that list. In that list, you will find billions of dollars and resources dedicated to providing medical care, food, housing, and humanitarian aid when it's needed, some of which come after a natural disaster or a major conflict. But if you think about how important peace is to everything else in life, if we don't have peace, then all the other necessities like safe water, food, shelter, access to medical care are all secondary to survival. And those necessities become even more difficult to access when you don't have peace. But the only agency I could find in the Forbes Top 100 charities list that was focused on peace building was the Carter Center founded by former president Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalyn. To give you an idea, the number one charity on that list has revenue of $4.4 billion, and the Carter Center is number 69 on that list, had an annual revenue of $206 million. Of that $206 million as quoted by Forbes, the majority goes to health programs and only a portion of that money goes to peace building programs. So Nayeli and I walked away feeling like we need to spread awareness about peace building. It needs funding and resources behind it, and it needs to be part of our everyday conversations. Exactly, Hannah, we need to bring it up as a common discussion subject schools and community. It has to be a movement. We might have to revive the peace and love movement from the sixties and seventies. I am not opposed to that. I wasn't born yet during that movement. So I say bring it back and let us get to experience a peace movement. Cool clothes, anti-war protests, calls for nuclear disarmament. Let's do it. Okay, so I think this is a great place for us to stop and introduce our very special guest. We are so excited to have Elizabeth Hume, executive director of the Alliance for Peace Building joining us today. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. We're so incredibly honored to have you agree to meet with us and discuss peace building. We were wondering how did your professional and personal journey lead you to the Alliance for Peace building? Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I am so excited about what you all are doing, bringing these really important issues and breaking them down for everyday people. So I want to first thank you all for that and especially for picking peace building and conflict prevention. These are some of the wonkier topics, the ones where people think, well, what can I do? So that's why this podcast and this discussion is so important. So thank you for that. I can start off and tell you a story that I actually most people don't know about me. I grew up in a household that was very conflict, a lot of yelling, a lot of arguing. I was fortunate that I grew up in an area that was upper middle class or actually in some ways quite wealthy, but it didn't mean that behind closed doors, there wasn't a lot of violence and conflict, and that really shaped me because it didn't want to live like that. I didn't want a family like that, and I didn't understand how people had to fight. And so I was really drawn to it. I was always drawn to it. I always, even let's say in high school or college, focusing in on what causes conflicts globally or internationally or community conflicts, I was always trying to understand it and also myself. I mean, when you come out of an environment like that, you kind of feel conflict affected yourself. And so I really loved international affairs and knew that I wanted to combine the two. So I was really fortunate enough to get a job right after the war ended in Bosnia to work on establishing the legal sector, the laws working on while the conflict ended, the war ended, the battle was still being fought in the elections, who would run the government. So I was seconded by the State Department to the OSC, the organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe did the same thing after the war in Kosovo nine 11 happened, I went to Afghanistan to work for the International Rescue Committee on protection issues and human rights issues. I came back to the United States and helped start up the Office of Conflict Management and mitigation in usaid, the US Agency for International Development. How do we take our development assistance and actually try to prevent and mitigate conflicts? That's just been my kind of trajectory, the alliance for peacebuilding. What it does, it allows me and this organization to say, how do we build and advance the field, the peace building and the conflict prevention field? How do we build and advance it collectively? The only way that it's going to happen, I don't care if you're a Democrat, republican, independent, whatever, we don't put conflict prevention and peace building at the front of our policies, and that's what we have to do better. Absolutely. We completely agree. When we were looking at the homeless episode versus peace building episode, the information that was available, it was night and day. There were numerous resources out there on homelessness, but not with the peace building field. Can you give us an overview what the Alliance for peacebuilding does and the types of organizations that join the Alliance for Peace building? So we're a network of over 200 organizations globally and while we are headquartered in the United States in Washington dc. So of course a big focus is on the US government, but we also work closely with other governments, multilateral organizations like the un. But our whole goal, our whole goal is to build and advance the field and to do exactly what you just talked about in terms of how do we make these issues not wonky. They're very wonky. We talk in very technical wonky ways. What actually is peace building? What is conflict prevention? How do you integrate it into the work that you're doing, whether it is internationally, but also here in the United States, and we have our own conflicts here and our own fragility. So what do we know that's working and not working? How do we make, and I keep going back to how do we advance and build the field, but how do we do that? How do we get