 If I could ask everyone, just before we start to move in our group, if you could be so kind as to begin to squeeze in a little bit, and those who are coming in now, please fill in the seats to the front. We're going to be a full house today, so we want to do our best to get everyone organized. We don't have any spare seats marooned in the middle. Can't hear me? Can't hear me? Okay. Hi. Once again, if everyone would be so kind as to look to the center of your aisle, if it's a spare seat, if you'd be kind enough to move in, and as you're coming in, if you could move down, that would be great. We're going to be a full house today, and it would be wonderful to have all of our seats occupied and not have the center seats marooned. Thanks so much. Good morning, everybody. I'll do it one more time. Good morning, everybody. Well, it's a good thing I used to teach school. I'm sorry to interrupt such a lively conversation. It seems like a good sign on day three of a conference. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president of the United States Institute of Peace, and I'm absolutely delighted to welcome you here this morning for the third day of a sold out conference, which is a wonderful sign for the future of peace building. And for those of you who have not previously been to the United States Institute of Peace, it was founded in 1984 by Congress in response to citizens' demand for additional focus within the U.S. government on peace building and how to manage conflict. We are federally funded but independent, and we are dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, peace is practical, and it's essential for national and global security. And we do that by working in partners around the world in conflict zones, equipping them with tools, equipment, training, and policy recommendations. And it's wonderful to be here with a group of people who I know are completely aligned with the idea that peace is possible and peace is practical, and so many of you are doing that in ways here in this country and around the world every day. And I can tell by looking at who has been signed up for this that there is an incredibly diverse audience here, people coming from different backgrounds, different parts of the world. And so I know there's been a really rich conversation the last two days. This is a great opportunity today to really explore the different ways that peace builders can make a difference in conflict areas and in fragile states. I just returned from Istanbul where we had the first World Humanitarian Summit, and I was just sharing with Melanie that what was remarkable to me is how front and center the issues of violent conflict are in that conversation, both in terms of mustering the political will to manage those conflicts, but also in how the humanitarian and the development community has to understand conflict dynamics, has to think about how things are done in a way that enable local actors to build peace from the ground up as well as from the top down. And in the backdrop of what is going on globally, these issues have never been more urgent, and this conversation has never been more important. And with that, I am absolutely delighted to introduce a good friend, somebody you know well by now, Melanie Greenberg, who has really spent a career thinking about these issues and doing remarkable work. And so please join me in welcoming Melanie. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day three of AFP's annual conference on Next Gen Peace. We are so proud and honored to co-host this day of the conference with the United States Institute of Peace, the only government organization dedicated solely to peace and an important partner and champion for all of civil society, working for a more peaceful and secure world. And so Nancy, thank you for your brilliant leadership and your ability to link so many different sectors and communities together for a more unified and effective voice for peace. And thanks too to Lynn Woodham over in this corner. We're so grateful to you and Tina and all of your USIP colleagues. We couldn't ask for a more wonderful partner, and it's really been such a joy to plan this with you. The theme of this conference is Next Gen Peace. Over the past two days, we've been exploring a fascinating terrain ranging from innovation in peace building to storytelling, new frontiers in teams and human performance, peace building in Baltimore, and community mediation over a decade in Nepal. We continue the theme of innovation today with deep dives into some of the most complex peace building problems facing the world today, highlighting new thinking and strategic approaches. We also shine a light onto the deep personal and societal costs of violence on a very personal and societal level, a reminder of why we're all spending our lives to build peace in an increasingly turbulent world. So I want to thank the AFP staff and all of our interns for making it such a joy to come into work every day, and for the blood, sweat, and tears I've given for this conference. And I especially want to recognize Emily, Emily Delossi, who has masterminded and led all of the planning for the conference and whose brilliance you see reflected in everything today. So thank you to all of you. I want to thank AFP's funders who've made this possible. And we look forward to a great day here today at USIP. And it's my great pleasure now to introduce Bob Berg, AFP's new board chair. Thank you, Melanie. Thank you, Nancy. It's so good to be with USIP again and to gather on the last day of a three-day event. I used to chair the donor committee on evaluation at OECD, and I think we need to do a quick evaluation in the last two days. So remember on TV and radio shows, they used to have an applause meter. So for those of you who attended the last couple of days, what did you think of it? You're so right. So for those of you who missed the event, see next year, buy the whole package. By the way, our opening keynote speaker, retired general and administrator of NASA and presidential cabinet member Charlie Bolden, wrote me last night saying, thanks for introducing me to the work of the Alliance. I look forward to future opportunities to participate and support your work. That's one of the nice things about these conferences. You can bring people in and have them come into the tent. I just want to note that this year we have added reason to be together. You know, you never know when you've been in a golden age until after the age is over. That's those of us who were in the Carter administration kind of learned that. Democracy, liberalism, human rights, the space for civil society in many countries and violence are all trending in the wrong direction. Four of the five bricks and the EU are in serious difficulties. We could be here a year from now with an American Berlusconi in power. Despite these trends and threats, the global community had its most productive year ever. That is because they found ways to work together on environment, on social and economic goals, and on the marvelous and serious goal for peace. We as a field have accomplished much in our work. And in this difficult environment, we not only must be smarter in our work, we must work in far greater, more effective, more embracing, and more courageous alliance. As the great British economist Barbara Ward said in the midst of the Cold War, we are either to be a community or we will die. So we have added serious purpose for being together today. I look forward very much to an exciting and needed set of discussions. And we will begin with a great first session and Melanie is going to introduce it. Thank you. So it is a tremendous honor to introduce Jeremy Richmond, who will deliver the keynote address this morning. Jeremy is a neuroscientist and the founder and CEO of the Aviel Foundation. Dr. Richmond has extensive research experience spanning the range from neuroscience and neuropsychopharmacology to cardiovascular biology, diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, immunology and inflammation. He has worked in the research and drug arena for over two decades and is passionate about helping people live happier and healthier lives. Dr. Richmond is dedicated to reaching out and educating youth and believes our future relies on their imaginations. This is manifest in his teaching martial arts, biology, neuroscience and rock climbing to children and teens for more than 25 years. Most important, he believes it's critical to empower youth to advocate for themselves and their peers when it comes to brain health and brain illnesses. Toward this end, Dr. Richmond and his wife, Jennifer Hensel, started the Aviel Foundation, committed to preventing violence and building compassion through brain health, research, community education and engagement. Jeremy is a peace builder in the deepest sense of the word. As he will tell you, he lost his daughter, Aviel, for whom his foundation is named in the horror of Sandy Hook. He's taken this experience and dedicated his life to understanding the causes of violence and helping people organize in their own communities for healthy brains. The mission of the Aviel Foundation is to prevent violence and build compassion in communities by fostering brain science, research, community engagement and education. So Jeremy, we can't tell you how honored we are that you are here with us today. We hope you'll consider our community a home for you and for your family. We support you not only with the increasing emphasis that the peace building community is putting on neuroscience, but on a much deeper personal level as well. We hope you know that we stand with you and your family and dedicate ourselves to honoring the memory of your beautiful daughter and all of our work on peace in the world. Well, I appreciate the opportunity to come and speak today. I'm going to talk about a different way of looking at science and the way we can use it to prevent violence and build compassion through research and education both. And I have to express my profound gratitude for being invited to speak here and to be invited into such an amazing community and I think that being in a community is really the key to peace. So I appreciate it. I'm going to make some introductions as I start out in the brief talk that I have. First, I want to introduce you to my favorite organ, the brain. The brain is just another organ like the heart, the lung, the liver, the kidneys. It can be healthy and it can be unhealthy. But unlike the other organs, the brain is difficult to study and people are surprised when they find that we know less about brain science than we do about any of our other sciences, pardon none. We know more about the subatomic structures. We know more about the bottoms of our oceans, the surface of the moon. Then we do about our brains. And as one of our 15 year old interns put it really profoundly, she said, considering this is the organ we use to consider. It's really ironic how little we know about it. But it's difficult to study the brain. It's housed in our skulls. It's not whizzy-wig. You can't take it out and look at it for a while and figure out what it does. So there's a lot more pieces of the puzzle missing from this than all the other organs. And so we begin to think of it in a very ethereal, invisible way. We think of it, here's my body. This is where the action happens, but where am I? I'm somewhere else. It's separate. But we have to recognize all of our behaviors come from this organ. And therefore, they're all biochemical in nature. And you can have healthy and you can have unhealthy behaviors, just like you can have healthy and unhealthy hearts and lungs and livers and kidneys. So we need to fill in some of these missing puzzle pieces. And that's what we're all about. So let me give you a brief introduction to myself in a couple of different ways. First, I'm a neuroscientist by training. I got really interested in studying the brain in neurosciences, because I had a grandfather when I was a kid that had Alzheimer's disease. How many of you have been touched by that disease in some way? Almost everybody. When I was young, the disease wasn't well known. And it turns out the disease is so much more than I can't remember things. It really changes your personality profoundly. You become a different person. And while it was really tragic that my grandfather suffered in this way, it also fascinated me who we are all the way down to our core, really depends on the proper functioning of this organ, the brain. So I went into studying the brain as a result of this passion. And the only reason I highlight this, and I do this really, it's important in young audiences to highlight the importance of letting things, experiences in your life touch you down to your heart. Because when you have a passion, when you have a reason for doing something, you get so much personal satisfaction in life when you're pursuing things that are personal and touch you. So there's a great quote that's often attributed to the Holocaust survivor Victor Frankel, but he was actually quoting Nietzsche when he said, those who have the why can endure anyhow. So I always encourage people to find the why in life, because then there's no obstacles, there's just great learning opportunities. I also need to introduce myself in another way, my wife and I as parents, who in 2006 had a beautiful baby girl, Avielle. She became the brightest light in any room. A smile that could melt anybody, break down any barriers, loved stories. She loved stories to fall asleep, driving in the car, going to the bathroom. She had to have a story all the time, and she really got it. She realized her whole life was a story, and that everything she did could be told through a lens of, this was a great adventure. Going to the grocery store, who knew? Unfortunately, as Melanie pointed out, her story came to a horribly tragic ending when she was murdered in her first grade classroom with 19 of her classmates and six of her educators on a very dark Friday, December 14th of 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut. And as you can imagine, that touched us about as close as you can be touched. This is such a profoundly heartbreaking phenomenon to lose a child in a violent way like this, that it really turns your world upside down. To try to paint a picture of it is really difficult, but you feel like the world is spinning and you're going to fly off. And so, literally, Jen and I were on the floor for days trying to figure out what we were going to do, how we were going to try to reach out and prevent this kind of heartbreak and tragedy from happening again. And as we would travel around the world talking to people, trying to figure out how to address this epidemic of violence that we have, particularly in our country, people would express their sentiment to us with an interesting statement, I can't imagine what you're going through. I can't imagine how hard that would be. And while of course we appreciate the sentiment, the irony is that they are imagining it when they say that and that they are stepping into those shoes just for a second and they're horrified. But we all need to do that. We have to step into those shoes because that is the connection to your heart. And the only way to be motivated to do something is to be touched in that way. So we really can imagine and really need to imagine it because we become involved when we allow ourselves to be touched. So we have a trademark you can imagine. And on the brighter side of that tunnel, it's the imagination that sets us free to make tomorrow better. And it's the imagination that we need to use to create something better tomorrow. A statement that I think is really important for us all to embrace that comes from this imagination is the concept that few are guilty, but all are responsible from A.J. Heschel. We are all responsible for being part of a community and ensuring the health of that community, for advocating for ourselves, for our loved ones. And we have to take that responsibility very seriously. The other quote that I really like that's appropriate here is one that's hard to find out who originally said it, but it's mostly attributed to Reverend Watson. Be kind. Everyone that you meet is fighting a hard battle. And I see this every time I travel, every time I meet somebody, you look them in the eyes. Everybody has a tragedy. Everybody is facing some great adversity. And you need to recognize you can't see those battles. They're in there, though, and you have to be kind as a result. So what can be done? We created the Aviel Foundation with a specific mission, both Jen and I are scientists, and we said, well, we need to approach this in a scientific way. That's the way that we see the answer why questions for a living. That's what scientists do. So we created a foundation in honor of our daughter to leave a legacy with a mission to prevent violence and build compassion through neuroscience research, community engagement, and education. And let me expand on that just a little bit. We're researchers. So on the one side of the coin, we want to fund to foster to encourage neuroscience-based research that bridges biochemical sciences, and I'll expand on this in the upcoming slides, and behavioral sciences. And we want to make the study of the brain in any form that doesn't have to be a test tube, or a neuroscientist, or a clinician, a psychiatrist, or a neurologist. It could be an engineer that builds the next machine that allows us to affordably and accurately measure brain activity. It could be a peacekeeper who comes up with a paradigm or a program that helps us heal, be resilient, and be peaceful. But we want to make that study, that endeavor lucrative and prestigious, so that people will want to go into that field. We also recognize that science in a vacuum is of little or no value unless you give it to the everyday citizen in a way that they can approach it, embrace it, and use it as a tool. So the other side of that coin is community engagement and education. It's the what then. We want to provide tools to the everyday citizen. We want to make this study and understanding of the brain knowable to everybody, because at the end of the day, really, we all own this information. We paid for it. We really deserve to have it in a way that we can use it. And this will foster empathy, increase connection, and encourage people to take action. And we love the statement, knowledge is power, but we think it goes beyond that. We think knowledge is empowering. And once you've been infected, you can't do anything but take action. So what are the tools that we can use? How do we study the brain? And how do we link what's happening under the hood here to the behaviors that we see? And that's where I think a lot of the shadow, the mystery, the invisible nature of things that are mental come from this very complex world of how do you study the brain? What can you know about it? Well, we have some really great tools. We can watch the brain. We can see it. And not only can we see it, we can watch it while it does something. So you can say, this is your brain on joy. This is your brain on anger. This is your brain on frustration. We can look at it. We can also do the pee in the cup kind of science. We can take a cheek swab, a urine sample, blood sample, the fluid science. And we can measure things I doodled some of our stress chemicals like cortisol, adrenaline, serotonin, dopamine, GABA, glutamate, neurotransmitters, and hormones that you can measure that correlate with behaviors. And we also have the wonderful world now of genetics where we've sequenced the entire genome. I'm not going to pretend that we think we know what all the genes do or what they all are yet. We're making discoveries every day. But we do know the whole sequence of the genome. And we can identify the presence or absence of genetic material with behaviors. And now we have the amazing science of how the environment influences those genes, what we call on top of the genetics, the epigenetics. And we're going to expand a little bit on that. But these are the tools that we have. These are the tools of the trade. So we need to build some bridges with these tools to the behavioral sciences. The link between the pee in the cup science and the sort of, tell me about your mother's science, that we picture somebody laying on the couch and giving their history. And we have some bridges just to illustrate so that maybe you can connect to what I'm saying. We have the molecule serotonin here on the left. We know that when you have lower inappropriate levels of serotonin in parts of the brain, that's associated with depression. That's why we take things like Prozac, SSRIs, serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors. We have a bridge between the biochemical and the behavioral science. What we need to fill in is those pieces of the puzzle that relate to things like reactive violence, where somebody explodes inappropriately and becomes very violent in a reactive fashion. The guy that goes road rage or the kid in the lunch line, that feels affronted when you step on his new shoes and gets violent. And what's the difference between the reactively violent individual's brain and the proactive or instrumentally violent individual who's disenfranchised, who becomes sort of extremist? This could be your terrorist. It could also be your serial rapist or your pedophile. Somebody that pines away, thinks of ways to lash out in an antisocial way against society. And what's the difference between their brains and the everyday citizen's brain? Those are the pieces of the puzzle that we need to fill in, but we have some barriers to our understanding of these pieces. We have the mental barrier. Right now, we diagnosed diseases of the brain, mental illnesses, based on symptoms and syndromes, groups of symptoms, with expert opinion and checklists. Now, I'm not being so heavy handed. This is really the best that we've had for a long time, but we need to move beyond this. Here's the problem. Can you imagine going into the doctor and she looks at you, she says, well, your nose is running, your eyes are puffy and scratchy, your throat hurts, you're a cold. Wow, that bone sticking out. You're a broken arm. You're a colon cancer. But if you go into the doctor feeling depressed, overwhelming grief for a period of time, and she goes to a checklist and you answer yes to five out of nine questions on a questionnaire, you're depressed and you're bipolar and you are schizophrenic and your child is ADHD. There's two huge problems here. One, we haven't found anything wrong. We didn't identify a pathology. So there's really no hope. And we're moving away from this, but more frequently than not, we define the individual as the disease. We don't say you're a colon cancer, you're a rhino virus, you're the flu. But we do say your child is ADHD, schizophrenic, bipolar. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell a child he's got a learning disorder, he's going to have a learning disorder. We need to move away from that. We need to make the invisible world of mental a visible one. Name it what it is. There's so much fear, intrepidation, and stigma associated with this invisible world of mental that people don't get help for themselves, don't get help for their loved ones. And this is certainly the largest contributor to why the Sandy Hook shooter never got help, never was intervened and it resulted in horrible tragedy. We need people to feel that it's a matter of chemistry and not character. To feel comfortable talking about brain illnesses and brain health in the way that it is. Can you imagine going to the doctor and she looks at your child and says, well little Johnny's right in the middle of the growth curve. Good job with improving his diet. But we did find a little too much dopamine in his right cingulate cortex, which is a really fancy way of saying, this explains his behavioral impulse control problems at school. There's no character judgment there. You've already gone out and read every self-help parenting book there is anyway. You need some help. And now they're saying, well there's hope. We did find a problem and this is what we're going to do to try to prevent it. There's no stigma attached with that and we need to move in that visible direction. So if you get anything out of this talk, I really encourage you to recognize that it's brain health. Take the word mental out of everything. You need a new brain tality. We need to think of it, take it out. It doesn't mean anything. It has no value. We need to rename the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Disorders Administration. We need to take mental out of our lexicon and just call it what it is because that does a large service towards getting help and decreasing the fear interpretation. So can we study violence? Is there a paradigm, a model that we can create where we can look at risk factors that lead to violence and protective factors that lead away from it so that we can then associate biochemical changes with the behaviors that we see? How do we predict it? Is there any way that we can do that? And it turns out there's a lot of risk factors that lead to violence and protective factors that lead away from it towards what we could only call, say, compassion, kindness, connection, communication, resilience. It turns out that there are. And if I have a lot more time, I like to go through a lot of these examples, but I'm going to really cruise just through a couple of them and I want to really highlight the important ones. One that I start with, oftentimes, people say we're animals, humans are just animals, we're probably very violent. And we come up with these debates. The nature-nurture debate is a very famous one. But as with a lot of our debates, global warming, for example, the world is warming up. We could debate why it is, but it's a fact that it is. There's no debate. And in this case, the nature-nurture debate, there's no debate. We know that your genes influence how you see the environment, how you interact in it, what you think is relevant. And the environment shapes what genes are expressed, where they're expressed, what organs are expressed, and how long they're expressed, to what extent they're expressed. You can't separate them. So if you leave here today and you ask, if somebody ever asks you, is it nature or nurture, is it your genes or in the environment, give them a really smug smile. Let's say, of course it is. It's both. There's a great quote by Don Habba, a famous behaviorist, and I love this quote. He said, what contributes more to the area of a rectangle, the length or the width? And I'll go as far as to say that there is no behavior. There's no disease that is purely one or the other. There's always a contribution of both nature and nurture. So keep that in mind. You're not born dealt a bad hand that can't be influenced. And you can't be born with good genes. Into a bad environment that purely leaves you in that environment. We can always influence this. And that's because, in other words, if you're born in an adverse environment, you're abused, you grow up in Sierra Leone, that's very hostile. Yes, you can end up a violent and psychopathic individual. But if you're raised in a nurturing and healthy environment, that same individual has the great chance to be your resilient leader, your Fortune 500 CEO, your president. That's because our brains are plastic throughout our entire lives. Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of the brain to adapt and change in response to environment. It occurs on a molecular level. So at the points of contact where your brains communicate with each other, we call these the synapses. The proteins, the constituents, the chemicals that are in those communication zones, the synapses can change. You can influence what's there. It occurs on a cellular level. Contrary to what I was taught when I was a kid, that you're born with everything under the hood here that you get and that's it. Take care of it. We do grow neurons. We do replace them. We're doing them right now. Some of us more than others. And this neuroplasticity occurs on a regional basis, kind of like a muscle. You know, if you use regions of the brain more, that they become reinforced. You deliver nutrients and clear out waste more effectively, just like a muscle is use it or lose it. And when we're born, we have about 100 billion neurons. Okay? That's a lot packed in there. 100 billion. And each and every one of those neurons has the potential to talk to and communicate with 2,500 other neurons. So think about that. Each one communicating with 2,500 others, talking to 2,500 others. That's an amazingly elaborate network of communication. And as you reach about the age of three, all the way up through adolescence, which believe it or not ends for women around 21 and for men around 24, not 18, that communication completely expands about to the point where each cell, each of those 100 billion neurons can communicate with up to 15,000 individual other cells. When you talk about complexity, that is a machine more complex than any of those computers that you have in your pockets. That's an amazing machine. And as you become an adult, you're not becoming more stupid, but you do prune away those connections and that's what makes you the unique individual that you are. That's your personality. What you use becomes reinforced and what you don't is lost. Which brings us to the point, again another quote, I love quotes. This one comes from the ex-slave, Frederick Douglass. Because the brain is built this way, it's really important that we approach creating healthy environments for our children because it's easier to build the strong child than it is to repair a broken adult. But we have to remember that our brains are plastic throughout our lives so even the adult can be fixed. It's just a lot harder. Let's move for the sake of time. Since I only have a couple of minutes, when we look at this paradigm and we can identify in a scientific sense risk factors that lead to increased likelihood of engaging in violence. And it's unfortunately human nature to kind of go down this list and look at the negative and go, okay, we have a healthy family unit. My kids wear helmets when they play sports so they don't get traumatic brain injuries. There's no toxins in my environment. They get good physical activity. There's low violence. They don't get to watch violent media or play violent video games. I'm good to go. But that's not how the brain works. Unfortunately, if you're not actively pursuing protective factors, you're moving downhill. It's like a muscle. It's either hypertrophying and getting bigger or atrophying and getting smaller. There's no good to go. So if you were to look at this and say, what are the protective factors that I should best spend my time? I'm just going to highlight a couple of them. I'm going to cruise through them. One of them without question needs to be self-mastery, the ability to set and achieve goals, name and tame your emotions, and recognize how your behaviors influence other people's behaviors. We call this emotional intelligence, but it goes by all these other names over the years. It's getting a lot of popular press right now for, I think, great reasons. It turns out that parents a lot of times hear that we want to teach this in schools and they say, oh, come on, we've got so much. My kids need to learn reading, writing, and math, right? The science is just the important stuff. Well, they can relax because if you teach social-emotional skills in the school, kids improve 11% to 17% on their academic test scores. That's a profound improvement in their test scores. But while we're at it, let's look at those test scores. What do they mean? Now clearly, if you're going to be a biologist, you need to know biology. A physicist needs to know some math. But what do these test scores academically worldwide prove? Well, they don't really predict anything. One thing that they do predict, and it's almost disturbing, the better that you do on a standardized test worldwide, the more money your family has. What does that mean? It means that somebody is writing the test and that person is usually somebody with great means. But your emotional intelligence predicts success in life. And usually I do a social experiment and I have people define success for the sake of time. Let me just tell you that your skill set, how good you would rate yourself or your parents would rate you, or believe it or not, your kindergarten teacher, how they rate your emotional intelligence predicts health. It predicts your incarceration rate. It predicts your substance abuse liability. It predicts how often you see the doctor. It predicts wealth. It predicts your credit score and how much income you're going to have as an adult. It also predicts your parenting style and it also predicts your satisfaction with life. So if there's anything that we're going to instill in our kids at school, it should be social-emotional skill building. Let's go up to another one. I met some great people from Wisconsin and this is a really great study in terms of social justice and perhaps approaching how we could reform the criminal corrections and processing system. They have a huge problem in this area, southeast Wisconsin, with violence. And when they looked at the most heinous offenders, these are juveniles that are murderers, rapists, and have been incarcerated for aggravated assault. They go through the juvenile processing system. They go through time served and within five years, over 70 percent of them recommit the same heinous crime again. 