people to say, huh, we actually have to support this. We have to actually resource it. It's not one and done. It has to be integrated into all the work that's happening and how do you make sure that the people that are actually doing the work as well are following the best practices that understand what the research is out there so that when they are doing this work, they're doing it well and not causing harm because you can do that too. So you brought up a great point about educating people, and one thing that brought us to a FP was that in our research, I came across your YouTube profile and one great thing about the pandemic was that all of a sudden everything went online. The fact that you guys put those videos online of some of your, I don't know if you would call them training sessions, but we listened to hours and hours and hours of them, and I did. And we learned so much because it feels like that information is not publicly available. You have to really dig for it. And I sort of equate it to when I was a child, climate change, a term that people just weren't aware of, weren't familiar with, weren't educated about, and I sort of felt like right away that no one knows what peace building is and the world needs to be educated about the fact that peace building exists and peace is possible. So that sort of leads me into my next question for you is what does peace mean? And is it just the absence of armed conflict? So absolutely is not just the absence of armed conflict, although that is important. So you can talk about managing and mitigating conflict when or violent conflict when it's happening, but you really want to get to that preventing and the peace building, and that is ongoing in any society. So I always say this, if you put two people in a room, they're going to disagree and have some kind of conflict over something, but conflict is actually good. It's how some of our biggest advances have happened. So sometimes you have to have it, and that's okay, as long as you can manage it and mitigate it in a way that you don't have violence. I mean, that's really where you want to, that's kind of your least common denominator. You don't want violent conflict at the same time, you cannot have violent conflict but have grievances and things that are driving conflict and not be dealing with them, and then it explodes at the same time. A lot of people call it positive peace or that resilience factor because you can look at a country that sits high on a conflict watch list, but it's not, nothing's happening. There's no violent conflict there. So you also have to look at, well, what are some of those resiliencies? Do they have high trust levels in their society? That's always a great indicator. That's some of the best stopping or preventing violent conflict. Just as an example in the United States, our trust levels, according to the Resilience Index by the Fund for Peace have been declining rapidly for 15 straight years. And when I've talked to them about that data, their point is that is a freight train going in the wrong direction. And you can see how that played out during Covid, right? We fought over wearing masks. We fought, people didn't believe our institutions scientists. My husband is an epidemiologist, he's a scientist, and he's like, I don't understand. Why aren't people believing me or believing us? And they think we're horrible. And so that's really just a breakdown of trust in our society, and that is a really big indicator that's telling us something is going wrong there. So even though the United States doesn't look like Syria or Sudan right now, for example, have to be looking at these indicators constantly and saying, okay, what do we do about it? And that's what's really important about peace building. Yeah, sounds something we should be looking at. It's more than just a lot of people focus in on the trust in institutions. You're trust in your government. That's very important. But what we also know now, it's trust, it's social relations, it's social capital. It's the fact that you trust your neighbors, that you are getting involved together and it means you are working together in a community, for example, so that you trust each other. And it doesn't even have to be on issue about something. Conflict prevention. It could be you're working in, you're meeting people in rotary clubs or you're working on a playground issue. You're coming together to work on an issue and you're creating social capital and trust. So when something big happens in your community, you can work issues that might be dividing. Taking all this in account, it sounds like every country, every community is in a different level in the system. So is it possible and what needs to happen to make it possible? So it's absolutely possible because we know so much more about it now. I mean, think about it, conflict since the beginning of times, but we know so much more about what causes it, what you can do to prevent it. People's brains on conflict look differently. And we know this because we looked at MRIs of women that have been in domestic violence. So you don't have to just go to Sudan or Syria. Conflict impacts people's brains in different ways. Your brains look differently. So we also have to understand that people that are dealing with conflict, there's a brain science behind this as well. It is possible, but to make it possible, it has to be something that we talk about, that we understand, that we understand that all our actions are part of this larger system. What you can do at the community level, what you can do in your regional, what can you do at the state level? What can you do at the national level and how you communicate with people, how you work together, what we demand. I always say you can't do it if you don't resource it. So I'm not sitting here saying, oh, we need more money to do this. But when you're looking at the work that we're doing internationally or even here in the United States, it's like minuscule work that's being done on it. And at the same time recognizing what we need to promote. So again, just talking about the United States, our trust