70 percent. And in this area near Madison, they said, we can't afford this. We can't afford this on a moral and philosophical level, but we literally can't afford it financially because these beds cost in the range of $45,000 to $65,000 per bed and we have too many of them and they're going to recommit and now they're adults and that's even more expensive. $75,000 per bed. What can we do? They looked at the paradigm and we have a compression paradigm in our country where we segregate from society and compress and compress and compress to the point that every time that you infringe on a rule, you're isolated further and further and further. You're losing more and more and more community engagement and rights. They said, can we turn this paradigm around? Instead of having it run by law enforcement, have law enforcement service, security and safety, but now what we're going to do is we're going to have healthcare providers run the facility and we're going to give cognitive behavioral therapy to these kids, give them one-on-one face time. This isn't hand-holding. I mean these kids are heinous criminals but they're shown that their behaviors have a value and a meaning and do affect other people, that their lives matter. And this could be argued by a therapist certainly better than by me. I don't think it was the cognitive behavioral therapy that mattered. It was this one-on-one attention and time giving but that could be studied. But the results are unbelievable. Within just two years of applying this program at the Mendota Corrections Facility, following the kids out for five years, they cut the recidivism, they cut the recommit of the crimes in half. That's a profound result that needs to be replicated and expanded in other populations, larger groups, and I would love to see that in the adult population. But we can change this paradigm and the reason that I think we can change it is because while a lot of young audiences often come up to me and they say, you know, we're just animals at the end of the day, it's our nature to be violent. So let's look at that for a second. It turns out that what makes us special particularly is our brains and it's not that we have bigger brains but we have a lot more of a part of the brain, the neocortex, the outside part, the part that you always draw with all the bumps and ridges. That neocortex to total brain volume, that's what we have a lot of. And what does that correlate with? It turns out that the volume of neocortex to brain ratio correlates with the group size that we live in, which leads to the conclusion that we either have big brains because we have large groups or we live in large groups because we have a big neocortex. Regardless, we've evolved to live in large communities. And when you look at the evolutionary process, we don't evolve on the same genetic level that the other animals do. We evolve at a much different process. In days past, you have Darwin's finches here. This guy in the upper left has a big fat beak because the environment where they live, they have a selective advantage if they can crack tough seeds and get the carbohydrates inside. These finches in the bottom right, well, they live in an environment where the advantage is obtained if they adapt genetically to a long beak that reaches into the flower petal and gets it out of the pollen in the middle there. But humans, if we need to crack a seed, we build a nutcracker. If we're cold, we build jackets air conditioning for the heat. We went to the moon just to check it out. We evolve on a different level. Richard Dawkins has a great term that he tried to rhyme with, genetic. He called it mimetic, the transfer of ideas. We adapt our environment to suit us through the exchange of these ideas. And we evolve by sharing our knowledge and those that are able to do it effectively to communicate, connect, collaborate, and create those are the evolved humans. And that's our evolution. So I would argue that, yes, while we are just animals, to be human means to be humane. And that's what we need to evolve to. And we're always hung up on differences. I think it's important to point out that if you look at it on a genetic level, there is no such thing as race. We're really hung up on race, but there is just one race. And I'm not saying in a hippie trippy, not only in a hippie trippy tree huggy sense, but literally there is no such thing. These two girls in Nigeria are just as genetically identical to these two girls in Southern California. That's a fact. So am I saying that when you get your next job application or college entrance exam, you cross this off and you say, hey, I'm a human? Well, yes, I wish I could say that, but while there is no such thing as, there's only one race, there's no such thing as different races, there is unfortunately the existence of racism. And until we can normalize the playing field and get rid of those differences that are completely contrived, we've got a lot of work to do, and that'll go a long way towards peace to recognize them. So I appreciate your time. We all need to recognize that the brain is our seat of behavior, that we all are in control of our brain health and advocating for our own and those of our loved ones. I could tell you about what we're doing specifically if you have time. But in ways that you can help. So please, I promise my wife I will always say, find us on Facebook and like us, tweet us on Twitter. It really matters because we can share this message of brain health. So put it out there. By all means, donate if you have the means and the desire to do so. But find us, like us, tweet us, Instagram us, whatever that verb is. And just to conclude, remember why we're all here and what we have to do in front of us because it really matters. Thank you, Jeremy. That was just, I can't imagine, a more inspiring and wonderful way to start the morning. We just have a few minutes, but I wanted to make sure we could take just a couple of questions, but also hope that we can invite you back every year to have just much more of a dialogue and everything you talked about. It would be honored, absolutely. So questions? Yes, and we'll cluster a couple. I want to thank you for your presentation. It was really amazing. My father is a therapist in a prison, and I'm going to be sharing a lot of this with him. And while he is a really great empathetic therapist, sometimes he does struggle with seeing these prisoners who have such horrific backgrounds and pasts and have then gone on to do some horrific things. And he does struggle with that sometimes. And I'm wondering what you would say to him and what you would suggest he say to the men that he sees to give them hope about the preventing and the healing of brain health and violence. Thank you. That's a great question. What can be done, particularly on these adults that we've pulled out of society? So specifically, I would make sure that he has a good support structure to recognize the difference between empathy, which would be taking in all of that emotion and feelings and compassion, which is the hope that you can actually do something with those feelings. And that he needs to take care of self-help first. What he can tell his patients is to recognize that their experiences, the adversity that they faced, have a large contribution to their behaviors. They don't excuse or forgive the behaviors, but it goes a long way to recognizing there's a reason that you're acting that way. There's a reason that this happened, and there are many injustices in the world that you have to face and work with, but that there's hope that this brain that you're fortunate enough to have can be fixed, can be adjusted, and that there is help to that, and that you have to address it and recognize that that's influencing your behaviors. I think that's empowering in and of itself. In the large scope of things, while we call it corrections, unfortunately, beyond deterrence, it doesn't serve any form of correction, and we really need to kind of reform our correctional process. Another question? Yes, sir. The humanity has invented vaccines to control the diseases. Can there be a vaccine be invented to control that violent, that agitate the violent neuron in future? Well, so I'm going to probably say in the, in some day, maybe it's not likely, the contagion, violence as a contagion, and I love to picture that, and the cure violence people would definitely get that. There's no question that violence is a public health threat, and we need to look at it in that way, and it is a contagion. Violence definitely leads to violence to self and to others, but there probably is no magic pill, no antibiotic, no antibody, no immunity that we can get with one injection. But we can definitely use boosters and help that. I don't think that it's going to be a pharmacologic intervention, and if it is, it probably won't be a standalone intervention. It's going to be something else that hopefully one of the young minds in here will come up with, but I don't think that there will be one injection, but it could be in a more philosophical level. Yes, we could be actively pursuing all those protective factors that will have a very profound, almost immunization effect on our community and our culture. One final, yes. Thank you very much. I wonder if you can talk more about the, on the negative risk side, you mentioned violent media. Is there a way you can study the impact of violence in the media, say there's the video games, there's the entertainment, which I think is significant, but what about our politics, world affairs, our wars, these ideas that sort of legitimize state violence? How do you measure that? How can, is there a way to, how do you measure it, but also what could be done, not in a vaccine sense, but in a preventive or the positive side? Great question, and in the expanded version of the talk, I go really into detail about that, and when I ask people, and I tell them violent media leads to, is a great risk factor to violence, and I ask, what media am I talking about? Almost everybody says video games. But importantly, we do know how to study the effects of media violence on increased aggression and purposeful aggression being violence. From 1960s to present, there is countless scientifically solid peer-reviewed journals that show the very clear positive correlation with the news. Television, in all aspects, our movies, the way that we portray it, that is correlated so much data, in fact, that two Surgeon Generals address this, Satcher and Coop, issuing the equivalent of a Surgeon General warning on violent television, and we've done nothing about it. Now, when it comes to video games, you think television is completely passive, you sit back, you got your tepacorn, and you're being entertained, a video game is first-person oftentimes, it's fully immersive, you're part of the game, that's why you're playing it, and when the majority of video games, well, when a large fraction of them, 30, 40% of them are violent in their nature, that is what they are, and I would say almost every, virtually every game has a violent aspect to it, about 80% of them do, and when you think that 95% of adolescents are playing video games, that's a real problem, but the solution isn't to take them away. Violent, just the violent video game industry represents around $1.2 billion, but that's our dollars. So the purchase power is in your pocket, if we take that purchase power and we say, you know what, we don't want that, we want this, the video game platform is such an ideal opportunity to get to our kids, to help to enforce good behaviors, and we need some creativity there, I mean nobody's gonna play fun with numbers, besides maybe me. We need some really cool games, and we need to reward those video game manufacturers that are willing to move into that space to create games that reinforce positive behaviors, because they're not gonna go away, and all our kids are playing them, what an opportunity to be a powerful tool to educate that we have, we just need to use it in a responsible fashion. Well on that note, I want to thank you again so much Jeremy for being with us, and we wish you great success for the foundation, and hope you'll let us know how we can support you. Absolutely, thank you guys. Thank you very much, we're going to transition very briefly into our next panel, which will be Next Gen Fragility, New Approaches to Peace and Governance in Fragile States. Our panelists are receiving their microphones right now, we're gonna do a little bit of stage remodeling, and then we'll begin in just a couple of minutes, so if everyone would just take a break, in place. Thank you. Sarah Cliff, if you're here, if you'd come down, and we're here to give you a microphone to begin this session. Could you get me a pen out of my bag? Have you noticed how neuroscientists are like the new rock stars of the peace building world? Yeah, thank you Jeremy, that was really great. And now we have a different group of rock stars here. For those who've just joined you, my name is Nancy Lindborg, I'm the President of the United States Institute of Peace, and this is really a terrific conference, thank you Melanie and everyone at the Alliance for Peace Building for putting this together. We are talking today with this panel on Next Gen Fragility, New Approaches to Peace and Governance in Fragile States. So our goal for the next hour is looking at the ways in which conflict, violence, and governance converge in fragile environments. And I'm joined by an incredible panel, people who have deep expertise, very, very thoughtful on this topic, including Sarah Cliff, who's the Director of the Center of International Cooperation at New York University. Sarah's worked for over 20 years in countries that are either emerging from conflicts or in political transitions. She also spent much of her career at the World Bank and wrote one of the seminal works that's guided many of us, the World Development Report in 2011. Still a very powerful document. We also have Claire Lockhart, who's the Co-Founder and CEO of the Institute for State Effectiveness, the author of another critical book, Fixing Failed States, which she co-authored with Ashraf Ghani, now the President in Afghanistan, and she previously served as an advisor to the UN in Afghanistan during the bond process. Pradeep Pariar is the Founder of the Nepal Policy Center, which is a youth-led think tank in Kathmandu, and he's a board member of the Association of Youth Organizations in Nepal, and recently appointed by the Nepali government to the National Youth Policy Review Task Force. Congratulations. Grace Yeyeney Mason is a social worker who spent nearly a decade working on women's empowerment, advocacy, and HIV and AIDS in communities across Liberia. She's also the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Women's Movement for Sustainable Development in Liberia. And finally, we have Eileen Babit, who's the Director of the Institute for Human Security and Co-Director of the Program on Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at the Fletcher School. And Eileen has done research that has informed many of us in very powerful ways on identity-based conflicts, trust-building, and post-war environments, and that critical interface between peace-building and human rights. And she's worked as a facilitator and trainer in conflict environments around the world. So this is an incredible panel that we have. We'll take questions from everybody after we have a few rounds of questions among the panel. And for those of you who are following online, be sure to use the hashtag PeaceCon 2016. We'll also be taking questions from Twitter. So this is such an amazing moment for this conversation. As I said earlier, we had the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, where conflict was really front and center. And there was an amazing moment at the roundtable on preventing and ending violent conflict with world leaders, where the most forward-leaning speakers at the table were the leaders of fragile states, Tunisia, Mali, Somalia. They're the ones who were talking about some of these core concepts of inclusivity, accountability, and ending corruption. I would love to have your reflections, particularly with the Sustainable Development Goal 16 in front of us. I hope everybody here knows what Goal 16 is, yes? This is a wonky audience. That without accountable, inclusive societies and access to justice for all, we will never achieve the rest of our sustainable development goals, our global goals. So Grace, I'm going to start with you. When we look at the challenges of fixing fragile states, of enabling fragile states to really move forward on peace and prosperity, in very complex, complicated environments, what's the role of civil society? What do you think we've learned over the past five years of how civil society is crucial on this set of challenges? Okay. First of all, I want to say thank you that I'm at this very important meeting. And for your question, one thing we need to understand is that civil society is actually like a bulldog. We are the ones supposed to be looking at government and where government is going. If they are going wrong, we tell them, hey, you are not doing this. And if they are not doing good, we also compliment them. But if you ask me that question, civil society in Liberia over the period, especially from 2005, when we had our first democratically elected president, civil society has been on the forefront. We have been engaged in most of all the activities in terms of reforms, in terms of peace building, especially focusing on the community levels. So in as much as there are a lot of challenges in the work we do, but civil society has always been at the forefront in these different areas. And one of the things that we also have some problem with is the issue of corruption. And in terms of talking about corruption from the civil society air, it has been like once you talk about corruption, you are anti-government. Anti-government. Yes, it means you don't like the government. And for us, we don't see it that way. We think we should be telling government where they are going wrong and where they are not going wrong. But that is a big challenge in terms of doing the work we do. Other than that, civil society has been at the forefront in most of the things that are happening in Liberia. Our own regret in recent times has been the drastic drug down of the United Nations missions just before the 2017 elections. We're going to be having elections in 2017. The UN missions in Liberia will be joined now on the 30th of June, 2016. And we think this is also a challenge and that in as much as we want the peace and security of Liberia to be in the hands of Liberians, we think there's still a need to have the United Nations in Liberia maybe up to the elections and then after the elections, we can move forward. Pradeep, I want to ask you the same question. Nepal has undergone a long painful transition. What has been the role of civil society and of peace builders and where do you see the priorities going forward? Thank you very much for having me here. It's okay. Yeah. When King took over power in 2005, 2001 to 2005 when there were a political party are divided when one parliament dissolved and there is only civil society very active and when political party organized rally there is only 150 to 200 people and when civil society started campaign against the king and then there is a thousand and thousand people and that's people movements started by the civil society. When that happens but after that political party took over the power and civil society are really divided into political parties they are divided into name of the political party and right now there's a not really civil society they are divided in terms of political parties and they have a little interest to get some appointment to get something from the government so it's not a very strong civil society right now when there was a king took over the power civil society was so active to achieve some common goals but after that there is no common goals so there is a little interest within civil society so that's happened right now. And Pradeep how did that happen? What happened to that co-opted civil society? When there is a civil society had an earlier common goal to throne king but after the political party comes over into power they are divided because of their limited interest because they have a small interest I already mentioned they want to get something from the political party and government when democracy restored before democratic crisis restored that time they have only one goal common goals now there is not common goals I think so civil society has divided in terms of their political ideology and political thoughts. Helene you're nodding over there you know what both Liberia and Nepal have experienced is trying to restore that state society confidence and because of the lack of legitimacy that both their governments suffered from you've looked a lot at that what's the best pathway back and what can outsiders do to help states and civil society recreate that legitimacy? Well the project we've been focusing on is asking that question and the question we've started with is what is it that creates legitimacy in the eyes of the citizens of the country so-called internal legitimacy because the research shows that if a state is perceived to be legitimate by its people then it has more capacity to manage conflict to operate effectively etc and there's a dilemma in the answer because the answer we found is participation and inclusion even in something as material as provision of basic services like education, health, water etc one of our colleagues did participated in a multi-year and multi-country study of whether the provision of basic services leads to state legitimacy because donors believe that that's the relationship that if you give money for state capacity building particularly in basic services that you then create legitimacy for the government and it turns out not to be true which is rather surprising finding given that the donor community in 2014 contributed 36 billion dollars to the creation of social infrastructure and basic services with the idea that it would provide this benefit what the study found and this is a study funded by DFID is that the provision of services per se did not create perceptions of legitimacy what did create perceptions of legitimacy was if people participated in at the community level participated in the design of those services and also had a mechanism for voicing grievances if the services were not adequate this was the only relationship that actually mattered in terms of legitimacy so we all know or believe that participation and inclusion are important what we were trying to figure out is is there any empirical data to support that belief and it turns out in this context and in others it's true but then you have the dilemma that Pradeep just mentioned which is the civil society is often fractured and what appears legitimate to some may not appear or be seen as legitimate by others and the real challenge I think for all of us is figuring out how to enable, facilitate, support multi-stakeholder discussions at the community level and at every level to work through those differences because otherwise people end up getting left out feeling silenced and it reinforces division rather than creating the legitimacy that we would hope does the outside donor community exacerbate that by emphasizing creation of political parties and pushing elections? it's an unintended consequence yes I think so it's with good intent because we have a functioning democratic polity here in this country and in other western countries well yeah yes you're right that is a laughable proposition sorry about that yeah we think we do we will again yeah Grace and Pradeep how does that resonate with your experiences in Liberia and Nepal? Grace did was there a mechanism that gave communities a voice and participation and development of services? I think what she said resonated very well with what is actually happening on the grounds because all the need for community involvement is not is beyond the papers is beyond writing it on the paper we need to interact with communities and that is one thing that is not being present so sometimes our government may write good reports for example you had a stakeholders meeting and you had the chief wife there and you have maybe two other women the report tells you that women were involved but the reality is that who were the women that were involved? Are there women at the political levels? Are there community women that need to speak out? So that is very clear that the inclusion of communities is very crucial in us getting where we want to be and for Liberia I think that is one thing that we need to do I tell you I gave you a story that in Grand Basel County there was one of these big institutions at the end of the civil crisis this county earned their source of income from blacksmithing anyone knows about blacksmith? Okay so usually we'll sit in our big offices maybe in New York or maybe in Monrovia or in Johannesburg whatever and we go online and get these information we don't confirm them in the communities we don't know what the processes are and we sit and write these fabulous proposers and this group wrote a proposal to build a blacksmith for this community and they intend that this will help the community to raise fund to move their livelihood forward but the biggest mistake they made was not to go on the grounds because traditionally before you build a blacksmith there must be some traditional ratios that take place in the absence of that they wouldn't use it so because they did not engage these communities and they built this big place brought all of the facilities and up to present is a forest so now we've written good reports that we did this work but the reality is that it's not impacting the lives of the communities so I think we need to think twice on the way on our approaches to be more community driven to be more stakeholders driven so that we get the input of the people who should be benefiting from our services Grace, thank you Pradeep in terms of the legitimacy of the Nepali government have they sought community participation and engagement? Can I share my some of the pictures? No, I can go on if that's okay that's fine actually when there is a war or when there is a yeah yeah I want to share some of the picture continue just we're gonna keep this punchy though yeah yeah look at this picture I want to stop in this picture you can see the few few I have a huge respect on older generation in the previous picture you can see the all the rest all the caste group people in this pictures but in this picture you can see after this when peace agreement signed by these two leaders after that all the inclusion is not there when there are fighting was there when there is a war was there there are always inclusion all the people there all the caste because they have a common goals to achieve restores restore the democracy but after this peace agreement signed there is a not inclusion perspective in that they're in the leadership I want to give few examples when this peace agreement signed after that there is a new government fund but there were not young people participation there was not marginalized people participation in the government so when we have a new election happen that's a vice of marginalized people heard and then there's many marginalized people in the constitution assembly but the one they decide main things and main points in the what should be in the constitution but only five male leaders decide only five male leaders from the same caste groups so there is a 601 representative in the constitution assembly but the one they need to decide and do agreement they don't ask with their cadres or leaders because they felt that we appointed you we appointed because of us you are here so that's kind of mentality in the leadership so that that's how going on still and then we have a first constitution assembly dissolved and then we have a second constitution assembly and there are also 601 members when they decide now we have a new constitution but still there is not marginalized vice it's not heard and then Madesi people Dalit Dalit is so called low caste groups and then women and marginalized groups are still continuing fighting with these leaders when they were together to fight restore the democracy now we need to fight with these leaders that kind of situation over going on when they are interim constitution we have a we have an interim constitution they wrote beautiful things in interim constitution now we have a new constitution but they took out our rights from the new constitution that's why now still more than 50 people already died and then still fighting going on that's kind of situation I don't know why this kind of mindset with our leaders but still that kind of situation going on and Pradeep does does your appointment to the national youth policy task force signal any change of heart the fact that they have such task force yeah we have now task force as yesterday I also mentioned with the in previous panel before coming to Washington DC one of the minister called me and then said you did a really wrong thing and I said why and then we put in the national youth policy 50 percent women participation we ensure 50 percent women participant participation and now they need to fulfill the youth council with the 50 percent women participation but political party are really afraid to afraid to include all the 50 percent women participation in the council and they are threatening us like why you did all those kind of things and I said to minister look at how its impact in near future so that's kind of situation going on I don't know why these people are like that but we still need to fight and then we called this justice as a really race really race so we need to sometime tired but we need to fight continue so Pradeep lack of inclusion lack of consultation lack of legitimacy Claire I know that that ISC is looking at what are some of the successes and failures from the last decade or so of trying to do the state building transitional exercises how does this compare with what you are finding what are some of the highlights of that well it tracks quite closely to the conversation so far and I'll highlight maybe just a couple of lessons that are emerging one is the absolute centrality of citizen and community engagement and especially the youth which as we know