scores are going down. One of the areas where we have high scores in this trust area is civil society. We have really strong civil society. So that's a really big backbone and an antidote to conflict. So we need to make sure that that stays strong and resolute. So it's possible. But leaders and everyday people focused in on it, understanding it, what's driving it, why is it happening? And then what do we do about it. All the time? We hear all these, the media, everything is full about war, about conflict, but we don't hear about peace. Are we talking about peace enough at the international level, at the local level, or we are just leaving the concept to the side and say, well, since many people think is unreachable, are we No, I mean, that's one of the big issues, right? Because what sells? What do people want? What's on the news? You turn on the news and it's terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible. You might have a feel good story at the end, but more of these stories of what have people and everyday people achieved. So that's one of our biggest research is that when you talk about this celebrity or this person, they did this heroic thing, people are like, okay, well, that person is incredible. I can't do that. But when you talk about the everyday aspects of it, and more importantly how people work together collectively to achieve something that gets people to say, huh, well, if they could do that, I can do that. And oh, that's kind of like an ordinary thing instead of an extraordinary thing. Oh, maybe we should share with you that while we were doing this research, we were watching these videos, both of us, Hannah and me, we were watching these videos about arm conflicts because we were trying to understand the deep of this. So while we were watching these videos after that, we were truly depressed. Like Hannah and I got together and I'm like, I cannot keep watching this, especially women and children suffering every day. And it's not just this big armed conflicts that we're looking, we have this violence that is happening every day that is mostly women and children that are victims of this. But in the other side, we wouldn't seeing so many women taking this big decisions about what's happening in the world. So we were really wondering if there is a special importance in women participating in this peace building process. And I think it's really important to say we hit a few years ago, we hit a high in global violent conflict. We've hit a high and it keeps going up to say, this is depressing. However, at the same time, what it shows us is what we're doing isn't working. So while it is incredibly depressing and we've hit these global highs, we have more refugees than after since World War ii. I mean, you could go, the stats are horrific, but it also tells you we have good data now that we didn't have prior to 2000. We have some incredible data, the Fragile State Index by the Fund for Peace, the Institute for Economics and Peace has incredible data that we can use now that we didn't have before that actually shows us this shows us what's driving it. So that's a really important piece of it. Now, on the women piece that you asked, yes, women and children in armed conflict and violent conflict are hit the hardest for sure. In many places, women are really significant actors to reduce and prevent conflict. But one thing to understand is women, it's not of a monolith or multiple things can be true. At the same time, women can also be part of causing conflict. So you can't just say, women are always going to be the best ways to solve conflict. That being said, we do have some other data. We know that when women are involved in peace processes, peace processes, they hold for longer periods, they're much more inclusive. They deal with the issues that are driving this conflict. Initially, when Nael and we were planning the episodes for this podcast, we didn't want to do anything too controversial. We didn't want to get canceled in our first season. And we're discussing some pretty sensitive topics. So we had decided in our first season, we wouldn't discuss any of the wars that are going on. But the student protests of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really changed our mind. The student protests themselves were very controversial in themselves, but we also know that it is young people who often are raising their voices to try to make change. We wanted to ask you, what is the importance of getting young people involved in the peace process? Well, incredibly important, right? Because they're the ones that have to live with the consequences of the decisions that are made, number one. Number two, again, when I just talked about the data of how we've hit all these conflict record breaking highs, what we're doing isn't working well. The youth does many things, but they push people to think differently, and that's what we have to do. And so you talked about this issue. How do you talk about these issues? Well, first of all, you have to talk about them. What you just said is not, and especially with the Israel-Palestine conflict, nobody wanted to talk about it. Everybody shied away from it. But this is what I say, multiple things can be true at the same time. And you can say a country has the right to protect itself and to be safe, but you can also aor human rights violations, humanitarian law violations. So multiple things can be true at the same time. And that is very hard for people to understand because it's easier just to be on one side and then to argue that your side is correct. So that is what I also tell people to take a deep breath and to just say that you have to look at it from the other perspective. So I'll also give you mean talk about being canceled, right? What's happening in the United States? I mean, just kind of going back to that, I kind of considered myself a terrible peace builder that looking at what was happening in the United States, not being able to sit down and say, Hey, we got to ask ourselves what is really driving conflict in the United States? And again, multiple things can be true at the same time, and that's hard for people to do. It's hard talking about it in the United States talking about it in any country, talking about the Israel-Palestine issue. But can we all agree that we want to cease fire? And can we all agree that everybody has to have security and protection? And I think if you start with those pieces and then work your way down. But the first and most important thing is you have to be able to talk about what's driving conflict. And you have all these people that are like, oh, I'm conflict avoided. You're like, no, but you can talk about it in a way that is where you can see multiple sides. And then there's different ways out of it. I mean, just another example in the United States, by 2040, the US will no longer be a white majority country that's scaring people. It's scaring people very, very much. You can understand it. Our brains are designed and it's a logical response to see different and not want change. So if you talk about it that way, it's kind of different than just calling everybody racist at the same time. You can talk about it that other people, they're feeling that they're falling behind or their rights aren't being realized, they're scared. So if you talk about it in those ways, it's a lot different than a lot of the narratives that are going around now. Yeah, you reminded me, Liz, of one of the videos that I saw on YouTube is around the language and the way we talk about things. And it seemed so simple. So simple, it really hit home. I saw organizations that work with a FP describing language learning models, and it would help the situation better, further discussion rather than shut discussion down. Ask questions. I'll give you an example. I was on this Facebook page and somebody posted something about how republicans are going to university in lower numbers. And then people just started ranting about, oh, see, they're stupid. And I was like, no, no, no, let's not say that. Let's ask why is that happening? And then I got screamed at, and then finally people started going, I hadn't thought about that. Why? Let's talk about why. And so I think that that's one of the best ways is just to ask questions. Well, why do you think that way? Now again, there's going to be extremes on all sides, and probably that's not the place to start, but you can start somewhere in the middle. And I think that's really important because just yelling at everybody isn't helping. Yeah, I agree. People that we may disagree with on certain things, but just remembering that we're part of a community who cares about the health and wellbeing of the community, even if we disagree about certain things. We need more peace. Buildings like you in this world, help us out. I know there are young people out there that they need to develop certain skills to do this. What else is lacking in this field? There's this incredible person. She's a great peace builder. Her name's Mari Fitz stuff. She worked on the Northern Ireland Good Friday agreement. She was a professor at Brandeis, and she wrote this incredible book on conflict. And it's how our brains and how we think about it. It's kind of like a 1 0 1 on brain science on conflict, and what happens when something happens and then you get mad and your cortisol levels are going off in your brain, your thinking about how you're going to fight back on this subject. So one of the things that we've been thinking about here at a FP, it's kind of silly, but I like it. I mean, we all grew up, stop, drop and roll. If you caught on fire, I don't know why we were all catching on fire when we were little back then, but stop, drop and roll. We all know it. We've kind of started this funny thing where it's like, got conflict, got milk. Of course we've got conflict. Everybody's got conflict. So what do we do about it? And one of the things we've started talking about is stop, think, build peace, right? Stop. The best thing you can do is if you're getting heated and you're in a conflict, it's just stop. And then think about it. Think about lowering your cortisol rates. Okay, so what can I do? I can ask questions. I can try to understand where this person is coming from. I can, maybe this isn't the moment to have that discussion, maybe come back later, but really see it from that other person's side and understand that you want to get to the common goal. I mean, I guess people, if you don't want the same thing, well that's a problem. But if you do, then okay, you have this common goal, so how do you get there? It might not be the same way. Those are kind of the skills that people need to build every day. And we don't teach them in schools. We teach math and English and all this stuff, but we don't how people succeeding. This ridiculous percentage of how you get along with people, but people don't have the skills and the tools we're not built that way. We really fall back into this fight or flight. That's our caveman brains talking. That served us well when we were cavemen, but we still have those same brains. So that's the amazing thing that Fitz stuff talks about is that we can notice differences in other people. That's what kind of separates us from the animal world is that we can stop and say, wait a minute. I need to lower my cortisol levels. What can I do differently? We can think rationally, but we have to override our brain sometimes. And that's really important. At the same time, knowing that your brain might be wired now a bit differently because you've experienced violent conflict, whether it is in a home with domestic violence, whether you're in Sudan. So it's also making sure that you understand that piece of it as well. I love that. That should definitely be a new slogan, a new commercial. Just spread it everywhere. Stop, think, build peace. It's very easy to remember. Yeah, I love that. Are there people that we need going into certain lines of work that would help? So first, we need these skills integrated throughout. All right? I know you both have economics background. Talk about the business, the private sector, right? Making sure that this work is integrated into the private sector. It's so critical. In