are the absolute majority of so many dynamic and growing countries around the world and I think you know in part it was one of the mistakes of the millennium development goals we spent a lot of attention on primary education and very young children but we forgot about the teenagers and the youth and you know then there was an agenda of including them through sports and through activities which was one step forward but I think that's not enough for the youth it's not just soccer matches and so on that it's going to include them they want to be included politically but what are the avenues for political engagement what are the avenues for economic engagement in the society that need to really make that a real avenue of inclusion so that's the first the second is I think the field has made huge strides in some people thinking and working politically of course peace processes and transitional processes are intensely political but I think there are some real dilemmas and issues that need to be confronted here part of the field has now moved into to recognize the importance of the political settlement and the grand bargain and many of the grandees of the field absolutely rightly you know you need to do these deals to stop the fighting and I think one can recognize the imperative of that but too often then the deal stops there so what about the inclusion and having much more inclusive and broader processes that follow I think the UN is recognizing this now with the sustaining peace report that's just come out so what do we mean by thinking and working politically and how can it have that much much broader sense of participation in political processes and I think that does mean about how do national political agendas get set do they get set by a few men in smoke build rooms or what are those processes for setting a national political and development agenda how do you engage people not just in the capital city but in the cities around the country and in the villages how do you engage different stakeholder groups and what kind of political processes that are not only top down but bottom up as well Sarah when you think back on your groundbreaking work of the world development report in 2011 and then CIC just did a really terrific evaluation of how we're doing with the new deal for fragile states which has these five peace building and state building goals and one of the things that the president of Somalia said in Istanbul was you know Somalia is just now 20 years later getting to the point where it was 20 years ago and it's critical to fix the politics this is really hard this is hard inside the country it's really hard from an external perspective so from all the work that you've done where do you see the greatest struggle and the greatest opportunity particularly for civil society and external actors to provide the kind of support that gets at this core issue So if we think about the moment now and the world humanitarian summer in Istanbul it has to be said that in terms of outcomes we're not looking at that good a picture conflict deaths from violent conflict have gone up fivefold in the last five years I always hope this is not correlated with the publication of the world development report but certainly the performance the performance since then has not been very good and I think that there are really two key things we need to look at why we're not already why we're not implementing what we already know which is what many of the other panelists talked about and what is new that has emerged in that period so on what we already know the balance in legitimacy of capability of states capacity of states inclusion of states and accountability over issues like corruption we keep on getting our external support to this balance wrong so for instance in Iraq in South Sudan we quite clearly supported a kind of capability led agenda and we didn't push very hard on issues of inclusion and accountability with quite disastrous results that's not an easy balance so for instance in Somalia there were some external programs to hold accountable the government through parliament three or four years ago when really the government didn't yet exist so you can't also support accountability before you have some degree of capacity but I think we get the balance wrong the second aspect is what we invest in and Eileen mentioned this so the first three of the peace building and state building goals political institutions justice and security we don't invest in very much four percent of our aid in political institutions three percent in justice two percent in security sector reform separated from defence cooperation so for instance in a country like Burundi there was some investment in military reform but almost nothing in the justice system the police political institutions which we now see is leading to problems and the third I added listening to you but the emphasis still on fast elections from external actors absolutely goes against all the lessons we have that we know that without the surrounding institutions pushing for very fast elections with a full handover without checks and balances has really severe drawbacks so I think that's an issue with the drawdown of the mission in Liberia it should in fact be waiting until after the elections probably not even at the election it's a huge challenge for us if a ceasefire proceeds in Syria if there is the beginning of a political settlement how would we avoid a situation of pushing there for very fast elections just finished by highlighting what is new we've seen much more middle income countries in conflict I think that relates actually to us applying these institutional indicators more broadly and in the end in the context of the sustainable development goals we really need to see that as applying across high income middle income and low income that fragility is not constrained to the lowest income of countries we've seen a rise in geopolitical tensions and we've seen of course the rise of violent extremism those things are linked ISIS obviously has gained territory and ground in countries that already had civil conflict that already had very weak institutions geopolitical conflicts have always exploited that kind of circumstance but we really need to do more to think about how our different types of prevention from the violence prevention that our first speaker talked about this morning to conflict prevention to prevention of violent extremism linked together USIP is tri-chairing along with Carnegie and the Center for New American Security an effort working with a senior study group Claire is one of our members to identify key recommendations for the next administration on how can the US government be more effective on addressing fragility so I'm going to shamelessly exploit each of you I'm going to ask you really quickly give me one great idea to include in this in this study Aline? I think the aid agenda should absolutely focus on the multi-stakeholder process and not simply as Grace said as a box to check off but really understand what is involved that these are political processes people have to do analysis they have to understand the local context and they've got to put money into it it can't simply be again a checked box it has to be something with integrity I also go with her that is a great need yeah there's a great need for community involvement and for community inclusion into these processes because contexts are different from different places so you need to understand what is happening in this context in order to come up with what you are so I totally go for community involvement Aline? Yeah I'll give you one example before coming to here there's a in Nepal after the earthquake reconstruction is happening hugely and then I asked with the Nepal government authority to ensure young people participation in this process and they are not listening our voice and then I went to the SEM development bank and they are funding for many many part of the country and then I went to them and then I asked with them in when you are doing agreement with the Nepal government ensure youth participation in all the process and then they asked with the Nepal government official to ensure young people participation in reconstruction now they're doing that sometimes when we ask for many things with the government they're not listening us but sometimes donors ask with them that they will listen so we need to channel in different ways so that we need to ensure young people and marginalized people in the decision making process but sometimes we ask all the time but they are not listening we need to channelize in different ways have external support clear so I think in hope this is what the report will do but I think it's that U.S. leadership on this issue really matters and now is the time for a sort of renewed bold vision that Sarah's report at the World Bank did to really mobilize people I think understandably in the U.S. especially the media and the public and some policymakers there's a lot of lack of confidence you know Iraq and Afghanistan with tough experiences and this is really demoralized people but now is the time to also look for grounds for confidence and I think U.S. leadership whether it's in Colombia of the last decade South Korea all around the world that when the U.S. has put its resources and leadership in partnership and through multilateral institutions with others it matters and try to find a way to mobilize this U.S. public and policy establishment for the next decade Sarah I agree with that and with the previous speakers I would just add that I think if you are able to work out what is common and what is different between our discussions on violence prevention on conflict prevention on prevention of violent extremism and on prevention of mass atrocities those are four different communities that use the word prevention but that actually don't cross over very much that would not only be useful here it would be very useful to other countries who are grappling with that to create a typology in terms of the kind of work out what's common about those challenges and what is actually different and requires quite distinct responses and where can responses contradict between the different communities which has happened yes indeed I want to open it up and enable the audience to ask questions we have mics if we can come down front we have a questioner right here sir and please if you could just tell us who you are when you ask your question yeah right down here somebody has to be first I suppose we appreciate it my name is Peter Dixon associated with an organization called Concordus International thank you all for your comments and for your wisdom we talk about fragile and conflict affected states as a kind of acronym and we talk about states and sometimes we see them as pariah states but it's very state-based we live in an international society which is a system which is has the sort of inadequate shorthand of the Westphalian system very state-based and Fixing Failed States is a concept a book and all about states but we do the professor next to me might well suggest that the state is a very open system not a closed system and I just wonder what you might have to say about fragility as an international concept rather than fragile states as such how the globalization for instance and fragmentation affect the fragility thank you anybody want to tackle that Eileen just to say that another part of our project not on basic services but on security sector and reform of the security sector is a project done by our colleague Alex Dual in looking at peace missions in Africa and how they create or don't create census of security and one of the things that they've found in that research is that not surprisingly the conflicts that are nominally state conflicts within states are not at all that they're more regional that there is a lot of cross-border relationships and things that pass back and forth the parties are much more multivariate and that these processes need to be seen as regional problems rather than state-based problems again it means reconceptualizing who is at the table and table metaphorically who's included when we talk about inclusion it may be that you have to bring in a larger group of people that rather than just the state people themselves because the not just interested actors but the important actors in making decisions and changing political processes are larger than within the state so Sarah I think it's important when we talk about institutions to think about whether our international institutions are geared to actually prevent and redress these newer types of conflict so if you think about the security council now the security council is not a capable and inclusive an accountable institution in its current form or necessarily effective indeed yeah no so capable definitely I think the results in the last few years speak for themselves to some extent but so the institutional arguments at national level you can mirror at regional or at international level now that's not going to change realistically in the next few years so one needs to think of ways to work around that what mechanisms can be set to create more inclusion to create pressure for some accountability on results let's take a few questions sir right here hello you're you're on sorry William Anderson former USA senior foreign service officer senior development advisor at US European Command an African Command and a formerly USA represented to the European Union so the WDR at the World Development Report of 2011 which I thought was a wonderful piece concluded in brief that to prevent recurring violence in conflict affected states union citizen security jobs legitimate institutions and it takes a generation so how do we get stakeholders national and international especially governments and donors in the US whose horizons are barely a day to act plan act and adapt accordingly good question over here in the white shirt yep and one other we want to tee up raise your hand if you have one go ahead sir Andrew Tomlinson from the Quaker UN office in New York and thank you for a wonderful panel so we talked about a lot about inclusion this morning and of course inclusion comes up very strongly in the 2030 agenda and I would emphasize that we're not just talking about goal 16 but goal 10 and other places and actually some of the inclusion language is probably more transformative longer term than everything we have in goal 16 but the question that arises I think as we focus more on inclusion is can we switch our thinking from inclusion as part of a sort of a democratization project and eventually a regime change project to thinking about how we actually encourage more repressive political circumstances to actually work on inclusion in those not as a road to some kind of big scale political change but how do we actually if you like sell this in the less than democratic circumstances in which most of the world lives what does actually inclusion look like in a less than democratic political environment and I think so I'm really interested in how the panel could think about this and perhaps help us what is really the key issue in implementing the inclusion project in so many countries around the world thank you the ad campaign for inclusion final question down here of this round the woman in the let did you have a question no okay over here hi my name is Sophia Giddens and I'm with the global nomads group and my question is on your experiences or if you could cite examples of best practices of youth in civic engagement either training or within the actual political process thank you okay so predip do you want to start with the youth question we are running the campaign against the corruption I'll I'll give an example a corruption if we talk about the corruption it start from the house usually I talk with the young people have you ever asked with your parents how much money they are earning or how much money they earn let's let's give an example in young people they want to motorbike but their parents on like every month like hundred dollars but young people want hundred thousand dollars motorbike so how your parents can give you motorbike but you are asking with your parents motorbike or iPhone so it's corruption start from home you are encouraging your parents to give something what your parents doesn't have so that's a start from house so we asked with the young people so please ask if your father giving motorbike or iPhone ask with your parents first start from the house and then ask question to your government or wherever asking question is one of our campaign asks how it's not happening or how it's happened so from the house so asking question is our one of a campaign that's it's really good campaign so when we talk about this and then young people realize oh I'm part of the corruption society and then when we ask with the family and then family is aware oh my son or daughter asking this questions if that really happened so I'm going to jail or somewhere else so we are the country like 16th in the more than 167 countries transparent international does survey and we are on the 16th list so now we are educating young people to ask the questions on this issues I just want to not really answer but democracy and inclusion that's questions all but I want to answer now we have like more than 16 years we don't have a local election every year more than 100,000 young people can participate in the election process in one time election now three terms we don't have election so more than 500,000 young people couldn't get chance to involve in the democratic process so that means they can't involve in the decision-making process when they can't involve in the decision-making process inclusion is not happening even though we have a democracy we are federal democratic republic country but we don't have a local election from 16 years so that kind of situation is happening inclusion is like buzz word no one want to do really in a real situation look at this I saw the some of the picture of our leaders when they were demanding the democracy and then they were like we include you all when we have a democracy registration but after that they forget all of them and the next election they are going to have in very soon and they are also giving same agenda we are include you so it's not happening when you are in the position to giving position you are very very very reluctant and you don't want to give so you third this leader third this is our like own assets or something like that so we need to challenge especially young people need to challenge the authority challenge our family we need to ask the question you have a little bit more culture in US and this part of the world asking a question but we don't have a culture of asking questions to our authority or our own family so that's why we have this kind of campaign asking questions to our authority so that's a good segue other thoughts on how you convince particularly more authoritarian or close societies to take on an inclusive approach clear I think it's a great question so one of course is inclusion in the political processes but what are the other avenues for participation and one of them is the functional which Eileen has already mentioned so the co-creation and the participation in service delivery whether it's the health system and the way that health services are delivered the education system agriculture and there's been a lot of tremendous learning and expansion of the community driven development approach whether at the village level people take responsibility and make their own decisions on the allocation of resources we're seeing I think the other is when we look at the different levels of governance and where are the avenues for participation and particularly given the pace of urbanization and the role of cities participation whether it's through the election of mayors election of city councils is going to be just is already a tremendously important avenue and will continue to be I mean some of the great examples that I've seen as we've launched this new processes you know getting and I understand it in Nepal because you've had the local elections it hasn't been possible but for example in Kenya terrific work being to help young people stand for election at all levels of governance in this new way this new generation and now having both political and technical representation in this way and how do we then keep people engaged if it's generational how do we how do we keep you we're pulling out just before your next elections in Liberia what Sarah you're the one who made the statement how do we how do we address that so that that piece of research that you quoted basically looked at every country that had made a transition in the 20th century and how long it took them to go from the institutional level of Haiti to the level of roughly Ghana and it found it was on average 20 years so our three year time frames or five year time frames are a way off that was the most unpopular recommendation we had in Washington I must say so clearly this is not easy to to change I'm a little bit hopeful because it's come up through an unanticipated angle recently on the humanitarian side where one of the major themes in Istanbul was when the average person is now displaced for 17 years how can we keep having these annual funding appeals we need multi-year programs so I'm hoping that will be a bit of additional pressure but in the end as I'm sure everyone here knows that's a political challenge within donor countries to get agreement to make the changes and donor countries have legislative and policy constraints to doing it just on Andrew's question 20 seconds I think we also need to do a better job of publicizing the experiences of countries that have gone from authoritarian governments to more inclusive systems without a war in between and two of those experiences would be Indonesia I think very relevant for instance for different countries in the Middle East now and Ghana in your neighborhood which while by no means perfect on every front avoided a major civil war in the transition that it went through and Tunisia is now and Tunisia is now providing another model absolutely yeah absolutely Nancy could I just yes one other comment sure I about the question about the incentives and the especially US agencies that have this short time frame and have to see results if there's anything that in your report on advice to the next administration whoever that might be if we could finally get around to changing the incentive structure for aid assistance and where people's careers and promotions are not based on outputs but are based on the processes that they put in place to do the kinds of things we're talking about if we know that this is what is needed why aren't those the parameters on which people are given incentives to perform putting processes in place and and having them be politically sensitive and based on good analysis why aren't those the parameters rather than how many dams do you build how many clinics do you set up and the boxes that you check we have to change the incentives and the institutions thank you I'm being told we only have two minutes left I will take one final question and then give everybody a chance to wrap up all the way in the back gentlemen with the beard Erin Chassis Catholic Relief Services thank you all for talking about inclusion and challenges and trying to increase it could you now shift a bit and talk more about access and influence and how civil society beyond just the community level can be a very active voice and channeling citizens concerns and their preferences at higher levels and more importantly connecting those different levels so it's not just the community or just working at the national level for socio-political change but setting up the processes I mean set to actually be able to work at all levels Grace that might have your name on it okay thank you well in as much as we want to do all of the work at the community level it will not be very essential if we don't link it to the national level neither to the international levels so everything we do at the local level must be transformed must be sent to the national level and the way we do that is that we try to engage different stakeholders based on the kind of situations we are working on for example if you are doing a peaceful elections project and you are doing the peace building initiative at the community level the best thing to do is to engage different stakeholders that are in the sector for example the elections commissions the library national police the transport ministry all of the security sectors you need to get them involved because this is a situation that they actually supposed to be involved since you are doing it you need to get them linked so that they send it at the national level and from the national level our own government has to take it and send it to the international level so there must be a link I clearly agree that there is no way that we can survive at the community levels with all of the good things we are doing if it is not linked at the international levels so the processes are in place we do that by connecting different stakeholders based on the issues we are working on thank you so I'm just going to do a check find other is there anything that absolutely wasn't said that we would be remiss in leaving out final comments I just want to say the last thing there is an international community here when you travel to like our country and then you meet the certain kind of people that means elite that means who has access of information who has like network so you got one kind of impression only so that most of the time our project and our campaign failure because of the you have you can't get chance to meet those group of people who never heard so let's try to meet other kind of people those who can give you a different perspective that would be lead to our campaign or our programs in different way and then change will happen slowly but we we are we want to change very fast because young people want to change very fast and we don't want to wait change until we die so we want to in this generation we want to change in this generation so let's make happen thank you thank you Pradi Claire you wanted to add something just just one thought and I you think you know what is it that the US peace building can contribute to the peace building state building field especially as we now mobilize around goal 16 one of the things we didn't hear but I think it's worth mentioning is what the science and technology community can bring to the field that vast innovation that America brings and whether that's you know as Yemen hopefully moves towards a peace process solving the water issue in Yemen and bringing this agenda back into the peace building field as we look for the decade ahead I think would be very important to do Grace thank you I please join me in thanking our panel for the research the energy we appreciate the knowledge the experience and the impatience thank you everybody thank you everyone we're now going to take about a 20 minute break and when we return at 1120 we'll be in two locations in this auditory and we will have the civil military police coordination for human security conversation and and b241 which is on the same level as your coffee tea and water all the way on the end we will be convening a conversation that will explore the intersections between peace building non-violent social movements and civilian protection thank you very much enjoy a break I'm Lisa Scherz that's looks like you're trying to I'm trying to and I I guess is there only one of these it is let's talk with our A.B. folks to see how they want to upload they may want to upload it here oh I see okay and what do you have it's a power point and there's a video link in it would be great if they can pull it up right away okay all right let's um sorry you just walked downstairs let's walk upstairs okay that's fine thank you for helping me I didn't see I didn't know who was um for deep So when are you coming to Nepal? I would so love to come to Nepal. You know, I lived there for two years in Chitrapati. Chitrapati? Yeah. So I have a big part in my heart. Do you know where that is? Yeah, I know. 1982 to 1983. I bought it in 1982. You were? Well, at least you were born. Yes. But it was... Born? No, I... He was born, just born. Just born when he was two years old. Okay, ready? Mm-hmm. Thank you so much. They're not organized by date. Oh, I see. Do you have a cup? I don't. A lot I have in. I'm going to find it out. Sure, I will take it. Thank you very much. Nancy, this is your book. Oh, you gave me a book last time when you were here. Yes, that's it. That look right? Last time. I do not know. No, that's for the run-up. Was there a video for what you said? Yeah, so if you open it up, there's a video link to the internet in the... No number it is? There. It won't invent, it'll probably just open and play. Okay, wonderful. Great. So we have had integrated training, especially where more than 20,000... Jump to another input and you black me out real quick. So I have an idea here. Tell me if you think this is going to work for you. What I'm thinking is, when you're showing the PowerPoint, and you've gotten to about here, I've got a laptop upstairs that once you get to this, when I see this, I just need a visual, and just a cue from one of you to say, and then we've got this video. And I can change my inputs. That way you guys can stay sitting down. I can jump back and forth. That's fine. If you're comfortable with jumping into this and moving to it and opening the link, by all means, go for it. It'll open right up. And then how do I get it large screen? Full screen for Bimeo. If I need help. Which do you think would you like to do? I'm going to try doing it myself. And if I can't... What I'm going to do is, I'm going to grab a copy of this. That way I have it. If we need to go to plan B, we can jump in and I can roll the video from up top. Perfect. That works for you. There's two versions here. Go ahead and just jump in to one of them here. Let's take a look at it. I left it open. You don't necessarily need to click it. You can just jump to the website. It's up to you. It's workflow. Hi, Nadia. Good to see you. That is the only one. My colleague Deborah has a slide that's animated that was not animating correctly. It's this one. Deborah, just come make sure this is animating correctly. So it's like this and then that. Okay. It translated. Our computers are different as we were passing back and forth. You need it if you want to sit and if you want to walk around or something. How does everything look? It looks nice. Good. As it should. We'll also put it on that monitor for you right down there. Oh, look at that. So people can see that. And they can see the video down there too. Anything that's going to play through it. So if you need to, you don't have to crane your neck. I really appreciate that. You're pretty much covered. Thank you very much. Do you want this to be up right away when this panel starts? Are you going to go on first and do this? This is the first screen. All of our PowerPoints are all together now. And after this is done, we can jump up to it. We have an image with just the participants' panelist names on it. Basically. And we'll switch to that. But this is first. That's great. Good. I really appreciate it. I'm going to hang on to this. And I'll try to catch up with you before the lunch. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're kind of rude to have a desk, not at my, much of it anyway. Yeah, I think that's a really good reason to do that. I wonder, I probably got an idea of what I'll probably be able to do. Yeah, that's good. Well, I was going to introduce you to the project first, but I'm going to do one first. Oh, whatever. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, or, um, Yeah. Yeah. Anybody who wants to go to the podium? Well, you're going to sit down. You're going to sit down. This is when you get in trouble. And is this it? I just want to make sure that we have the right PowerPoint hours. I believe, yeah, she's first introducing the, she's first introducing the project. And then there's, there's clicker right there. So are they queued up? I guess everybody has, everybody's presentations queued up. Oh, it's on one after this. Good. Okay. Just making sure. Oh, do you mind? Good for you, Steve. So you're going to get off and get into this dance. I think you should start and then I just want to do whatever works for you. I'm very glad you told me about that. I'll actually go stand here. Let's get started for our next session. Good morning, everyone. My name is Nadia Gorsbacher. I'm the director of security sector education programs here at the institute. And welcome to this session on civil military police coordination for human security. We'll be having a variety of presentations and then a discussion, which hopefully will involve you. Let me first turn over to Dr. Lisa search, who will introduce the project and the, the handbooks that are being launched. And then after that we'll start. I'll introduce the panelists and we'll get going with the presentations and then the discussion Lisa. Good morning and thank you for coming to this session. This is a project that will be sharing both some of the key concepts and some of the case studies for, but I want to just give you a bit of a background on the project itself. Last year we actually did a mini session reporting on it. It was a collaboration between GPAC, the global partnership for the prevention of armed conflict. Darri now is here from GPAC in the audience, sorry up there. It was also involving the Crock Institute for International Peace at the University of Notre Dame and Laurel Stone, if you could stand, is here from the Notre Dame and the Alliance for Peacebuilding and all of our members. So just to just tell you briefly about how we developed the, the books that we'll be talking about today. It was a three year participatory process and that process was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. We had global consultations in Geneva, Washington DC and The Hague. We had a global steering group with 19 different countries represented and altogether there were over a hundred organizations involved including many Alliance for Peacebuilding members. Last June we did a training of trainers in which we had 30 people, police, military from NATO and civil society leaders from 26 different countries participating at Eastern Mennonite University's Summer Peacebuilding Institute in which we tested the curriculum and we got another set of feedback. So over the last three years it's all been very participatory and it includes the ideas and concepts from many different countries and people. Then just in December of this year we launched these publications in The Hague at the Civil Military Cooperation Center of Excellence which is a NATO affiliated training center in The Hague and again we had over 80 people, military, police and civil society sitting down together and talking about how do we identify the differences in our approaches, in our values, in our way of working, in our goals but how do we also work on the common ground and find ways of working on specifically the human security agenda. Okay, I'm going to pass it back to Nadia and we'll be sharing more. Thank you Lisa. So in the agenda you have a couple of different presentations. Let me introduce Lisa, Christopher and Deborah first and we will then get going with the presentations and I'm losing some of the... So let me introduce Christopher Holshek who's over here on chair number four. Colonel Holshek is an international peace and security consultant focused on civil, military and peace building related training and education. As a senior fellow at the Alliance for Peace Building Christopher is helping to shape a new strategic narrative of peace building as applied national strategy, built institutional and disciplinary bridges and foster enduring dialogue between peace builders and national security professionals at policy and operational levels. Deborah Mancini Grifoli is an independent consultant who has been working on this project has been working on various issues around peace building and security. She is based here in Washington DC and working on topics related to peace and conflict. Deborah's focus lies with civilian protection, civil military police relations, corporate community engagement and humanitarianism. She has co-authored various manuals and guidebooks now widely used by humanitarian organizations, U.N. agencies and governments such as humanitarian negotiation. A handbook for securing access, assistance and protection for civilians in armed conflict. Deborah also regularly conducts trainings and workshops around the world with humanitarian and human rights workers, military personnel, government officials and corporate leaders. And Lisa, and I don't know Lisa, but there you go. I lost you in the shuffle. Lisa Search is a F.P.'s director of human security. She's also a research professor at peace building at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peace Building. She's currently working with global civil society partners and key security sector experts to write a curriculum on security force civil society relations, 25 years of experience on the ground peace building in Afghanistan and 25 other countries. Lisa trained security forces, governments and international organizations to work in partnership with civil society peace building efforts. So at this time I will turn it over back to Lisa who will talk to us about a civilian perspective to human security. Lisa. It's actually Chris and I. Chris is going to go first. We're going to double team. Okay, got it. You first. Okay, good. Also, yeah, when you're looking at this, we kind of started to think about what does the environment look like? And it's kind of the old story. The more things change, the more they stay the same. So we looked at this phenomenon of what Fareed Zakaria has called the democratization of violence. But the very same platform such as social media that can transmit content that fosters violence can be also the very same platforms and technologies and so on that fosters peace. So it's the democratization of both violence and peace. And if I could describe this, what we're basically doing is we're shifting in an era of warfare and peace where, if you will, that is largely the sort of 20th century, this sort of vertical model, the national security model, which is top down, which is state centric, industrial era warfare and conflict management. We're now moving to this more distributed, more horizontal concept of peace and conflict. And these are essentially people centric and they are struggles for identity, as was mentioned in fact earlier this morning. So the paradox of this is while a lot of this is being distributed and going downward and more horizontal, it requires therefore a more strategic approach. I spent 25 of my 30 years in the U.S. military in civil affairs and our moniker, the civilians say think globally act, locally we would say things strategically and tactically. So the focus is moving to understanding the strategic context that drivers the causalities of violence rather than just what the violence itself, which is one could sort of compare this with symptoms versus the disease itself. The other thing that's been happening is the field for civil military police coordination has become more complex, more crowded. In my mind's eye I think that's actually a good news story because a long time ago we tended to look almost primarily or exclusively to the military to solve a lot of these issues and now there are these many other actors in the field who are not only more appropriate, but in many ways more effective than the military. There is still a role for the military. The one thing that I thought that was important for me to mention here is there are some things that still stay the same. One is that peace, this concept of peace, is actually a higher ordering principle than security. This is in fact one of the sort of problem areas that we have with the overwhelming focus on security versus peace. But peace itself is strategic. It is inherently strategic. It is not because it is a state or an objective or a goal, but it is of itself a process. So as we've seen in the so-called decade of war, winning the peace is really the goal and winning the war is only a step to that. In fact, every major military philosopher from Sun Tzu to Colin Gray will tell you that the object of war is to establish a more favorable peace. So in my mind I have seen peace building essentially as applied whole of society or national strategy. So getting down to the more somewhat operational level, it's remembering that in the conduct of this consolidation on the objective in a sort of Klausovitzian political-military sense, this winning the peace, you have to focus on the real center of gravity. I asked this question in Tom Rick's book of a commander I was confronting in Iraq by saying, sir, what is the battle space? The battle space is human and not state centric. So all of these concepts, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, countering violent extremism, peace and security operations, the engagement concept the armies have, this idea of centers of gravity, it's all part of the Klausovitzian trinity where he talks about the people, the government and the army. The people is in modern warfare the center of gravity and that's how you get to peace. So the civil-military relationship and the state-civil society relationship as representative of that is really among the key nexus for managing this transition. And I've always looked at civil-military operations not as winning hearts and minds or public relations but as a transition management function. So governance in civil society is what you're trying to institute because that's the antidote necessarily to violence. And Lisa has taught me greatly what the term governance actually means. And again, I've mentioned that there are more players in the field who represent civil society who are really the more appropriate and effective capabilities to, for example, counter violent extremism. And the military, and this has shifted the role, the military is in fact the force multiplier. Despite what some people have said and not too long ago passed about NGOs being force multipliers it's actually the other way around. Now this is really not so much of a sea change as we think it is because the truth of the matter is that if you understand civil-military operations as the application of the civil-military relationship as you understand peace-building as applied national strategy then what you realize is the key in all of this management process of these different actors is how you align, how you balance these, the civil and the military actors. And we have had a model for that, believe it or not, since 1782 and everyone carries it in their pocket in the form of a US dollar look on the back and look at which way the eagle is looking. That tells you that is a depiction of the civil-military relationship that is the depiction of civil-military operations that is a depiction of what we're driving at with this management, the strategic management process of getting to peace and prioritizing peace. It's already right there. So with that I'll turn it over to you, Lisa. Thank you, Chris. Chris and I really are modeling today what I've spent the last 10 years doing and it's a lot of translation and learning acronyms. You see CVE, Center of Gravity, COG. I want to just make a mention here that Chris and I were in Iraq almost at the same time. I was in Iraq with Mennonite Central Committee in 2005 and many of the students that we've had it from Iraq who were doing reconciliation work who had come to Eastern Mennonite University in our Summer Peace Building Institute. I was working for them and when I left they said it's great that you Mennonites come and teach conflict transformation and peace building but what we really need you to do is go engage with your own government, especially your military. And so really today is the culmination of 10 years. Over 10 years of, first of all, the first three years I just listened to the military and tried to learn all these acronyms and this language. It's a real cross-cultural divide. And I see Jim Embry here from the U.S. Army War College because most of my learning really was there. I attended courses, I went and I was at conferences and I spent several years only listening before I could begin to see where the differences in what we're talking about and where there are similarities. And so really this project has been about focusing on the similarities but also in the handbook there are pointing out where there's different theories of change, different analysis, different language. So part of the handbook is really the translation of the Civil-Military-Police relationship. What we learned as I talked about that participatory global process that we used to develop it is that all of the Civil-Military-Police coordination and the whole concept of human security really comes down to how does the state relate to the society? What kinds of community engagement, local ownership are there? The handbook on human security has a lot on practical skills for community engagement. How does a civil society organization figure out how to reach out to the police, reach out to the military? How do the military and police pick which civil society organizations they want to listen to and how they will go about listening to that. It's a very practical handbook in that sense. But the idea is that security is a public good and nobody embodies that more than Chris Holshek. Currently he's on a national service ride around North America trying to promote the idea of service and citizenship and community engagement. And Chris really articulated for me security is a public good and local people, the consumers of security have a voice. It really defines the relationship between the police, the military and the public. It became very clear even at our first global consultation in Geneva that we needed to make this about human security because there are real tensions between national security and human security. There is overlap but there are also tensions. And so the handbook really focuses on how can we work together for human security because that is the paradigm, the framework in which coordination can happen. We heard earlier this morning about this concept of security sector reform. It's really being discussed a great deal in Europe. It's used less often here in this country. But it's this idea that security sector institutions are kind of the center of whether the state and society have a relationship that is seen as legitimate and there's consent for governance. When people in communities fear the security institutions there is something wrong. So when they see them as predators whether it's in Ferguson, here in the United States in our own cities, here in this country or in other places around the world basically the dynamic is the same. How do we move from the people seeing security sector as predators to seeing them as protectors and partners and civil society seeing itself playing a role in security. Civil society has been shifting I don't have a slide but the numbers of civil society organizations around the world is skyrocketing every year. It is growing by leaps and bounds and more and more of those civil society organizations are trained and practiced in peace and security issues. They're doing conflict analyses, they're doing mediation, negotiation all kinds of work in dialogue, community processes and as that expertise within civil society has grown there is a shift and it's not really civil society not protesting anymore but it's enriching our ability to speak to government. We don't just have to go to the streets and protest we can also make proposals we can make security proposals and in the video we'll see in a little bit there's a detail about how civil society is moving from protest to proposal in so many countries where civil society is stepping up and going directly to the police and to the military and saying we have ideas about how to improve public safety and how to improve human security. So, we're going to watch a film an eight minute film that discusses this publication called Local Ownership and Security and then Debra and I will give some of the conceptual background but first of all we'll watch a few of the people who came to our training of trainers last June who really articulated what does this civil military police coordination and local ownership of security look like in practice in a variety of different contexts. So, I'm going to hopefully pull this video up without too much. So, when we were thinking about local ownership which has become such a buzzword we realized it means very different things to very different people and in order to make it more tangible we thought it would be useful to really think of it as something that has two dimensions at least. One is you can think of it as the wide or the horizontal dimension and the other is the deep or vertical one and the wide dimension is really the idea about inclusion. It's the idea that as many stakeholders as possible representing all different categories of age, gender, religion, race, ethnicity etc. should be included into security sector policymaking and programming and this slide illustrates how ownership can be widened starting with the national government then working through international NGOs which is not always necessary sometimes even counterproductive case able to draw in elite local civil society who then can draw in women and men from all the segments of local society. And this is an aspect of the debate that receives a lot of attention and rightly so because it is so important and it comes with many dilemmas and challenges but there is this other axis or dimension if you want and when this is about who do we engage the next question is really how do we engage and it's the idea that local ownership is there are actually many aspects of it but one is that joint efforts between the security sector representatives and civil society have to be systematic it's not about a one-off project in some locality it's something that goes through the entire cycle and here we are showing you the cycle of any kind of program in the security sector where in each phase assessment the orange planning, implementation monitoring and evaluation there are opportunities for the two groups to really work together in meaningful ways and capacity building of course is an extremely important category also which comes before but also during this entire process and which is often the first opportunity as Lisa was saying for both sides to learn each other's vocabulary but also their interest and most importantly the constraints it's this idea of comprehensiveness just to point out in the Philippines they are actually working on each of these five areas together I think the Philippines may be the only country where that's happening in the world and they really are the gold standard of civil military police coordination and John Rudy who I'll introduce later who's taking on some of this work at the Alliance for Peace Building has done some of this training in the Philippines but the Mindanao Peace Building Institute began training military it's expanded into training entire brigades of the Philippine military and also with the police and the security sector in general they now have 17 civil society centers all over the country that are government approved that jointly assess human security challenges they jointly plan human security operations they implement sometimes together and civil society has a role in monitoring and evaluating at the highest levels of what security operations happened and did they work or did they hurt people and civil society representatives in these forums actually have security clearance so that they get intelligence reports from the government so they not only have their own civil society knowledge but they also get government reports of where activities are happening so they have a much tighter relationship in terms of civil society and the security sector working together through the tensions through the differences and finding out where is the common ground and this example of the Philippines is also a great way to illustrate the probably most important aspect about local ownership that often gets put aside in the debate because it's the most controversial one it's the question of responsibility sharing what actually happened in each of those cycles does civil society simply sit at the table or listen and actually get to say something if they say something our policies being changed on the basis of the feedback and not only for the decision making also during implementation other responsibilities shared and some of the local community policing projects that we're describing in the report are a great example of civil society representatives working with police in the same committee in certain neighbourhood working to identify security threats and thinking about possible remedial options these are very successful projects so if you think about local ownership now you can change these are the two axes and if you look at what is currently happening this left upper area is luckily not very populated but there are a lot of projects in this lower end narrow and deep where you have meaningful engagement civil society representatives taken up roles but they're often part of a local elite or you have a lot of projects up here where much more diverse segments are engaged but they're not receiving meaningful roles so now you can just click on it so the meaningful projects which are in this area are the ones that we have focused on in our report and there are of course many layers and nuances there and we've tried to come up with preliminary categories that think about what are really the differences between in different community policing projects for example or other DDR etc and what are the categories that we can find but much more work is needed to make local ownership more tangible, more measurable and more implementable also and a couple more of our observations so the local ownership and security is not a handbook it's a set of case studies of about 40 different situations around the world some in the US some abroad of community policing of civil society working together with the military and what Deborah and I are really focusing on is what did we really learn in looking at the patterns across all of those case studies and one of the biggest things that stuck out as we collected these case studies over the last three years was that in every single situation the key person who really organized the coming together had training in peace building because this is what's unique about the peace building field we our theory of change is about relationship building and when there is tension you don't run away from it you go toward it and so it was really the peace building organizations in each of these context that had the skills to bring together different stakeholders the processes for how are you going to manage that identifying the differences and the tensions and living with that sitting in the fire feeling but also finding the common ground for each other so I think this is a real testament to our field that peace building organizations in many different corners of the world at the same time without even knowing each other we're basically using the same methodology of peace building and again the second thing which I've really already mentioned is in every single case the language of human security was there so they recognize that national security state security is a very conflictual thing in many places in the world but when people could start using the framework of human security they could start coming together the third common point I want to point out is that as we went through all 40 case studies but also as we had these global consultations with over a hundred organizations the operational requirements of civil society for working with the police and military and they're very similar if not the same as the humanitarian and development world while humanitarian and development world has enshrined these principles many of the peace building organizations actually have the Red Cross NGO standards which involve these principles up on their wall they're framed when I was working in Kabul you walk in the front door and there's a framed statement of the Red Cross NGO principles about independence and access and freedom consent and acceptance and of course empowerment which we talked about already so that concludes sort of the key concepts that we have found in the case studies and I wanted when we were thinking about launching these materials today and having this conversation we wanted to have an illustration from this country of what good civil society, community, police interaction really looked like and in my own hometown with a friend Lieutenant Boshart from the Harrisonburg Virginia Police Department who I actually went to high school with at Eastern Mennonite High School many years ago and my colleague Carl Stoffer from Eastern Mennonite University and our community friend Stan McClinn and I think Nadia will read their full bios before they come up here but I wanted a case study because really as we move into this thinking about how does this apply in our own country with our own police departments in every corner of this country as well as thinking about the world so I invite Nadia up to give the bios and then my friends from Harrisonburg Thank you, thank you Lisa and Deborah and Christopher so let me just introduce our speakers for the case study Dr. Carl Stoffer Professor of Justice and Development Studies Center for Justice Peace Building Eastern Mennonite University Dr. Stoffer's work in Restorative Justice Transitional Justice Peace Building and Post-Work Reconstruction has taken him to over 35 countries in Africa the Middle East Eastern Europe and Asia Dr. Stoffer lived in South Africa for 16 years during which time he worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission community policing forms, local development forms and restorative justice programs in the court system I will then introduce Stan Macklin who is the founder and president of the Harriet Tubman Cultural Center Stan graduated from Eastern Mennonite Seminary has held several pastorates traveled internationally and did multiple service projects in Jamaica and Africa for 16 years he served as executive director of housing inter-denominational missions a ministry of housing projects across America for 12 years he served as national president of the African American Mennonite Association and currently he serves as the founder and president of the Harriet Tubman Cultural Center and was a leading advocate renamed a street renamed Cantrell Avenue to Martin Luther King Jr in Harrisburg, Virginia sounds like the story that you need to tell us about here up here and finally Lieutenant Kurt Boshart who is a police officer in the Harrisburg Harrisonburg Police Department Lieutenant Boshart is a 27 year veteran with the Harrisonburg Police Department he graduated from the administrative officer command school with the Southern Police Institutes at the University of Louisville in 2013 and in 2015 Kurt attended Eastern Mennonite University Summer Peace Building Institute on Restorative Justice and he currently works directly for the chief of police's office as the administrative lieutenant so I invite you to either sit at your chairs or come up here or stand wherever you like and tell us about Harrisonburg, Virginia I guess I'm going to start off and we'll just start talking a little bit about Harrisonburg we're excited about the collaborative effort and restorative justice process that we've started I guess it all began back in December of 2013 in Harrisonburg we have a very active non-profit organization and the director for restorative justice services they've been practicing there for about 15 to 20 years I guess very affectionate or how should I say very affectionate about what they were doing and Sue Prell had approached our chief of police at the time he had just come to Harrisonburg and really wanted the police department to be involved with the restorative justice process so in December of 2013 I was asked by the chief to actually look into this and see if this is something we can do so we started looking at it and our first thing I did was I contacted Howard Zaire from Easter Mountain University who's known as the grandfather of restorative justice and we met and we started a coalition if you will of different different entities within the community right now what we have in Harrisonburg is we have a coalition on restorative justice the coalition as you see up here has all representatives from all these different entities that meet regularly and actually plan what's going to happen in the future for restorative justice but we have members from Easter Mountain University James Madison University also has a very robust restorative justice practice they used to have a program where they would have students that would get in trouble at James Madison University and they would go through what their process was called judicial affairs the director of judicial affairs Josh Bacon also attended the SPI at Easter Mountain University after that he became so rejuvenated in his career that they actually renamed judicial affairs of James Madison University to the student practices of student affairs and restorative practices and so they've redone that Fairfield Center as I mentioned criminal defense attorneys we brought them on board we also have our prosecuting attorney's office is on board with what we're doing and has supported it 100% we have civil attorneys victim advocates organizers the police department Harrisburg City Schools and juvenile intake the city schools will talk about here in just a little bit as we move along basically what we have anytime we're looking at human nature we're looking at two reasons really there's only two reasons that people obey the law first is through fear they fear the police, they fear getting caught they fear going to jail, they fear the punishment so that's one reason that people are going to obey the law is through fear the other reason people are going to obey the law is what we call procedural justice and police legitimacy and that is where people believe in what the police or what the law enforcement or the authority power is saying they believe in what they're saying and they believe it because they're being treated fairly if you look at the Department of Justice 21st century policing the report that came out in May of 2015 the very first pillar of that is procedural justice and police legitimacy in 21st century policing what we're looking at and what we're trying to look for and the direction that we need to go is how we're treating the public how we're engaging with the public and how we're giving people a voice to actually have an input in what goes on and what happens so those are really the two ways that people obey the law and those are the two ways that we try to look at fear obviously is not sustainable in any organization from enforcement policies that would require a police officer to be on every corner we can't do that and it's also not effective so we try to look at what that's going to be how that's going to look why would the police department want to be involved with some program like restorative justice and restorative justice I look at it as very interesting in the sense of what we can do when officers go out and they're responding to calls normally we're getting called when people are at their worst the worst things are happening bad things are going on in their life and they're probably not in a very good spot how many of you have ever called the police department because you were having a good time you're having a barbecue and you say