some ways, the private sector has more control over how people exist than even our governments. So understanding how businesses can promote this work is so critical. And businesses have been very wary of getting involved because they're afraid everyone's just going to yell at them for doing bad stuff or human rights or whatever, violations. So they tend to be nervous. They tend to not want to stick their toe in it because they don't want to alienate one side or the other. But our point is peace building is everybody's business sit on whatever you believe. And we got the Global Fragility Act, which is a bill that really puts conflict and peace building at the center of US government strategies in priority countries. And we had bipartisan a hundred percent bipartisan support. We had Republican and Democrat sponsors on the bills. So I think one of the key parts of it is this is everybody's business and it can't be partisan. So I think that that's something I think we can all agree on. So that's an important piece of it. And I'm so sorry. I forgot the question. I went off on a tangent. No, but this is so important because that we have seen when we were checking all the O and Ds and how the money was distributed among them, I'm like, peace is way down in the list. I'm like, all the money is going to other causes that I'm not saying they're not important. They're all important is primitive for the humans to have peace to achieve anything else. If you don't have that, then you have nothing. That's right. And our funding is very internationally. Our funding is very siloed, right? Here's like an education program. Here's a health education, there's a health program, there's a this program. So this work has to be much more integrated into all the sectors. So look, if you're doing a vaccine program in Costa Rica, okay, don't have, let's just say we don't have to integrate that. But if you are working in Northern Mozambique where you have significant violent extremism, all programming there, you have to have conflict prevention and peace building integrated into the programs because you can actually do more harm. And recognizing that just going back into Covid in the United States, you had this health pandemic that not only did our lack of trust in each other make it extremely difficult to contain this pandemic, just think about the fights we had over wearing masks or vaccines or whatever. We didn't trust each other, but at the same time that this health pandemic increased conflict and violence in the United States. So none of this work can be done in a silo, and that's something that we very strongly advocate for. So I wanted to really touch back on the funding aspect. When I pulled up the Forbes top 100 charities, and as Naomi mentioned, they were all great causes, but I did not see one piece building organization in that top 100 list. How do we get there? So part of it is you have to make it a priority. And I get it if you have this conflict going on and a humanitarian crisis, but this is what I always say, you have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. You have to be able to deal with that humanitarian crisis and focus on prevention as well, because otherwise we're just going to be coming to something after the fact. And that goes back to my career. I got to Bosnia after the war. I got to Kosovo after the war, I got to Afghanistan after nine 11 happened in the war there. And I thought to myself, so we just show up. We're just constantly showing up after the fact. How do we get to a prevention piece of it? Which is why I went to go work for the US government to help start up this office of conflict management and mitigation. What can government to address this? And one, we have to have better data. And in the last 20 years, like I said, we've really gotten there to understand what is driving conflict, what stops it, what prevents it. But you do have to resource it. And then you also, when you have this data, you have to use it. And that's also because here's another psychology issue. Our brains are designed to see the here and now. We don't really look five to 10 years down the road. We want to have our instant gratification now. That's how we work on our iPhones. It's why we're all so addicted to them. We want that instant gratification, but we have to notice that and know that and pivot so that, okay, we can do this now, but we also have to look at the prevention side of it in the future. And just because conflict does break out doesn't mean that, oh, well see. That's why we can't prevent, so let's forget it. I mean, we just had a massive pandemic. Are we shutting down our health systems? No, of course not, right? Because it's inevitable it's going to happen. But you have to get better at the prevention piece of it. But it means you have to prioritize it. You can't just say it. We have lots of world leaders that talk about conflict prevention, conflict prevention, but then you're like, okay, what are you doing about it? Then? What are your resources? How are you promoting it? And that is something that's really important that again, whether you're democrat, republican, independent, everybody should be asking their candidates and their elected leaders. So where do you stand on these issues? Absolutely. And Liz, this is so interesting, Nayeli and I actually met with the executive director of the Richmond Peace Education Center. We were wondering what is the local peace building organization for Richmond? And he echoed some of the same things that you just mentioned. He said it's difficult to actually get funding when it's difficult to give measurable results to investors and the peace building field. How do you measure that? And because we really dove into that conversation of funding and compared to the homeless episode that we will do, it's very easy to say, there are 1200 people in this encampment, and I'm moving 1200 people into homes. But when someone invests their money into an organization, they want to see metrics and results and how do we overcome that challenge and still convince people that this is a worthy investment, even though the