hey I'm going to call the police they need to come over and check this out it just doesn't happen so people are often times looking at police and they're calling us when they're in their worst of times they're interacting the relationship is automatically on a rocky start what restorative justice does and through a circle process every time that officer deals with a juvenile or someone that's just committed a crime it's kind of like what I always call a stamp on their forehead they're now stamped with that label that they're a criminal that they've done something wrong the next time the officers go out on the street and they see that person on the street what's the first thing they're thinking that they did something wrong so their interaction with them is not always going to be a positive interaction through restorative justice what we can do is we can bring these officers in a circle process we can actually have the offender the victim actually tell how they feel about certain things what they've gone through different things that they've been involved in and we start to see them in a different light the other thing that it does for the offender is it gets them to see the officers they're no longer at that bad point in their life they're now it's been weeks later they're now seeing things differently they're now able to look at things from a different mindset so the next time they go out on the street they have that sense of empathy that has been created through that circle and they now are able to see that person in a different manner in a different way as police officers we're looking for peace we want to try to look at victims and try to make sure that they have a voice what we've learned in the criminal justice system is the criminal justice system doesn't always give the victim a voice it doesn't always give the victim an opportunity to say what's happening and what's going on so that's why we want to look at what's going on there through restorative justice we actually do that through the procedural justice and the police legitimacy what we learn through with restorative justice is we tend to increase this level of legitimacy within the police department within the community the restorative justice process that we do that we utilize in Harrisburg right now is pre-charge so in other words what we have is we have officers going out on calls they'll take a report of a larceny or report whatever it may be if the offender is known then what the officer can do is the officer can ask the victim if they want to go through the restorative justice process if the victim agrees then the officer can take it through the restorative justice process we then check with the offender if the offender agrees we're still good the third thing that has to happen is the offender has to account for what they did they have to own up to what they've done if none of those three things happen we can't take it through restorative justice so we have to have the victim has to agree to it the offender has to agree to it and the offender has to own up to what they've done after that point if they all agree we can go through the restorative process and no criminal charge is placed and it's all done pre-charge so that way there is no record of it as far as the criminal justice system we found this to be very effective in the few cases that we've had so far in the sense of a lot of times we have the victim asking for it before the officer can even say anything about it and the victim is saying can we go through the restorative justice process so then we go through that process measuring success what I like to refer to is measuring what matters in old times in law enforcement I think we always looked at clearance rates as a way to look at success of the police department how well we're doing as a commander of the criminal investigations division for a number of years that was one of the goals that I was always given by my superiors what's your clearance rates look at that well clearance rates are good it's part of a story but really when success what we should be looking at is how do people feel how does the community feel that's measuring success and when we can start looking at that as success is how our community members feel then we can start looking at really what's going to matter and how we're doing as an organization and how we're doing as a police department well you can see why we're fortunate in the city of Harrison Byrd to have an officer Lieutenant Boshard he's not just talking from his head he's talking from his heart and it makes a difference and I was really blessed to be able to come up here this morning with he and Dr. Stauffer which we go back quite a ways I was asked some specific questions asked a organizer community organizer and a leader within the city to respond to so I'm responding to some of these questions from my perspective in terms of some of the aspects I would love to see in a working relationship with the HPD we do have a very good relationship with the HPD from the chief of police all the way down to the officers on their local beat I think that's very important to the community to know their officers and to have interaction so we're going to respond to some of these community perspectives and to share with you on them from the answers to some of these here as a community organizer and leader what do you want our expect from the police my answer was what I want from the police is to do its community service without prejudice of race this is very important as you see now across the country what do I expect from the police is to protect serve and enforce the law with professionalism honesty accountability and integrity Ferguson gets an F because all of these essential components were missing from its police department what does community policing look like my answer is community policing looks like law enforcement officers more involved in community than enforcement getting to know the neighbors through geographical policing and neighborhood community watch groups responding to human needs with concern compassion and if necessary the use of daily force as a last resort this is very important is that the community officers through geographical policing in our community have engagement with the local community to know what's going on in their particular geographical area very important and it puts a face than just an officer just riding up and down the street within his vehicle how can the police and community partner together to ensure safety and security for all the community and the police can partner together by working together as co-labors partnership concerning community awareness through geographical policing and community neighborhood meetings our particular city is divided up into about seven geographical areas and it's very important to have that co-labour partnership working together to ensure safety and security for all the law enforcement officers must know their communities and the residents should know their local community it's a partnership, it's teamwork working together law enforcement officers other than just responding to a need to ensure safety and security for all and when there's fear in the community many times the residents when the officers coming to the community they don't know them they're passive about having a response to them and so this helps to cut down a lot of animosity where the community can look at the officers as a friend like it used to be in the days through that I grew up in what are the historical issues of race relations in the city of Harrisonburg well in the city of Harrisonburg there's not a chasm between the African-American community and the local Harrisonburg police department due to the low 5% population of the African-American community however there is a history of bad race relationships between Hispanic and Latino immigrants and the US born of Hispanic and Latino descent which is now 20% of working age adults what are some examples of this here well there was a shooting of a man of Mexican descent out of a tree in the late 90s there was also within our community there was the 287G campaign and rallies that were held 287G was a campaign to stop illegal stop and detain meant for ICE deportations and that was successfully done in our community but it left a bad taste in that particular community concern gang stops which was the SUR MS-13 a lot of individuals driving the car was automatically suspected to be a part of those gangs and so right today there is massive fear of concern in a lot of that community whenever they are stopped of concern in that particular surveillance and scrutiny traffic stops and ICE detainments was another big one in the community and then the other one is poultry plant workers abuse Harrison Bird happens to be a magnet for a lot of the immigrant communities coming to work in the turkey and poultry plants and so there is a lot of work to be done to make a difference and we are working hard to try to work at that to bridge some of those gaps Harrison Bird has now become a hub for immigration and what does this mean for police and legitimacy in the local area well within the local Harrison Bird public schools it is recorded that there are over 51 different languages as the second largest immigrant speaking region in the state the local poultry plants such as Tyson's Cargill Purdue has become a hub magnet for immigrant recruits what does this mean for police and legitimacy in the local area we listed some areas here more non-white law enforcement officers according to federal law title 6 which calls for the providing of interpreters for a detainee who does not speak English more diverse police administration and printed materials in Spanish are Arabic etc and lastly the visitation to local ethnic businesses in the area geographical areas for the hosting of officer friendly chats and working in these areas here can help a whole lot to foster a good partnership between the HPD and the local citizens we're glad to be able to share this with you today so let me just summarize with a few thoughts about why we're in this partnership and what are key parts to this partnership one of the things that's critical for us is you saw the coalition that Kurt named earlier is the fact that often restorative justice has been understood to be another social service in a menu of many social services we understand restorative justice as in fact more than a social service it's a social movement and therefore we think it has the ability not only to help with our individual safety and security and autonomy and freedom it also helps where conflict erupts to bring meaningful relationships and connections and finally we believe restorative justice offers a set of values and practices that bring social political structures into alignment and conserve to sustain these values that are so important for us so with that backdrop let me say a few things about police and civil society partnerships not only from our experience in Harrisonburg but from my experience in South Africa and Johannesburg also first of all one of the things that's really critical is we need to begin to shift the narrative the narrative from sort of crime control and the technicalities of crime control to the concepts that we've been hearing today community, safety, security these are the things that open up another conversation between police and civil society in this country we have lost a lot of our meaningful civic engagement and I think it's partly because we've given over a certain part of that to professional lobbyists and private consultants and so when you find out there's a conflict in our school system we bring in a consultant possibly from somewhere else to have the resources right within our own community Niels Christia, criminologist in 1973 wrote the sort of pivotal article in an academic journal where he talked about crime as property something we own because we're the ones who engage in crime and in conflict and what happens when that crime and that conflict is taken away from us just as we engage in crime and conflict and that is something we own it should also be ours to own the solutions and the resolutions and this is where restorative justice gives us that handle so what are some of the roles and I'll close with this in the police and community partnerships as we understand it first of all there's accountability and transparency that can flow both ways a lot more quickly and a lot more fluidly and we're looking at various ways in which those structures could be made we know in some places accountability boards with civil society and the police together one of the first pieces of legislation that the ANC Mandela's government put into force in 1994 was the community police forum legislation which required by law every police station in South Africa to have a community policing forum and to set that up was the beginning of accountability and transparency and building the bridge between an extensive chasm between the community and the police from the apartheid history advocacy becomes important unless we have the advocacy channels and this coalition provides an open channel for that advocacy as opposed to an adversarial advocacy process organizing becomes critical for the civil society can organize and mobilize and again we're trying to move that away from the adversarial as much as possible even though that's maybe necessary sometimes to opening up the space in which we can have equal partnership in the conversation the civil society plays a critical role in intermediary responsibilities when there is conflicts between the police and the community the civil society opens a space and a conduit for dialogue and for healing and rehabilitation for those who've been directly affected by either crime or have been inside the correctional systems and have come out and are attempting to re-enter into our communities ultimately as Lisa reminded us the civil society plays a role of long-term peace building if it's empowered to do so, if it's capacitated to do so and if it uses its abilities to educate and to inform and raise awareness and finally and dare I say this I think the civil society does also offer, not always and it's not always perfectly a moral ethical voice for truth and for reconciliation and I put both of those together because truth alone does not bring justice does not bring resolution we need truth coupled with other ways in which we can reconstruct the way in which we want to live together in peace, thank you thank you so let's we are running a little behind our schedule so we are going to have a sort of a discussion and Q&A session for the next about 15 minutes before we let you off to lunch we have microphones on both sides of the room so I invite anyone who would like to ask questions make comments to line up either on the left or the right side of the room I do so that everyone has an opportunity to engage our speakers I do ask you to keep your questions brief and let others come right after you so we'll take maybe let's take two questions one on each side and then let our panelists respond I will take volunteers in terms of response if you have a specific question to ask of a specific panelist please go ahead and let us know as a police somebody who works in the room I have lots of questions but I'll hold them for lunch or something like that but thank you very much for the great presentations go ahead on the on the side thank you really interesting conversation my name is Cecilia Sipel I come from the international development world I just wanted to know if one of you could talk about the messy part in the beginning how did this happen where did the leadership come from how did you educate people how did you bring this coalition together and what were the sort of success factors or which could be things that are completely idiosyncratic to Harrisonburg or whatever that may be and then sort of related to that I was just wondering Harrisonburg is like what 50,000 50,000 and if if you think that's a factor you know like if you get bigger or smaller whether that has anything to do with being able to do this so meaningfully thank you we'll take one more question yes I want to thank you very much for this I was doing local restorative justice organizing for a few years it was really frustrating where there was a lot of lack of peace building in because there's so much frustration and anger and I was organizing mothers that had their children killed by law enforcement unarmed men of color and the big frustration was we start the conversation of police accountability and we start the conversation of oversight committees but the conversation doesn't begin with subpoena power or any kind of teeth so the community it seems like a legitimate role but it just becomes a big circus where we the community we organize them we bring them to these events or to these forums and nothing is really it's just a reporting session and so I would love you to come to Orange County California to Anaheim where we've had you know police killing after police killing just four since last since January we had a riot yesterday because of the Trump rally we had KKK riot and then a peace rally and so we're dealing with a lot of inter-communal conflicts happening but that's my biggest frustration is that the community is really not empowered to do anything there's no subpoena power there's no they're just it's all a circus I love any of you want to answer the question about what makes Harrisonburg special I'll give a try I guess the as far as what why I was able to work in our community I think we have we have two resources that are right there Easterman University James Madison University both have been just at the foreground of restorative justice worldwide as well as as well as throughout the nation so I think that gave us a resource that a lot of communities just don't have and so for that I'm personally I'm very grateful for both universities and what they've contributed to us so far because I think that's a big part of it the other thing is I think from the leadership standpoint law enforcement I think has to be a part of it I think that's a big part that was missing prior and law enforcement needs to be involved with that process in order for it to be successful because I think that's really where it starts it's at the ground level the officers on the street need to understand the concepts need to understand what's going on and how it works so I mean to piggy on back on that the ally within the police structures is really critical and provided that for us and a number of others are joining in on that this was a bit of a snowball effect too we went to the schools the Harrisburg City Schools just to advise them on what we were doing and ask for their cooperation specifically because we had school resource officers there also and the superintendent of the schools was so delighted with what was happening he said well can you train our teachers and administration in restorative justice well that broadened our mandate in one meeting in ways that we hadn't imagined and bringing them into the coalition and beginning to see the tight and important relationship between schools between the police and between the community it was really critical and we're starting to build that relationship in a way that feels like it's a broader alliance and I think lastly to that question is that Harrisburg as a community where people have a conscious and they have a caring attitude to make a difference and when we're faced with truth that doesn't represent truth when it's confronted it's confronted in love to make a difference and there's a positive response thank you maybe Lisa I'm going to put you on the spot to answer the other questions alright let's take two more questions on both sides I'm Jim Emery and I actually grew up right across the mountain in a place called Lou Ray Virginia and it's just great to see that Harrisonburg community is finally getting things under control but I say that in jest for all those that don't know that but one of the things that's very interesting is I spent about the better part of the last four years in conflict zones throughout the world in various capacities but the thing that's most interesting about your process is the fact that it brings out the key point that security is not a condition that's enforced it's really a process that's pursued and what you're an amazing thing is I just ended a career at the Army War College where I worked with a Ugandan Brigadier General who talked about the reconciliation process in Africa analysis of a number of different models and everything that you're outlining here is really not so much a security process as a reconciliation process it brings about a partnership amongst the community where the outliers that use violence as a mechanism of change or advantage are really marginalized over time and then brought under control by the community themselves and so you're in the center your comment there is very well taken I think that that really a lot of the things that we had as children as younger people growing up in the area got out of whack and then in turn have been restored but just one comment is is just interesting to see procedures that we pursue overseas now being brought back into our own communities but I'd just like to ask you about the reconciliation aspect of this what did you see as the major challenge in achieving community reconciliation amongst the very traditional community that felt threatened by immigrant populations and outliers that were coming in thank you for the question we'll actually get through the individuals that are standing everyone make their comments and ask questions and then I'll invite the panelists to address all of them together in the interest of time sir thank you well I guess I've been attending or putting on conferences at global summits national conferences for 40 years I think this is the most consequential session in my experience because of the potential of what this view and this case about effort is congratulations and tell us Lisa what your dream would be for the use of these publications and what this community might do as part of that dream thank you sir Hello I'm Nic Oakley from Partners Global I have two questions the first for our colleagues from the folks in police I'm curious about the figures you have reoffending recidivism for those that have gone through the transitional justice restorative justice process compared to those that go through normal legal process and then the second question I have is similar to Bob's already and it's probably directed at Lisa but I wonder what your assessment is of how well we're doing getting these kinds of ideas and processes around human security embedded in government and militaries around the world I mean just security governance initiative led by the US State Department here working with about 7 governments in West Africa and the Sahel launched its process of agreeing priorities for security sector reform and security and there was no part that civil society had in that process so you know here we are this wonderful process this wonderful set of materials and there's still things like that happening that really there's a big blind spot in terms of the centrality of having a place at the heart and the very center of these processes so your comments and suggestions about you know how we can start a movement of getting these kind of approaches adopted not only by the US but by governments and militaries security forces all around the world Thank you My name is Didas Kamana I'm a student at the American University I'm from Rwanda I was just wondering for police and military talk in Rwanda in context the community we're looking at the military and the police as perpetrators of genocide because most the police and military were killing people and what Rwanda did to transform or to build trust between civil society and the military or the police was police and military come back to meet communities to work with them in Rwanda we have Saturday of each last month the week the last week of Saturday we have community work where the military and the police can come and do community work with people then afterwards they can have dialogue and share and the people among the communities they can greet police, have fun with the police or military that rebuilding again trust from the military who's helping people to the military who can work and have fun with the people that's community how just I was wondering it's not enough to think about restorative justice but the ways we can reach a real restorative justice that's one of the example and I was just want to ask who's in charge of police police department how do you think you the mindset of police can change vis-a-vis to change the relationship between people and the police police is looking at the people if you are black among communities or Latinos you are criminal before you make a crime how do you change narratives to no longer looking at the people as crimes before they make crime as the police 1 last question is a mayor I research international organizations peacekeeping my question is directed stage left if you want to see somebody in the security sector reform unit of the U.N. shaller just mention the word coordination sort of have now because the problem is that international interventions reform are thoroughly fragmented it's the US is working with one aspect of one agency the UK with another the Germans and so on and so forth. So I agree with and enjoy hearing sort of the ground level coordination but how do you account for the fact also that there are seven, eight, 15, 72 different governments at the international level that are involved with this and is there sort of what is the medium or the platform to bring those elements together as well. Thank you. Thank you. Why don't we answer the restorative justice questions first and then close. So let me just keep that moving quickly as we can. I think I don't think we refer to our the person who asked a question from California also. I mean I think let's let's be honest. Restorative justice cannot be brought in in the middle of a situation that's on fire and in flame and and so it's it's it's we have to talk about other ways in which we begin to engage and this is why peace building must be part of the conversation and I think so there has to be ways in which we begin to dialogue. We have to organize and we have to put the pressure on and those are not contrary to restorative justice or peace building. It's within mind a horizon of where we want to be and so I think what we're discovering in the movement is that community organizing is one of the ways in which restorative justice can find its place and so we need to bring those together. The advocacy work comes first and and and that's a tough place to be but I think we have to look at each context carefully in that. So finding ways in which we could begin to change the narrative and break the dialogue down between the parties that are so antagonistic now would probably be where the most energy should be put right now in in in your context without knowing much about the details of that. I think the question about restorative justice any others that we wanted to address from the from the group. We're not far enough along in our case studies to give you those statistics right. We're very much at the beginning and and the case load is growing but it's not as a place we would like it to be in the fullness of its diversion. I can speak from other areas in which there has been sample researching done between those who do a restorative process and those who go through the regular criminal justice system as we know it. Probably the probably the best one or the one that we've seen the most success in is is the difference between a 34% recidivism rate for those who go through the regular criminal justice system and that dropping to about 22% for the comparative group that had gone through restorative justice processes. Now of course you'd want that at zero but for research purposes from 34% down to 22% that's a significant drop and we have other other research that would back that up. I'm going to be very brief in answering to those questions. Are we doing enough or is it working? I would say there are doors open almost everywhere and I did not think those doors existed or the windows did 10 years ago when I started this work but when I started knocking the doors started opening. So I think that often civil society we need to try before deciding it doesn't work because I think in most countries of the world there are entry points, windows, cracks in the door. What is my dream as Bob Berg asked really we need to make this macro. We need a 10-year plan, we need funding for that 10-year plan that John Paul Lederach talked about. We really need to take it out to police departments across the country and we're talking about that in Harrison Berg and we would love to talk with other Alliance for Peacebuilding members about how can you engage your police departments in your city and how can we support you in that. Also with the military around the world and our military training centers here in this country how can we begin to do more outreach. Many of the Alliance for Peacebuilding members are already engaged in interacting with the military. We plan to hold a training of trainers on the handbook specifically for Alliance for Peacebuilding members sometime in the next year so please let us know if you're interested in that. We want to really develop a whole training cadre. We have about five to ten people now but we want to make that a much larger gathering because we want to continue. This handbook is already being used in Colombia, in Ukraine, in the Philippines and Tajikistan and we are rolling it out to other peacekeeping training centers, other military training centers. In a couple weeks it's a big NATO conference keynote speech on the handbook and the process. We have a lot of open doors. We need all of you to work with us at the Alliance for Peacebuilding in taking it forward. It is online at this website. It's free downloadable. You can cut and paste. Just please credit and cite it so people know where to find the rest of the materials. There's training exercises, scenario based learning. You can really cut and paste and tailor it to your own needs in your own specific situation. As a last note, I want to invite John Rudy to come just on the stage. John Rudy is just joining the Alliance for Peacebuilding. I mentioned him earlier because he's done this work already in the Philippines with the Mindanao Peacebuilding Institute. He's already been working for many years. He is a fellow Mennonite and we approached this work with humility of learning and listening from the military and the police, but also a deep history of 500 years of peace values and witness. I think John is actually the perfect person to hand the baton to because I'm stepping back a little. I'm still engaged but not full time at the Alliance for Peacebuilding. Thank you to USIP and to Nadia for facilitating this session and all of the important work that USIP is doing in this area. Nadia is really doing incredible work in her own right. If you want to learn more about police reform and training, this is the place to come as well. Thank you, Nadia. Thank you, Lisa. We have one quick comment from Chris and then we'll let you go to lunch. I want to take a moment to do something that I'm going to hear a lot of this weekend and some of the other people in this room. I'd like to thank you gentlemen for your service to your community. I'd like to thank you ladies for your service to peace. Because without that, the service and sacrifice of soldiers represented in those graves over on the other side of the river would be totally meaningless and valueless. Thank you very much. So thank you. Thank you for all of you joining us. Thank you for these great presentations. We'll invite you to go through the doors, either downstairs or upstairs, and then join us for lunch in the Great Hall. Thank you very much. I'm taking the