results may not be as simple to explain as moving 1200 people into housing. You've hit it on the head. This is one of our biggest challenges. And so that's really at a FP, what we're talking about and what we're researching and pulling research together to show that you can measure this, you can show that you prevented conflict. You can show that you made things more peaceful, but it also means, again, you have to look at the data. So you have, again, the fragile state index. You can actually see, and this is with regard to countries sliding up and down, that scale, there is so much data out there on high trust communities in the United States. So that data is there and anybody who wants to talk about it, call us because we can help you aggregate that. But then there are ways that you can look at it, but as a field, we do a really bad job at it. And if I hear people say, well, how do you measure that? You prevented conflict. Nobody wants to hear that anymore. That's the 1990s. You can actually do it. And I'll give you an example. I was working in and I was working on conflict prevention programs at the university level. And so you'd have major conflicts that were breaking out at the university level. They would just a quick story. You have different segments of the population. Let's just say there's three of the demographics. So you have people from Amara, Romeo, and Tigrayan, and this is prior to the conflicts there now, but they lived in different regions, and they would take this percentage of these populations and put them in universities in a community that might be in the Amhara region, and these different ethnic groups there would be fighting, there would be really serious violence, and then it would spill out into the community, and then it would spill out to the next community because they would call their friends and other communities. We started this program at the universities and we had to kind of claw our way in, and we started with 1, 2, 3, and by the time we left, they were in all the federal universities. But you know what we didn't do? We didn't start and do an assessment of what were the violence, the violence instance. In this one school, for example, we didn't have our baseline. We didn't do a perception. So how do you feel about what's happening now, like perception studies in the communities? There was a lot of things that we didn't do that we should have done because after these programs had been running, I'd have the deans and the heads of the university say, oh my gosh, the atmosphere is down so much. The violence levels are down so much. People are coming and talking to us as kind of like an early warning system, but we had nothing to measure that on. So that's an example of how building and advancing the field means we have to do better at measurement. And we are a little bit, but we have to do a lot more. Yeah, this is great information for the small NGS that are growing, that are trying to do something in part of their job is to do this, to start to have people in their boards, to have people in their staff that can do this, that can aggregate the data, that can maybe reach to you and see what's happening at the top of the field and learn from that. A FP is here. We are a network of organizations. We serve our members to do this because we feel like collectively we have to raise everybody up and we have to build a really strong field, and that's how we can push for greater prevention and peace building programs. That's amazing. Well, Liz, we're just so thankful and honored that you took the time out to meet with us today. We really appreciate you. Well, I appreciate you all. Everybody who's trying to make this kind of a ordinary everyday subject are my heroes. So. Thank you very much. We really appreciate it. We learn a lot just hearing you, it brings all the pieces together and it makes sense. And I think that what the people who listen to us want to do make sense and see how they can do it in their daily life. Thank you, Lee. Thank you very much. It is time for us to propose those five things that we all can do. Number one, let's talk more about peace and less about war. As a society, we need to shift our attention to peace. Peace is possible and achievable. The words we use matter. They are powerful. And unfortunately right now the noise of violence is louder. Start following organizations in your social. There are focusing on peace building like the United Nations, political and peace building affairs, inter peace and the alliance of peace building. Number two, learn to recognize propaganda. Don't allow yourself to fall for any war propaganda that dehumanizes an entire population of people. It's an age old trick, and it's an incredibly effective strategy at getting people to overlook human suffering for someone else's personal gain. Since the beginning of time, propaganda has painted people as others, don't fall for it. All human life has value. Number three, speak up. Hold your public service reps accountable using town halls, email calls, or other methods to demand that your taxpayer dollars be used to fund peace building efforts and humanitarian aid. Number four, support long-term peace efforts. Join or donate to a peace building organization, especially those who are advancing the field and actively working on long lasting peace negotiations. Number five, stop. Think, build peace. Become a peace builder in your own home, in your own community. You can use your skills to start a change in your own circle of influence. If you are a teacher, a minister, a student, a parent, you can set the example and start a movement of peaceful conflict resolution in your community. Drive to the podcast on your favorite podcasting app so you are notified when new episodes drop. You can support our podcast by subscribing on Patreon at patreon.com/ordinary people with Hannah and na. You can also find us on Instagram at Be the Change Hub and follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn. All the links to our socials will be in the show notes. Thank you for listening today and being part of this community of change makers.