hushed room as maybe a cue that we're going to get started. So why don't I allow the folks who are trickling in to be seated and we'll kick off in about a minute. All right, wonderful. Well, welcome. There are concurrent panels going on right now. So we appreciate your joining us for this one. And I want to remind you this panel is about bridging the gap tools for systems thinking and practice. And it will highlight the excellent work that the Omidjar Group and its family of organizations, particularly the Democracy Fund and Humanity United are doing, grappling with systems really implementing it, I think in a courageous way to think differently about the world's most difficult challenges and to really push for enduring change and social change at scale. My name is Alexa Courtney. I'm the CEO of Frontier Design Group, a strategy firm that uses the tools of systems and design thinking to engage with the challenges of human security and national security. I also have the privilege of being based here at the US Institute of Peace and directing our fragility study. Some of you may have heard the excellent fragility panel earlier in the day where we had President Nancy Lindborg and some of our senior advisory group members. It's been a privilege to work with the Omidjar Group as they have taken on the experiment of systems and over time institutionalized systems thinking. And we'll hear from a variety of different perspectives today from big, bold systems thinkers and systems practitioners in terms of how they've really grappled with the good, the bad and the messy of systems. So I'd like to introduce you to our panel before turning it over to them. Rob Brasigliano, he is the Systems and Complexity Coach of the Omidjar Group and works across the family of organizations to support leadership teams, investment and initiative teams with systems, tools, practices and mindsets and thinking about what that really means for the kind of change they're seeking in the world. I've had the privilege of working with Rob for many years, so I want to just plug his book because I know that he would not. But making peace last, a systemic approach to sustainable peace building is becoming the text in many graduate school curriculum around here, rather the Bible. So I encourage you to read that if you haven't. And he brings a wealth of experience both in the peace building field and negotiation to the Omidjar Group. Many of you probably know Rob from his role as chairman of the Alliance for Peace Building, which he just stepped down from after six years. We're joined by Betsy Wright Hawkins. She is the Program Director of the Governance Initiative at the Democracy Fund. The Democracy Fund is one of the Omidjar Group organizations that's really working on the health, the wellness and the vitality of our own democracy here at home. And Betsy really brings a wealth of experience from her time on Capitol Hill over 25 years working across the aisle, balancing a budget, which is no small feat in today's political environment, back in the mid-90s and establishing the 9-11 Commission and implementing its recommendations. She worked for many years for her hometown congressman, Representative Christopher Shays, and also spent some time at Amnesty International. Her colleague, Adam Embrogy, saying that he's the Program Director for Responsive Politics at the Democracy Fund. And like Betsy, has quite a bit of time on Capitol Hill before joining Democracy Fund, held several significant positions in the U.S. Senate, including Chief Counsel for the Committee on Rules and Administration, and works on campaign finance and election administration issues. To his left, we're joined by Peter Runlet, the Managing Director at Humanity United. Humanity United is a vibrant organization that's really working on innovatively countering the pernicious challenges of trafficking, but also atrocity prevention and violent conflict more broadly. Peter actually had the privilege of establishing the Washington D.C. Office for Humanity United and has been in and out of government and administrations in a variety of roles working under the Obama Administration as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Staff Secretary, but as well as in the Clinton Administration where he served as Counsel, excuse me, yes, Associate Counsel to the President, spent some time working on the 9-11 Commission as well. And Leah Greenberg, to his left, is an Investments Manager at Humanity United, focused on public-private partnerships, working with the U.S. government to think about enduring ways to engage and combat human trafficking. She also has congressional experience, as I'm seeing a common theme here. She had served with Congressman Tom Periello and previously at the State Department. We have a fantastic panel. Rob is going to kick us off and for this audience, demystify what it is we mean when we talk about systems thinking and then you'll have the privilege of listening to each of our panelists as they've really grappled in real-time with what that means in the kind of work that they're doing with their partnership base that they are engaging. Before we kick off, I just want to take a really, really quick straw poll to get a sense of the systems expertise in the room. So if you identify as a systems enthusiast, wow, enthusiastic group, that's great. That's more than I anticipated. Now, what if you are a self-identified self-identified self-identified self-identified self-identified self-identified self-identified self-identified self-identified self-identified self-identified self-identified self-identified system skeptic, you're not sure what all the hype is about. Maybe there's a few more hands in the room, I see a few familiar faces here. So, thank you for being honest. And what if you maybe are just systems curious, you're not sure what it's about but you're open to it, it falls along a bell curve. OK, wonderful, thank you for your honesty and your candor, you're in for a real treat. Rob? We're having a, we're going to have a for the systems curious after this session, so you know. So let me continue in the vein of taking a poll. How many of you have a mengelschnob at home that you use? A mengelschnob? Anybody? Good, because I just totally made that word up. But for a point, which is it's a little bit like when people say, you use systems thinking, right? And you're like going, totally I use systems thinking all the time. So a little bit around the demystification is just to kind of poke a hole in that. And first of all, to say, I can't demystify all of systems thinking. That would take a while, and it wouldn't be my ability within my skillset to do. But we will talk about a particular set of tools that we've been developing within OMIDYAR to make using systems thinking something that actually is accessible and practical and value added. I'll talk a little bit more about that, but let me sort of set the stage a little bit. I'm going to talk a little bit about an overview of why as OMIDYAR got into systems thinking, why did they reach out to me a few years ago to bring me into the organization? I think you guys are probably asking yourselves, why did they ask this guy to come in the organization? And then, so I'm going to kind of give you an outline of the menu. And our four panelists are going to give you a taste of the meal. So I think that's really what we wanted to get at is what is it really like to go through this process, to go from best a system skeptic? So we didn't ask for who was like a system grenade thrower. There were some of those two. But let me give you a start. Let me kind of give you a lay of the land a little bit first and then get into the, I'm going to give you an overview of the process that we have been pioneering within OMIDYAR. So a few years ago, within the last few years, I should say, many people, including many of those up there, have been saying a lot of really positive things about systems thinking that we should be doing this in development and we should be doing it in social change work in general. So they're saying these really nice things about systems, which is kind of good for, I like that. It's better than 2002, 2003 when I was getting into this work and people looked at me like, are you totally nuts? But it also scares me because we're at a point in this field where the enthusiasm for systems is not matched by our ability to actually implement a systems approach. So the be careful what you wish for thing here for me is people are glomming on to this idea and wanting their mengelschnaub without knowing what it is. And they find out that it's hard. It's not a magic, it is not a magic pill, right? So the fact that several years ago, we didn't have tools that were accessible, practical, and value-add. And I think we're on the cusp of getting there. Brief story on how I came to appreciate this. In 2007, I was working with a large relief and development organization that had been working in a conflict-affected country, which I won't name, but it's largely somewhere between Iran and Pakistan. Highly conflict-affected country. And so I got their country team together and I got them to give me two days. And the first day, we went through all this analysis of their system. And then overnight, I was like the cooking show person who tells you how to bake the souffle and then magically a souffle comes out of the oven. So they gave me all the ingredients for a systems map. I produced one overnight. And I was very proud that I could put it up on the screen the next morning and show it to the group and the angels would sing and the heavens would shine in. So I put the systems map up and there's silence. And I'm thinking, any minute, the applause is going to start. And the only thing I hear that breaks the silence is, oh, shit, we suck. So I was kind of interested to know that the systems map was not the value-add tool that I had hoped it would be. And that's where it really took me on this challenge of, actually, OK, we've got to figure this out. We've got to make this something that isn't just for some wacky consultant or professor to come in and then do for your organization. But it's got to be something that staffs can use, communities can use, all throughout the layers. So we talked a lot about community participation, participation earlier, and how important it is. It has to be accessible and usable at all those levels. So how do we get there? So in 2013, an executive with the mid-yard group reached out to me, and we had this conversation about helping them find a way to bring systems thinking and a systems approach into their organization. And one of the first things I said to Mike Moray, one of the executives at O-Midi-Yard, is that this is a disruptive process of going from a traditional practice to a systems practice is a disruptive process. Now, I'm looking at the faces of people I know from our organizations who would probably use stronger language than disruptive. Am I? Yes, Peter's giving me a big, broad smile there. You don't have to say the words. We can keep that to ourselves. But you really can't do this unless there's a core belief in why systems thinking is right for you and for your organization. And it took a while, I think, for the executives, the governance bodies, Pierre, Pam, O-Midi-Yard, Mike Moore had a belief in this and sort of set out a challenge to the rest of the organizations that this is something we think we should add to our toolkit. We don't know how to do it. We think this is something we're gonna do over the next several years to kind of figure this out. And we've got this bushy-tailed resource for you named Rob, and he'll work with you to do this. But I wanna play for you how we now articulate our why. At the O-Midi-Yard Group, we are dedicated to fostering healthy societies where empowered and compassionate people can thrive. Together, our work has contributed positive, meaningful value to the world. But sometimes we wonder, will it get us to the enduring change we are ultimately hoping to see? There are times when we encounter roadblocks. It can feel like the movie Groundhog Day when, despite our solutions, we see the same problems over and over again. Or when we solve one problem, another pops up somewhere else, like a game of whack-a-mole. Most confusing of all is when we find ourselves in opposite day, where our solutions somehow end up making things even worse. It's what blood banks experienced when they tried to increase donations by paying donors. But they found that this actually demotivated altruistic people, which led to fewer donations overall. Or take homelessness. Many cities have poured energy and resources into addressing this problem for years, but the number of people ending up on the streets continues to rise. The question is, why? It's because shelters were never meant to provide a path to sustainable living, and because job training programs can't make a dent if there are no economic opportunities. And no one program can address the underlying challenges. These factors are all interconnected and interwoven. This is a truer representation of reality, but it's confusing, frustrating, and messy. It can be hard to know what to do with this mess. So we've challenged ourselves to add to our toolkit. We believe that systems thinking can help. Systems thinking is a mindset, a collection of tools, and processes for engaging with our messy world. Systems thinking helps us gain clarity by making sense of complex environments and understanding the interconnections. It helps us find leverage and reveal points in a system where modest actions have the potential for significant impact. It helps us adapt so we can engage with constantly changing environments and see the ripple effects of our actions within the broader context of the system. Together, systems thinking helps us to gain clarity about a complex problem in order to find leverage so we may act strategically with confidence. When we see the effects of our actions on the system, we learn and adapt, and these lessons fuel a virtuous cycle. Our approach here at the Omidyar Group is constantly evolving to incorporate insights from many fields. We believe this kind of systems thinking is a powerful addition to our toolkit. We look forward to partnering with you and learning together as we pursue the enduring change we want to see in the world. That's our why. So based on that, we take up the challenge of how do we build strategies as a set of donor, a set of philanthropic donor organizations that are up to the challenge of these issues, these problems that we seek to address, which is no small task. And we began, our process was to really work in partnership with teams, represented by our four panelists, to actually figure out, well, how do we actually make these tools work? And so I think a lot of people wanted off-the-shelf answers, which we didn't have. It's been frustrating and tiresome to be doing this together, but I think ultimately has led us to a really good place, and what I wanna do now is sort of summarize that toolkit that we've begun to develop. So I'm gonna walk through this fairly quickly and leave, I'm not gonna explain the steps in depth to you, I'd rather have you talk to the team about what it's been like to do this. And also I should say for the team, in the spirit of co-creation and co-development and iteration, none of these folks have been through this process yet. This is the latest state of where the practice is. It has evolved as we've worked with each of them and others throughout the group to get here. So this idea of clarity, which you get clarity by listening deeply to your system. So we have a set of tools that help you listen deeply to your system. We produce dynamic systems maps as being the sort of artifact of what that deep listening has told us. That clarity helps you as the video mentioned, find leverage, which is how we engage with our environment. We have a series of steps and tools to make that as operational and practical as we can make it. And then in terms of adaptability, there are a set of tools that will help us develop or scaffold our learning and adapt over time. What I'm gonna do is give you a quick overview of those steps and then we'll turn it back to our panel. So this idea of launch, how we get the process started, two very important things about that is we have people think about what they're trying to do in terms of a North Star and a Near Star. North Star being the preferred state of the system you'd want to see. So we're not about, we don't go in and change systems. Systems are not broken or fixed. They are what they are. We work with systems to help them evolve in a certain direction over time. But you need a Near Star to help you say, well, what is it that we're actually trying to produce? What will be a marker of a significant outcome for us that we want to help achieve? Knowing that that outcome that we're pursuing is likely to change. And if we don't have a North Star to navigate off of, we're gonna be lost. And a lot of great efforts to try to solve big problems did not have a North Star. They had one big answer that didn't work and when it didn't, they were lost. In terms of finding your team and your process, we have a team at a various levels. You have your core team. You have your extended team. You have your participant group. So in that broader circle are people in communities, partners and stakeholders on the ground, experts and so on throughout their communities. Process is infinitely scalable in terms of who gets involved. You can do this with communities. You can do this internally. It can be very internally focused just to try to clarify our own thinking. You can use the process as an intervention in itself. Getting a community to develop its own systems map is itself an intervention. That's really helpful. And I think folks will talk about how the maps that they've done have affected the communities within which they work. Once you know what you're trying to do, so in the, one of the strategies just got approved last week at the Humanity United was on eliminating slavery from corporate supply chains. Their North Star is eliminating the worst forms of exploitation. Their Near Star is corporate supply chains that are free of human slavery. Once you know that, you can ask this very big expansive question which is what enables and what inhibits slavery in corporate supply chains. The Atrocity Prevention Initiative at Humanity United looked at what enables or inhibits the international community to respond effectively to atrocity. We do this process where it's very big and predispatory. You put out all the enablers on one wall, the inhibitors on the other. You group them into these themes and then you take a theme and you dig in. And you say, well, what's the complex set of drivers of causes and what's the complex set of impacts? So knowing that nothing is straightforward, it's never one to one, one A to B to C. It's like A through Q to pumpkins and then pumpkins to druids or whatever. And by doing that, you start to connect. You start to actually begin to think in terms of causal loops. And these are patterns. And what we're trying to get at here is really uncovering what are the animating dynamics that make a system work. Because it's by affecting these dynamics that is going to affect the system that is going to affect the thing we care about. So if we figure out, for example, in our upstream downstream, what are the, if opacity in supply chains was a key causal factor in the overall landscape of slavery and corporate supply chains, what are all the factors that drive opacity? And when you have opacity, what does that then affect? What does it create? You can then start to, so what are the causal dynamics that actually result in opacity happening? That repeat over time? So that we go through this process of each of those upstream downstream analyses produces multiple loops. Those multiple loops now produce a table full of loops, which is what that is. We literally will lay this out. So a lot of these processes will produce between 30 and 60 feedback loops, which you cannot make a map out of. So we put them on a table and we group them by theme and then we say, is there a story that unites these thematic clusters of feedback loops? So it's kind of the same process we just went through, but now we've stepped back a bit. That becomes what we call a deep structure, which is the essence of the story you're trying to tell. It also is, quite practically, the anchor point for arranging those, however many loops you get. So once you've got a deep structure, you start to play with iterating version of your map after version of your map. You show it to other people, you get their feedback. Eventually you build a map. That's a kind of map that we might have been producing any of the initiative areas that we work with. That sort of beigeish yellow in the middle there is the deep structure. This is the corporate engagement map, the supply chain map. That in the middle there is basically the deep structure that says there's sort of a race to the bottom, which allows corporate supply chains to be opaque and distributed in ways that permit and even incent the use of slavery. But there's an incentive on those in the system to kind of go there. And then the loops, the blue and the green are ones that animate and explain why that deep structure exists. Once you've got a map, we ask, well what are the opportunities for leverage? And it's a very interactive process as well. So that is actually the corporate supply chain map. And you can see those post-its of different colors are marking different characteristics in the system. So where are there frozen parts of our system that aren't gonna change? Where are there bright spots that we might wanna build on? Where is there sort of pent up energy for change in the system that if we could release would actually result in changing some dynamic and changing the system? Then comes the harder work, where you've gotta evaluate. So in this example, the teams evaluated eight different opportunities for leverage using basically this exact framework to say how does it fit our organization and what's its potential for impact? Is it where we have distinct advantage in our sector or not? And here you've gotta start making some choices. You can't just say, we're gonna have one opportunity for leverage and like squeeze eight of them in there. You've gotta actually start to make some choices about where you're gonna focus and why. I wanted to give the atrocity prevention deep structure, which is about a crisis, an international system that's addicted to crisis, which is what I think the AP team has found is it's sort of core story for the atrocity prevention system. And then it looked at the broader system, thought about opportunities for leverage and began to build a strategy. So this is the same map I showed earlier, but now the team developed a three-prong strategy that's represented in those colors around how they are gonna try to engage with the system and how they see ripple effects in long-term changes. The dotted lines are ripple effects. It's not the things they're touching directly, it's the effects of the effects that they're trying to have. So drawing it on a pretty map like that doesn't make it so, unfortunately. This is done in Kumu. I'll give you the web address for Kumu software that we use. You have to scaffold learning. As one of our board members said, that when teams come before us, we don't want them to convince us they got it right because we know they got it wrong. What we wanna know is how well are you set up to learn to do it better? So in this map, in this chart, what we try to do is say, on the left, it's what do we hope to accomplish? How do we move from the current state of the system to a future preferred state of the system? How are we gonna get there? What's the leverage we hope to exploit? And what's our program portfolio? Then you move over to the right side and build up and say, well, the fast variables are what are the outputs of our programs in the short term? And what are the outcomes we wanna see? What difference do we want them to make immediately in their environment? Those outcomes hopefully feed up into impacts of dynamics and ripple effects throughout the system. Those are intermediate variables. Those are not things that are gonna happen even in a year, let alone two or three, up to slow variables, which are how do we impact, get to our near star, basically. How do we see some change in the system? But this is basically, all along here, you have testable hypotheses and you have indicators you can use to test those hypotheses. And so you're constantly, this is the scaffold for learning, right? It's helping you build that engine that will allow you to learn effectively over time and you're constantly assessing and adapting. What are the impact of our programs on the context and our context on our programs? That bottom line, the internal line, is also really important, which has kind of been verboten in the M&E community where you don't talk about process. If you're engaging for five to 10 years and you're spending millions of dollars, you better be auditing the effectiveness, the integrity of your process and how well you learn and adapt. Because as one of our board members said, you gotta show us you can get it right. It's all about how you learn and adapt effectively and you can't do that unless they approach as well. I think about this as like a research lab, right? The clungidist protocols and all those things don't actually result in discoveries. But if you don't have proper, follow proper protocol in your lab, you're unlikely to find a discovery. And then there's no rocket science after this. It's basically repeat as needed. And so you're constantly going back around through that process. So that for me is the overall overview of the process. I wanna turn it over to our panel now to sort of talk about what it's been like for them to go through this. Wonderful. And why don't we start with Betsy and go down the row and it'd be great if you could reflect from your personal experience on what has been most challenging, what's been most rewarding or impactful. And what do you wish you, what do you know now that you wish you knew when you started this experiment with systems? Sure. Can everybody hear me? Okay, I don't usually have a problem with that, but. Anyway, so just very briefly, and I do wanna keep it brief because I wanna leave time for questions, but just a general sense of where the governance program fits into Democracy Fund as a whole. As Alexa said, we are focused exclusively on US democracy, founded a number of years ago as the Anti-Fear Mongering Initiative in the wake of the shooting of Gaby Giffords to really look at what were the dynamics at work that were leading to the changes in the American populace, the American electorate that were allowing for really the emergence of violence as a currency and American political discourse. And so there were three initiatives that grew out of that. One focused on what was called informed participation based on the premise that people will make more informed choices and engage in the political system if they have better information and information they feel is more reliable and that is more accessible to them in the wake of the demise of traditional journalism. The theory goes that then if they aren't motivated to participate, they'll engage in elections systems, but those elections have to have integrity. We have to believe that the results of them are accurate and reflect the will of the people. And that's Adam's program, now called Elections and Money in Politics, but originally Responsive Politics. And so he and his team, some of whom is up there, look at how to help elections work better and reflect the will of the people and have the trust of the people. And then if you've invested enough to go and vote, now the government that you've elected has to work and that's the governance program, that's where I come in. And it's important for me to do my job, otherwise you won't stay engaged and you won't continue to be informed and that circle's broken. So as Alexa mentioned, I came on board, almost a year and a half ago after a long career on Capitol Hill, wasn't really seeking to leave, actually felt like it was a wonderful job and that I had an opportunity to do a lot of good things, but this was an exciting opportunity to come and see if I couldn't help the system in a different way. When I came on board, the governance program through Adam and our colleague Tom who ran informed participation, had done some initial investments in what I like to call sort of the usual suspects, names that you all would know in the bipartisan governance space, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Aspen Institute programs that are focused on legislators and building relationships. No labels, the Faith and Politics Institute, a wonderful program called Voice of the People that is a little bit smaller but has the potential for enormous impact to brings people together, constituents together, everyday people to problem solve and sort of work through a lot of the challenges that legislators have to work through and the challenge that I had was to bring more and impactful grantees into the space at the same time that we were building a strategy using this systems mapping process and I will confess to you as a hardened political person having been in an increasingly transactional environment that I was pretty sure that I knew just how Congress worked or didn't work and I really didn't need the system stuff, thank you very much. It was clear to me that I had to do it and that was fine and I was prepared to do it but I was pretty skeptical to say the least and I sort of said to myself, okay, well this is why you came here, you know your brain and literally for a while felt like my head was being pried open and I think that was a good thing, it was probably what I needed after 25 years on the hill and so we started about almost exactly a year ago bringing constituents, what I call constituents, different stakeholders in the process together to start to answer the question, how is Congress fulfilling or failing to fulfill its responsibility to the American people and what we found is we went through all the looping process over months and months and months is that we would think we had the answer and then suddenly we would realize as we took our loops or our draft map to another group of people that they said, oh no, no, no, you've got it all wrong and this part wrong and we'd go, oh my gosh, they're right, after all this thinking and it would sort of blow the thing apart and we'd put it back together again but we got more and more excited about it as we worked through that process because we started to realize that there were these dynamics at work that while we maybe anticipated them, we didn't necessarily anticipate it, how they affected the way Congress worked in the way we were starting to see that they did and I guess that might be one of the challenges is that in our case we were working in a system that in essence is already a system, it was established by the Constitution, it's actually pretty clear how it's supposed to work and so we were really looking at how it did work but it was an established system that everyone already acknowledged as a system of government, if that makes sense. So we were having to put a slightly different frame on it and then there was this moment, I think probably in December, when we thought we had the map just about right and we were looking at how Congress was sort of starving itself institutionally and how what I call the political industrial complex was driving this arms race of campaign money and how hyper partisanship was sort of driving both of those loops and somebody said, we're missing the role of the public in all of this and I realized that we were only looking at the system through the eyes of the system and not through the eyes of the people who were using it, who were not on Capitol Hill and that really changed the way the entire map looked and I think what's important about that is that it led us to an overarching umbrella strategy that really has us ask the question, what are the incentives and rewards for the behavior of members of Congress and really required us to see that in order to undertake all the other strategies that we had identified, whether it was skill building or increasing our focus on building bipartisan relationships or strengthening the processes and the procedures of the institution that we were really going to have to figure out how to change in essence the rewards and the incentives that members of Congress are gonna respond to because members of Congress will do what works, they all wanna be loved and at the end of the day, if they don't feel love, they're gonna do what makes them feel love and so that I do know after 25 years. So having the patience really to work through that was important and in terms of where we are now, as we're building the strategy, I think as I've taken it to individual members, one of the things that's been quite surprising to me and I think would not actually have been true say five years ago is I take them, I have my little map and I take it with me to Capitol Hill, I'm usually up there one or two days a week and I'll show it to a couple members or staff and they'll look at it and they get this wide and they look at me like I'm conducting a therapy session and they say you understand and that has surprised me. I expected to have the same skepticism that I brought to the process and I don't know whether it's a reflection of how serious the challenges are up there that they know they need help but that has caught me a little bit by surprise. That's yeah, I'm actually curious to hear if Adam has had a similar experience with incorporating systems or if it's been different because you're on a different initiative team. Yeah, thank you. And I'd also like to recognize Natalie Adona from my team who's been working with me on the systems process for our elections team for a while. When I say elections in this context, just so you all know because we're framing it in the US democracy, the perspective, giving you the context is best described by going through our core story, basically the essence of what we're thinking about in the conduct of how we run elections in the United States. Perhaps best exemplified by what we all I think reflect on when we think of a crisis in elections, what happens during Bush v Gore. 2000 contested election where 500 votes separated the winner and the loser. A failure by all counts of how elections are run. That failure of election administration led to a decrease in public faith and trust in the system and a decrease in how people wanted to engage in the system through voting. That decrease if trust in the system led to media attention and public and political pressure such to the point that Congress or the decision makers had to act. And so you have this moment where what happened in Congress, what happened in Bush v Gore and that really forced decision makers to make a decision. And at that point in time, that could lead to one of two results we found. You either fix the problem by adopting bipartisan legislation that both sides can live with, both political parties in the United States. You can develop technologies to fix the problem, processes to solve some of these issues. Which they started to do through the Help America Vote Act in 2002, providing funding and some processes to run elections better in the United States. Or alternatively that pressure could lead to a point and we've seen this in other examples where politicians can take advantage of a crisis and attempt to bias the election rules to benefit their party or their side or their policy view or position. And that leads back. Both of those things either have complete the loop if you solve the problem through bipartisan action or development through improving the quality of elections in the United States or if you take advantage of things through politics, you decrease the quality of elections in the United States. That was sort of our essence in our core story that we heard from intervening with a whole bunch of different folks. The challenges that we found in going through this process, some of it is dealing with the types of speakers and that we brought into the room. It's necessary to have academics and advocates and political figures and in our case, election administrators, the folks that actually run it to tell their story as we're developing and generating these 60-some odd loops. We had all of those folks in the room but they all speak with different voices and they all have different views as to what the election system is for. And so as far as a challenge goes, trying to reconcile all those different voices into what is the unified story as we are talking about the map in an appropriate way. Because of that the academics want to look at data and develop theories associated with it. The politicians want to have a system that runs quickly, efficiently and maybe benefits the system towards their voters and the advocates obviously want to do GO TV and voter registration and they fight about limitations associated with that. And so really trying to get all of that feedback and consolidate it and that leads to the second challenge, a question of Zoom. With all of these maps you certainly can tell how far out or in you want to be. Initially we could have had a 25-factor map focused just on voter registration in the United States and the challenges associated with that. That was important and perhaps it's important to know how these factors play with each other but if we're looking to fix and try to identify and leverage opportunities within the election system we needed to Zoom up. And so we took 65 different factors, many, many detailed items and Zoom out. And that leads to, I'll actually move on to the impactful and rewarding piece. I would say that as someone that's a funder and part of the job that we have is to convince other funders and other actors to come along with us in our journey and co-funding solutions to the problem, it's great to have a map there so that when we say, well we're funding this piece and that piece focusing on loops in the map and they say, well we're more interested in this other problem that we think is more important. I can point to where that other problem exists within the systems back and say, well what you're doing is actually really connected to this entire system and as you can see as we have laid it out has an impact and has an influence and it allows you to bring people together into the process of trying to fix these issues. And so I would say that that probably was the most, I think what I hope to use as the most impactful and rewarding portion of the systems map process. For that I'll let folks go on from there. Thanks. Thank you, Peter. And I'll see how quickly five minutes goes. I'm a systems curious, just so you know. I'm glad you said that I came to Humane United at the beginning in 2007 because at that time there was just a few of us around the table and so I've seen us live up to the great reputation of philanthropy of writing strategy and reiterating it and reiterating it and reiterating it until Rob has come along. A couple of years ago Pam and Pierre took stock of their $1 billion worth of philanthropic giving and they said, there's a lot of terrific projects here, some really great work and I think that Humane United is part of that great body of work. But they realized something bigger could be done that letting a thousand flowers bloom just wasn't quite saving the world. And that led us to the systems thinking and it felt like we were in the pointy end of the spear at Humane United because we had one of the first pilot projects there and it got introduced to us at the beginning of 2014. Basically we started that process which was right after the Civil War erupted in South Sudan in December 2013 and we had been working since 2008 trying to help bring peace to that area. We had one of the nation's, I think, greatest experts working with a small group of people who are deeply curious, very creative and very knowledgeable really tracking what was going on there but with a kind of a sole focus on the relationship between the South and the North and I think we came up with all sorts of creative and good work there but at the same time we were missing what was taking place within South Sudan itself and there was Civil War and all the dynamics for Civil War were there. As soon as it happened we could see it. All the dynamics popped up. Our experts, it was like an aha moment, like how did we miss this? We were completely caught flat footed. And I tell that story because right as we were getting into this body of work and we were deeply concerned about what was happening in South Sudan we took a pause on our work to take up the systems challenge and I'm talking about this because if any of you or your organizations are thinking about it it's important to be mindful of the impact on the individuals who have to do it. Rob said something like it's not rocket science but I think it's harder than rocket science at first. It has its own nomenclature at one point I think Leah called it systems Esperanto. And you saw the bewildering maps. I brought one but I didn't realize Rob was gonna show it. And even that video with the sort of advertising and marketing music and sound made me feel like creepily like we had discovered magic or something like that. All that said it has been a terrific help once we've kind of worked through the process. One of the members of the time we were first starting this and I was asked to raise this to kind of the hard thing. Right as we were getting into this he said, you mean we're gonna stop our grant making and our work in South Sudan so that we can write some bullet points in some bubbles and boxes that we will then read to ourselves. And he said that in a deeply frustrated way and it was kind of the nadir of the transition. That said he couldn't argue with the logic that if we had been taking a systems approach we would not have been caught as flat-footed as we were on South Sudan. That's not to say that a systems approach would have saved South Sudan or prevented more but we were, in fact it's kept us disjointed for a couple years. It's taken us a long time to catch up. So I think it's worth saying, it takes some sensitivity and working with teams. Our experts felt like their understanding was being questioned which was never the intent but rather to take the broader picture. I'll try to raise the head because I know there's a lot to say. The first pilot project we did it was on our human trafficking side and we've been doing some work paying attention to the well-being of Nepali workers that go from Nepal to Qatar. And as many of you know, the Qatar got the World Cup in 2022 and there's massive construction taking place which requires massive influx of more labor. There's already more Nepalese in Qatar than Qatarese citizens just to give you a sense of that. And in Qatar there is a system of a worker, a guest worker program that's called the kafala system. And it is that system, the essence of that system is what creates the conditions of human trafficking because it means that once you go there, you cannot change employers and you cannot leave and they take your passport. And that means if you pay the thousands of dollars for a certain type of job and a certain type of pain you get there and the job is different and the pay is different, you're stuck. And our typical approach as humanity of the United might have been, hey, we've got some money, let's go in, let's just bang the hell out of the problem of kafala and make it go away and then we'll be done. But in Qatar, the world's richest country per capita, our money doesn't buy us influence, they don't need any grant making from us and frankly they don't need to have us in the country at all. The system of kafala isn't a regulatory visa system, it's embedded in their culture. And when we started the pilot project, taking assistance approach, we recognized that there are other ways, other leverage points that we could use to affect the kafala system and the way the migrant workers would be treated in Nepal. And yes, of course, we look at the government, we see what we can do with policies and we are very much interacting with government. But business, US business in particular, has a lot to offer in terms of the incentives and influence they can play. The migrant workers themselves can leave Nepal with a different mindset and we're working with them. And the attitudes of country citizens themselves is something we're trying to work with. I won't go into great detail about that but the notion was we could zoom back and see that the field was bigger than we thought initially. Just take a couple more seconds, just talk more generally about the benefits. At a foundation where you're taking someone else's money and spending it, and this might be that much more true when it's your own money, you want to say, hey, I've got this idea, it's certainly going to work. Yes, we're trying to save the world with this money and we'll show you results next quarter. Our funders and our board members realized that was a fool's errand and we were making a mockery of ourselves by making those sorts of assertions and they said, take this approach. The idea is that it is the foster experimentation, foster risk-taking, knowing that we will fail as Rob said at the beginning, but fail smart. So that failure goes right back into the learning loops and we can adjust and adapt our approaches in hopes of getting closer to success. It's really important for us because in the past, I think we had the sense that the monitoring and evaluation team put us in us versus them dynamic and we weren't really learning together. We weren't understanding what we could learn from our failures and we didn't really understand what we were learning from our successes and so there's a real benefit to this more integrated feedback loop process that's really changed the way we work. Finally, I'll just say the time frames for impact for us are hugely important. Of course, we're not going to show that we've changed more piece, added more piece to the world in a quarter or even in a year, probably not even in three years but this process has helped our funders realize it's going to take time, they're with us for the long haul and they're part of the conversation because in addition to everything else that that map does, it can serve as a communications tool and a point of entry for our board members. I'll stop there because I know there's a lot more to say. Great, thanks Peter. So I've worked with several teams at Humanity United on different systems related projects. First, the pilot project on Cutter and Nepal that Peter referenced and then I've gotten pulled in on a variety of other initiatives over time. I'll just start by echoing Peter's plan on the transition process. I think that part of what we faced when we were first sort of coming to this work was this resistance, this sense that we had always been working on systemic change, we'd always been angling for transformational change and so thus we were working, we were taking a systems approach and I think that was sort of a limited perspective on what we were doing. I think if your mission, like you choose mission, is to address grave intractable problems, you tend to start by saying what's the problem and what's the toolkit, how do we address it? And that's good, but if that's how you frame things, then you have sort of a set toolbox of actions and answers that you take in response. So if you say, how are we gonna stop the trafficking and abuse and migrant workers in Nepal and Cutter and that's just the only way that you enter the problem. You have this immediate set of actions about ending the kafala, about regulatory and reform, about rights reporting, all which is important. But if instead of saying here's the problem, how do we solve it, you say what are the set of patterns that are interacting within this migration corridor that are having these negative impacts that are ultimately leading to the status quo and that they're ultimately sort of repulsing these direct efforts that change, you can start interacting with and influencing those patterns and you start having a really different conversation. So if you're the kind of person who blinches at sort of simple linear explanations for complex phenomena, then moving to a systems approach is a really fascinating opportunity because it gives you this chance to develop sort of an organizational understanding and buy-in to this approach that doesn't lose the nuance and complexity along the way. So my own role has been primarily working with teams at sort of the initial analysis and mapping process and so I'm gonna sort of reflect particularly on that and how it sort of interacts with the strategy process. I think that there is sort of an aha moment that a lot of folks within our organization has gone through or have gone through in the process and that's that moment when you realize that this approach starts to help you articulate and connect patterns that you sort of understood intuitively but she would have had an enormous amount of trouble pulling out in sort of a standard strategy process or a standard strategy paper. There's sort of this breakthrough moment where you are basically saying, oh, this is what I've been saying all along but now it's represented and it's sort of the visual representation of it's more complicated than that, which is really cool. And the other thing that's incredible about this process is that the process sort of promotes this continual openness to change and sort of sense of self-evaluation as a perk, not a failure. It gives you a framework for taking in new information and adapting to new developments in the system without suggesting that changing your approach is a failure. So to take one big example and sort of maybe in contrast to the South Sudan example, we developed our original system strategy on Nepal Qatar in 2014 and then in April 2015 Nepal suffered a massive earthquake and so in addition to being a massive human tragedy it was a huge political and economic shock and there was this sort of temptation to say everything's changed, what do we do, how do we respond to sort of this massive change to the political environment that we're operating in? Because we had this strategy worked out, we could go back to our original analysis and we could say, here are dynamics that we've already identified, some of these are gonna get stronger in the wake of this earthquake, so household financial insecurity is going up, that's gonna lead to more demand for migration, most likely unless for example, there's more demand for jobs in Nepal, et cetera but we were able to sort of use the map as our guide to what should we be thinking about right now and how are those things gonna interact and we were also able to sort of think through what dynamics had we either sort of under analyzed or left off or just generally sort of interpreted as not super important because they were sort of fixed or frozen and in this case it was the Nepali political context which Nepal had been in sort of a prolonged period of political gridlock and so we hadn't been sort of focusing on that as a potential area for leverage. So basically the systems approach gave us a template to sort of go back to our assumptions, figure out how a new development really interacted with them and figure out whether we needed to be pivoting and what that would mean. Let's see. I think in terms of what's most challenging, I think initiating new staff, oh and I'm out of time. Okay, well let's finish the thought. Oh sure, initiating new staff is a challenge because I think most people expect to come into an organization and get, like they get a strategy paper or they get sort of a basic understanding of your theory of change. It's a little bit bewildering to be handed a map and say this is the strategy. But so we've definitely sort of started strategizing about how to help staff understand sort of the theory behind it before confronting them with like the full map. But people are getting to eventually. Great, well thank you and I appreciate everyone's candor and honesty up here. I think you guys have really underscored the risks of embracing systems but also the profound rewards and just to underscore a few things that I heard that the audience might wanna chew on a little bit on the risk side of the equation, especially in this town. It's rewarded to be a subject matter expert and subject matter expertise is really held very passionately, whether you're coming from the hill or you've been working on South Sudan for a long, long time it can feel hard to feel like you're having to learn all over again or challenge what you thought you knew and anytime someone says this is harder than rocket science, that feels very, very daunting but I appreciate you guys also highlighting in an honest way the rewards of this and of embracing systems. The ability to see in a different way and to respectfully and collaboratively make your assumptions visible through the mapping process and challenge those assumptions but also to build constituencies as you're making those assumptions visual and we talked earlier in one of the panels about the challenges and the opportunities of multi-stakeholder processes. So you're creating a set of products but this is really very much about the process. I wonder if I could ask you to reflect not everyone has to answer this but if you have a strong desire to please feel free to jump in and then we'll open it up to the audience. How much systems is enough systems? So when you think about kind of these risks and these rewards, the opportunity costs I think you guys have made a great case for how much richer and on point your engagement is as you walk through this process. Do you simply say yes I'm all in and you dive all the way in to systems or is there a more kind of gradual process where we've deepened our systems practice enough relative to the context of the problem? No, I mean I don't know what it means to get halfway pregnant in a sense. It feels like we did that to some extent. To some extent we still are. We had programs at Humane. We started operating in 2007 and the systems work takes a lot of time to get and each one of our initiative areas is going through it and we're not finished. So we're able to continue doing what we're doing as we're getting into it. But the more we get into it the more it feels like the old stuff, the old approach doesn't make sense and we need to either find a way to integrate it into what we're doing or wrap it up. So I don't know if others have a different sense. No, I mean I think that's the right question to be asking and I'm not sure that we at least on our team have quite figured out the answer yet. I think there was a point at which I sort of felt like I was going down the rabbit hole and was just kind of continuing to dig because I thought it was so fascinating and I had to stop and say, all right a strategy has to come out of this that's at least an initial strategy that then we can continue to test. But there's a point of diminishing returns and it's not always in the eye of every beholder at exactly the same point and so in terms of like learning I would say that one thing that's important and helpful is to have sort of all the decision makers have a common understanding of when that point is. And if you have a common understanding of how it will be used and what the purpose of this is, then I think some of those other more difficult decisions are easier to make and become sort of more transparent and more collaborative if everyone's going in with the North Star not just for the map and the system that you're working in but for the system of your organization. So thank you. I wonder whether or not the question might be how much systems are too much systems? I mean, you need when you adopt it to sort of go all in but as Betsy illustrated you can spend endless hours and days thinking and rethinking, second guessing, finding another expert that has a slightly different frame on how the loop is connected. And so I really think it takes a while to get up to date in the lingo and how to do the mapping and what I'm interested in is for future work. Now that we know this, how can we expedite the process without cutting corners? How do you establish a way of thinking about a map or an issue that we can do in a way that's perhaps less rigorous than a multimillion dollar grant making portfolio but is good enough to get a good understanding of a small campaign that you wanna run for a policy agenda. And I think we've found that because we've done this in exercises we were talking about a particular issue in the office and said well, let's see if we can spend a morning and get a basic map together on it. And some of us that have been through the process before not experts on all parts of the map that we were focused on but smart people that knew how to do systems work pulled together what was a good enough map to really start to think about this process in a meaningful way. And so I do think it does become easier and I do think we need to, you know, as folks that are actors in the world and actually want to get to the point of using the leverage points to affect change we can't be captured by the thought that it is endless systems process or else it'll just be frustrating for folks internal and out. Anyone else wanna jump in on this or? Sure, so I'll just echo Adam's point. I think there's sort of an initial upfront investment in getting everyone to up to a certain level because otherwise you're really sort of speaking different languages once you are trying to communicate it outwards or across your organization. I think that to go to Betsy's point at some point when you're doing your analysis it's not just a matter of diminishing returns it's a matter of sort of starting to get counterproductive because at some point adding more detail starts to sort of distill or starts to obscure the underlying logic of what you're analyzing. And so I think that in our experiences that point has become apparent. It's sort of I know it when you feel that moment but it is definitely there. Just wanna follow up on that and listen to you all. One thing that's happened to us internally is to conflate the mapping process with a systems approach. And I think it's quite clear that you can keep going and going and iterating you can never come to the end of mapping. But I think in a broader systems approach you can get to good enough and then you start to engage the system and see how it changes and you continually evolve it. So in that sense I feel like you're all in on the mapping process side we'd like that it has to come to a day when you start to act. That's the rob cycle in terms of the clarity, leverage, adapt, repeat, right? I mean and I think that's a really important point. The mapping process is not a systems practice it's a tool in a broader process. So let's turn it to the audience. What questions are out there when I hear from you all? So why don't I take these three here? I'd like to take them kind of in groupings if you guys could each articulate the three gentlemen here in this row. We'll whoever wants to jump in on the question and then we'll come over to this set of room. My name is Tatsushi Arai, school for Internet and Training, working on peace building. My question goes to the first speaker, Roberto. Robert. Hey, I think it's a little bit nuts on both but as part of your presentation you mentioned that at certain stage of the process there's gonna be multiple feedback loops emerge and you come up with an overarching story. And that sort of stuck with me because when we work on conflict say you worked on Afghanistan and we work, let's say, the Taliban government of national unity, emerging IS and the different ethnic groups they try to come up with a story and I want you to sort of give me some practical experiences to how the competing stories emerge and how you actually reconcile that practical process. Yeah, so, oh, you want to take two more questions. So that was kind of about how do you reconcile the competing stories? Hello, Bob Rieck with Peace Reaction USA. Interested if maybe Rob could but whoever's best equipped to talk about how this applies in a multi-organization context because I'm hearing you all talk about oh we did this in our organization but like no offense but you're not the only one working on human trafficking so gosh, wow, we really have to include other countries, other organizations and other countries, et cetera and how do you see this playing out in a truly multi-sector, multi-national way? Great. How do you think about systems in a system? Organizations in this one and then open it up. Mel Duncan from Nonviolent Peace Force. Peter, I was struck when you said you were caught flat-footed with the reignition of the war in South Sudan and maybe this is a question for both Peter and Adam. If you would have done the full process, what might you, how might you have responded differently in December of 2013 and Adam, if you were engaged, had done this how might you respond differently to our current electoral process? Rob, why don't we start with you on the first two questions? Yeah, so in light of the first question about when you've got competing narratives going on so this version of systems, dynamic systems mapping there's many other kinds which are much more quantitative and have differential equations in them but this is fundamentally about producing a narrative and so the whole, the map really just becomes the table of contents for a rich narrative and if you change that narrative and I bet you was referring to this when you change that narrative it helps people in the system change their narrative of what is happening and what they should do about it so when I think it was a member of your team was saying you presented to someone on the Republican side say and they look at this and they figure freeze me now from blaming I don't have to blame the other side because I now understand we're both stuck in this. The piece I didn't talk about here that is really, really important about the whole process I had a mathematician who looked at our work somewhat critically and said oh, what you do is performance art and I don't know whether I should be insulted or go with that but he was exactly right which is what's really valuable here is the narratives and the competing narratives and the changing narratives that happen when people talk about what is a particular pattern we did a process on education reform and we had charter schools as one of the thematic clusters that they wanted to do their upstream downstream analysis on and build their loops on and there were four people in that group two people thought charter schools are the answer and two people thought charter schools were the devil and they came and said well what do we do and I said well both like so when charter schools work what happens and when charter schools don't work what happens and what was really good is that by the time they got through all that they could see each other's narrative and actually now had a combined narrative of how you could actually tell the story of charter schools work can work both ways and these factors tend to make them work and these factors tend to make them not work so I think it's an ongoing process so the more people you bring in which kind of goes to the next story the next question about the system of organizations in the system and I think one of the great experiences I've seen with all the teams has been how it has affected what other organizations have done I know with the informed participation map especially it's affecting what funders in this space are realigning their funding it led to a session we did on with people who teach journalism on bringing systems thinking into how they teach journalists so it had all these are sort of these knock on ripple effects that happen when you start to engage the community with your systems understanding when they get that view it sort of helps them realign and influence what they do so I think it's kind of infinitely scalable to bring in these different stories and if one of them wants to take that map back home and they want to take Betsy's map and reform it go for it, great, right? Yeah, I mean we started with a number of our stakeholders both funders, organizations that are grantees as well as other stakeholders in really involving them in the process from the beginning and then as we developed a more final map we've taken it out again both to other funders and to grantees and I think it's, you know we're not all gonna be working off the same map necessarily but it helps create a common understanding and a common, with at least one funder a fairly common direction that helps us, I think will help us build collective impact over time And I think the goal is not to have one narrative that everybody in the congress space or everybody in the local journalism space or atrocity prevention space is saying it's actually helping them connect their story with the story, right? And it becomes a harmonious kind of but diverse still ecosystem. Adam, Peter, do you all want to comment on what role systems would have played for preparedness and anticipation? I think that in the assessment then question I'll have a relatively unsatisfactory response because it's not my area of expertise. I will say that and I don't believe it's the case that we would have necessarily stopped it if we had the maps. There's an analogy to our work in the atrocity prevention space and I didn't have a chance to go into that in any great detail but as we started to map out the system such as it is that exists to prevent conflict what we found is pretty simple but actually powerful observation which is that the system is designed to respond to the crisis once it's already emerged and I think in South Sudan that's the case as well. Before the blow-ups in December 2013 the vice president was already starting to be disempowered there were fractures in the parties as I again, I'll speak relatively limited knowledge but there were warning signs that were earlier than that and we were deeply operating there and I think even the US government was very focused on how can we help support the South and its issues with the North and we belittled to some extent unintentionally the significance of the events that were taking place until it was too late. I don't know precisely what we would have done differently and I said we were flat footed because we were caught unaware. Being aware would have been better but I don't know exactly what we would have done. Yeah, if we think of the whole series of things that went wrong and there were many in Florida in 2000, although that story is not unique you had the butterfly ballot that was an incredibly poorly designed ballot that caused lots of problems. You had a punch card system that led if you recall to the hanging chads and dimpled chads and poll workers holding up magnifying glasses we had problems with registration systems where a number of folks that thought they were on the rolls were not on the rolls. All of it speak to the capacity preparedness of election officials to respond to situations where elections are close and when elections are close we still need the count to be right or as right as we possibly can get to be and so what we learned from hearing from constituents and stakeholders not just about the Florida circumstance but there are recounts in the Oregon governor's race in 04 and in the Al Franken race in 08. The capacity of election administrators at the local level needs to be bolstered through budget, through personnel, through training and many of the cases that those things don't exist and so right now the process is trying to find out how do you think about what is the best leverage point to give support to those local election officials? How do you scale it and transfer the information to folks that can use it to improve process and you're talking about folks acting within the government and within government resources but maybe not doing it efficiently or effectively and so the process now is how do we figure out those leverage points that support, you're never gonna be able to solve all elections but you can give people the tools to respond to crises and prepare for crises in a much better way than they did and that they have the capacity to do right now. Rob, does you wanna put a footnote on that? Just one quick point. One of my favorite systems quotes is a systems view stands back from reality just far enough to blur discrete events and the patterns of behavior. So every time you see a big dramatic event you gotta ask, is this just part of the sign curve? Is it part of the dynamics? So it's an ebb of an ebb and flow cycle or is it a sign that the system is fundamentally shifted? And so you wanna resist the temptation to just react to those big events because you gotta step back and say what is behind this? Is this the pattern or is this a new pattern that's emerged? So let's take, there's a lot of hands. If you can keep your questions short and to the point I'll try to take four or five and then have the panel react. We've got about 10 minutes and we wanna have a couple minutes for Rob to close us out here. So here in the front. So quick, one quick question on substance and one on practical matter. How do you account, you just sort of spoke to intangibles, say, Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns. How can you account for that in your map because I think leadership, vision. We didn't know about, we are all colored Saeed until or was easy until it happened. How do you account for that in the systems mapping process? Secondly, can we get the software? I got a quote to do a systems map. I'm at the Carter Center in Atlanta and it was $300,000 from a consultant. So I was like, I love to do it but we could never afford it. So is there a software that could prompt us? Yeah, fake a partner. Kuma, which I'll show you the address for is free for public projects. Great, so this gentleman here in the green shirt. Here, the woman in the pink. Hearing about South Sudan, Peter, I'm wondering, you know, in that part of the world they have the conflict early warning, early response system. What would happen if you combine the two tools? What would happen if you use the sewers but you built it on a platform of what you guys are describing? What would that look like? Right here in the white. Hi, I'm Jen Heig, I'm an independent consultant and thank you, this was like the clearest laying out of the process of systems mapping and I really appreciate at the end how you said that there was a bit of conflation here with systems mapping and systems thinking. I used to work in LER learning evaluation and research at USAID and we had a whole complexity aware monitoring initiative which is a completely separate part of systems thinking with, you know, we had five different processes very different from mapping. Now I'm at FHI 360 for a little bit and there's a scale plus system, whole systems in the room process they have. So to keep this quick I guess my question is what strikes me here is this looks like it's really great for headquarters, for the people who are designing the strategy whereas at AID with our complexity aware monitoring for example that was really meant for the quote unquote field to work with the implementers and to work with communities. So I'm curious if you could reflect on where you see the applicability of this and how much it translates to outside of HQ. Okay, so two questions, fire round and then we'll take all five at once. Woman here in the black and the pink. Hi, thank you, my name is Sarah Dunn. I'm with the National Democratic Institute. I have a question about neutrality and self reflection while you're doing the systems mapping. I noticed that and forgive me if this isn't a chronological order of your steps but I noticed that you do your defining of your north and your near star at the beginning. I'm wondering is there a risk of doing that before you start doing your mapping if you already have an outcome or a direction in mind can that influence how you map and the narrative that emerges? How much self reflection do you leave space for that during the mapping process in order to make sure that your mapping the narrative that you're building is neutral and not a self fulfilling prophecy or self serving. Thank you. Thank you and final question. Marie Fitzstaff and Brandaz University. I worked on Northern Ireland for quite some time and we very much use this kind of mapping and systems approach. However, the problem arose when we talked about implementation because inevitably we had to involve scores of institutions, scores of bodies whether security forces, firefighters, educations, et cetera. So in a way the work almost only begins once you have the systems analysis done. And I think the real task is what we found was first of all the courage to actually look at your part in this plan. The second thing was different timelines. Some organisations were much more willing to move faster than others. And actually it goes well beyond the capacity of your organisation to do this. It really is talking about sort of a major implementation process. So how do you encourage people to undertake this? And also they're not left with a table full of possibilities but not the energy or the will or the ability to actually implement it. All great questions, we won't have time obviously for everyone to answer every one of them. So why don't we start Rob with you and work our way down and you can decide what you wanna engage. Good, so remind me if I've forgotten something that I should have responded to. So again I mentioned the software platform that we use is something called Kumu which is, I'll give you the address in a minute. But it is, if you wanna have projects that anyone can see, it's public, it's free. If there's a subscription rate, if you wanna have private projects, so depending on the confidentiality of what you're doing, you're the one that's best. But that's fairly reasonable. It is, I think, free for academic institutions. We use it at UW Milwaukee and it's a free service for academic purposes. On the sort of the role of sort of actors and these sort of outliers and so on, we use a framework to try to get us to push our understanding of a system so we're not looking at any one dimension of a system. So anybody who's seen my book, they know the structural-attitudinal-transactional approach which basically looks at the big structures in the society, attitudes around culture and beliefs and norms, and then transactions around the role of key people, leaders, influencers, and what they do in the short term and how they impact and influence others. So we try to use that framework to make sure that we're going wide. It is a bit of the performance art as well though, which is to bring in, this is kind of at what level. In all these perspectives, you want to bring in people that have different perspectives and are going to challenge your thinking and you want to legitimize and encourage people to say, really, I don't see it that way. Why do you see it that way? I mean, Betsy talks some about this. But it has been used, this process and things like it have been used at the community level and I mentioned this to some other folks before, but so a leading practitioner in community-based participatory systems mapping is a man named Danny Burns, B-U-R-N-S. He's in the UK but has written a lot and you can get his stuff online. So Danny does this at that level. These tools are, again, infinitely scalable. I think, one of you mentioned that, I think Betsy might have mentioned that. What we're using as a version that we think is up to the task of saying, look, if you're going to invest for five to 10 years and you're going to put millions of dollars against a strategy, you need a certain level of rigor to what you're doing. And as Adam said, yeah, but if you want to get a quick, you want to do a quick systems reflection, you can do that fairly quickly too. So that's very scalable and it goes to the level, because different types of tools will be appropriate at different levels. And sorry, just to remind folks the questions, because I know we've got a cluster of questions, unknown unknowns, difference between headquarters and community, neutrality or bias and the role that plays, courage to act and then the specific question on Sudan. So I'll sort of pick up on the unknown unknowns and the neutrality question. I think that that's definitely a concern for us. It's particularly sort of the neutrality question as you define your North Star. You really, that itself is a process of really intense debate and back and forth, because I think we are very aware that that can sort of send you down a specific path. I think there are a couple of sort of general ways that you can prove along the way. One is the dynamic sort of the mapping process and the analysis process itself does really help you surface gaps in your understanding. Sometimes, a lot of times you'll have the experience of sort of trying to tell a story that you think is important and it doesn't make sense and you have to figure out why it doesn't make sense and that forces you to question sort of the underlying assumptions and take that back outwards and reflect it out. The other is the role of stakeholders outside experts, grantees, et cetera, in weighing in and sort of challenging the assumptions that we would come to the process with. And that's just really important. On the specific sedan question, early warning, it's a great idea. In fact, in our atresia prevention work right now, we're just about to embark on a four-country tour for about five weeks, four or five countries, actually, to really look at, we're calling it risk forecasting to slightly nuance the difference between early warning to say that we're trying to catch is the, we want to respond to the risk, not to the crisis. And we see things like in South Sudan where there are actually specific indicators of risk, sparks before the fire, so to speak, and try to figure out how we can operate on a platform, as you said, to act earlier. It's a great idea. For us, at least, and I didn't see that it reflected that in the slides, we waited until after the process was done to circle around our North Star and our Near Star. And so we do wait till the process is over and we really try during both the map development and then once the map is draft, we then go back out to a bunch of folks, some that we talked to the first time around, some that we didn't, and test our assumptions. And we really try to get people in there that might be prone to disagree with us. Sometimes we take suggestions and feedback and sometimes we can't because you have to have some confining principles for this map or else it would just be too expansive. And we've had to tweak the level of Zoom multiple times, but I do think that you have to wait till you're done with the mapping to get to that point. I also do think in reflection of taking the map and its applicability out to the folks that will be using it, either grantees or people that are working in politics or on the ground delivering aid, I think one of the challenges of the field is one of communication. And we saw a great three minute video that is incredibly useful for thoughtful people like yourself who know a little bit, most of you, about systems thinking and really helps you sort of provide a good synopsis of what it is and how it's powerful. I think we need to try to think in organizations that are dealing with very discreet communities how to even abstract it a little bit further and talk about why it's relevant to their work and why it might be useful in their particular field. So I think communications to folks that don't really need to necessarily know about systems thinking, but need to know why they're trying to solve this problem in a different way is really useful and important. And I think those were the questions that I wanted to answer, so. That's a good place to end. Great, I think that is a great place to end. Rob is gonna provide one or two final points for us and after he does, we will conclude. So one of the things that we're producing is a mapping, systems practice workbook. And so this is a couple pages from that. Follows the outline that I presented earlier. It is, we're working with a design firm that has made us articulate what they call the peanut butter and jelly standard, which is, we have to simplify this as if we were talking someone through making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It's like open the peanut butter, pick up the knife, right? So it's trying to be very operational for folks. I think it's not quite gonna be, pick it up and do it. I think you still need someone who's probably been through this process before to help you. If you want to, so in terms of resources, that's an email address you can email if you'd like to be connected to the work that we're doing, if you'd like the resources that we're producing or the video that we showed. Please let us know that. Just email systems.omgrgroup.com. So that's the address for Kumu, which is a systems mapping platform. Also, if you Google Democracy Fund, Democracy Fund has published two of their systems maps with really great narratives that help walk you through the map and you can see their map. So if you just wanted to get a little more detail on what a map would look like. I also want to, we have a networking hour, half hour coming up after this session. So we've got our panel here, but I also want to rat out other members of Democracy Fund and Humanity United that are here. So if you're from Democracy Fund, can you raise your hands? So Tom is in the back. We've got several people, Donata, Natalie, Chris, in that row, Bill, Potop Tuck here. Tom is also on the board of the Outward Bound Center for Peace Building. Is that correct, Tom? Got it, right? And then Humanity United folks, where are you? Mary, where's Steven around? He was here. Amy's here. These are folks you should pigeonhole if you want to find out more. If you need immediate help, MSP students, so students that have been to the program that I helped co-found at Milwaukee, raise your hands if you're looking for employment. No. I also want to thank another person in the, I think she's still here, is Julie here? Julie Kohler's right here. So Julie Kohler has been funding the work that the program that we have in Milwaukee and funded a lot of my work. And without whom, I wouldn't have put written the things that caught the attention of the Midyar Group that led to me coming to them that led to these people being here and this work. So I also want to thank Julie and her vision for making all this happen. Thank you and please join me in thanking our illustrative panel. We really appreciate all of their insights. Thanks so much, Alexa and panelists. That's a wonderful session. So as Rob mentioned, we're gonna take a longer break for some deeper networking. We will return here. Our final session will be here in Carlucci at 345. And please, my favorite conference people are the four folks right here who came in early, went to the front and in the center so that we can get everyone seated here for our final session, which would be a wonderful one. Thank you. As everyone's taking their seats, want to make a quick administrative announcement. Before we begin our last plenary session, want to note what a tremendous energy that's been in the Institute of Peace all day. Clearly, that's a result of the great conversations we've had during the course of the day. For a select couple of people, the happiness may come from the fact that no one has been emailing you or calling you. I have two smartphones here. So please check. And if you've had an overabundance of happiness, it's probably because I have your devices. Check with us at the reception desk and we'll get them back to you. Now I turn it over to Melanie. So welcome, everyone. I hope you've had a great day. Please feel free to move a little bit closer. It feels like there's a lot of critical mass towards the back of the room. We won't think it's rude if you get up and move down a little bit. So welcome to our last panel, which we feel is one of the most important of our whole week. Because we've been laying out all the challenges of a very rapidly changing and complex world for the last three days. And now is our chance to figure out how do these this very important association of funders think about the challenges in the world and how do their strategies and their strategies for impact in the world dovetail with the theories of change and strategies that we as program implementers have in the world. And so I want, if you haven't read it already, I highly recommend the Peace and Security Funding Index that Rachel will be talking about. Because it sets forth a fascinating taxonomy of funding strategies and then is a treasure trove of information about which foundations are making which kinds of grants in what dollar amounts. And you can click, it's just very, very interactive. So please read it. I think it's fascinating and will be the basis for our discussion today. So the way the panel will work is that Rachel LaForgia who's the program director for the Peace and Security Funders Group will give a 15 minute overview of the Peace and Security Funding Index. So you have a good sense of some of the major lessons emerging from that. And then we have three funders, two funders and Alex Toma who is the executive director of the Peace and Security Funders Group. And we'll talk more about some strategies in the grand-making world and how we think together about making an impact in these big social problems. So the rest of our panelists, we have Steve Del Rosso who is the director of the International Peace and Security Program at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Mary Stada who is an investments manager at Humanity United. And Mary, if you want to continue over a little bit from the last panel and talk about systems work we can do that too. And Alexandra Toma who is the executive director of the Peace and Security Funders Group. So welcome all of you. We'll leave plenty of time for a discussion with our full group, but Rachel's gonna start us off. Thanks Melanie. Looks like we have no signal. But maybe it will. Okay. There we go. Great. So thank you all for making it to the end of this conference. I know four o'clock on the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend is a tough time to sell. So I will try to keep you engaged and not bore you with this presentation. I'm gonna go over the index, what it is, some of our key findings, the peace building specific findings and how you can use it and then take a couple of clarifying questions before we go into the panel. So what is the index? I see a lot of you have phones, laptops, they have great internet here. So feel free to go on the website. I'll show you the site shortly. But the index is essentially a mapping of 288 foundations grants. So there's 2,000 grants. In 2013, foundations gave $283 million in grants to peace and security work, large, so not just peace building, all types of work. And so that's represented on the index and there is a website. Again, I invite you to go to it now. It's peaceandsecurityindex.org. Obviously we love short URLs. And then also there's a report which you can download from the website to be totally honest. Sorry, Alex. The website is way more exciting than the report because you can click it, but you can feel free to look at both. So basically what we did was we wanted to undertake this mapping to understand who peace and security funders are, what they do and what they're funding. And the reason is why for us, we're A to understand for our members who are all foundations, who their partners are, are their new partners we don't know about, how can we get people to work together more? And for civil society organizations and GO's grantees, to people who identify new partners to see how their work fits into this broader picture to find, again, new funders, new partners, and really just to shed more light and transparency onto this sector. So this is our framework that Melanie mentioned based on a group of advisors who helped us come up with this framework as well as the grants themselves. We found that peace and security funders do three things through their grant making. They aim to prevent and mitigate conflict, resolve conflicts, and build stable, resilient, peaceful societies. And they do this throughout the spectrum of conflict and peace. And so one of the top questions we get is, why is it a line? Why isn't it a circle? We talk often about how conflicts are cyclical. And so that was actually a strategic communications decision. Part of the reason why we want to use this index is to bring new funders to the table, to bring more money to the pot. And so when we're trying to sell this work to people, we don't want to sell them a circle of doom. We want to send them a message of hope. So we have this hopeful rainbow that hopefully illustrates the goal that you can make progress in this field, that you can put money into things, you can support great work and have really great, important outcomes. So again, we hope that we will attract more funding to this field. So the website, again, is laid out and there's different issue areas that you can look at. Peacebuilding is one of them. And you can kind of see the pool of funding. This is an example for those of you who don't have internet access right now of what you'll see on the website. This is funding for resolution period of conflict. And you'll see that there's peacebuilding, peace negotiations, and DDR as a subset of that. So you can see kind of the funding breakdown. On the website, you can also see the funding breakdown geographically and it cross-sex the data. So you can look at the data in different ways and look at really countless options of how the funding is divided. You could spend days on the site if you really wanted to. Key findings. So we had five key findings overall. So I'm gonna give you those first and then kind of situate the peacebuilding findings within that. First, peace and security funding is a small piece of the pie. I've heard this countless times over the past couple of days, whether it's government funding or civil society organizations talking about how the pie is so small for this field and this space. And that's true within the foundation world. So peace and security funding makes up less than 1% of total foundation giving. So we're talking about a small pool within the overall pie. Despite that, the funding is having really outsized impact. And on the website, you'll find stories of some updates of progress in some of the grants, the work that many of you are doing in fact. And what we wanted to come through on the site is really to convey a message that it's not about money, it's not about dollars and grants and numbers. It's really at the end of the day about people. And it's not just numbers, it's not numeric. There's stories behind all of these grants, all of this funding. And so you'll find some of the spotlight stories on the website and that's something we really wanted to bring out. So there is impact happening with really small amounts of money. Again, which I'm sure most of you know. Diversity, the funding field is really diverse both in terms of issues funded and in terms of types of funders. So it's not like every foundation in this field is making huge grants of $200,000 a year. We have foundations who are making $1,000 grants all the way through the one point or two point whatever million dollar grants. So there's a really wide range and that's positive because if you're a small organization it means you have access to small grants that you can spend. And if you're a large organization you also have access to larger grants. There's also diversity in areas of focus. Again on the website you'll see there's I think 30 different areas that you can track how much funding goes to. So there's a wide range of areas of interest. Funders support a wide range of strategies. You'll notice that general support made up 20% of the grants. And so that's something that we as the Peace and Security Funders Group are gonna be working with our members to hopefully improve. Knowing that again over the past few days we've heard how important general operating support grants are. And that's something we're gonna work with our members to hopefully increase in the future. But you can see the other strategies again on the website. Prevention. Grants, money for conflict prevention and also atrocities prevention is a really small, really underrepresented area. And again this was referenced yesterday during yesterday's keynote. The challenges of funding and getting funding for prevention work. And so it made up only 6% of overall funding. Which was something that I don't know that we were surprised by but we thought was important to highlight given a lot of the attention recently that's been coming to atrocity prevention and response. And finally, just a reminder, this is a mapping of grants and grants data. So it's not a mapping of the field itself, it's a mapping of how foundations are making grants within this field. And so one of our findings is that we really need to improve the data set and the information we get from foundations so that we can better map the funding. And so here's two examples of grants that we have in our set. Both are for general support but as you can see, the level of description is very different. And what that means for us is when we get a grant like the first one that just says for general support, we have no way of knowing if it's a peace building grant, if it's a prevention grant, if it's a reconciliation grant, we don't know. And so one of the things that we're doing on our end is working with our funders and other foundations to improve the quality of data submission so that we can have a better sense of what they're actually funding, peace building funding. So in 2013, and this is all again based on 2013 data, the reason for that is A, this is the first year of the project and so that's the data we had to work with. We're working on updating it and making it more current. It will always, there's always gonna be a year lag time. We'll always be looking at the previous year simply because of the way foundations report data and the time it takes to process the data. So we are looking at 2013. 9.8 million in grant making went to peace building in that year. There was 131 grants and it represented 3.5% of total funding. Again, it's a very small amount within a small pie. So we're talking like, you know, the weight watcher's piece of pie. Not your like Thanksgiving pie. Yeah, so and it's 38 foundations did make those grants. So there are a considerable number of funders who are funding peace building work. Also, we know that there may be other peace building funders out there who aren't represented on this yet. And so if you know of any funders and I'm gonna show you the list next. Shortly, I'll show you the list, but if you see someone that's not represented, please come find me because I would love to reach out to them to ensure their data is in our index. So peace building keywords. This is the words that we used to identify peace building grants and this gets into more of the technical database side of things, which is really fun, I can tell you. But basically these are the key words we used. So if a grant grantee or grant description had any of these words, it pulled into the peace building side of grants. Now, I'm sure some of you are out there like, well, what about mediation? What about reconciliation? So that was a really big challenge for us is how do you define peace building work? Everyone defines it differently. And what words are people using and not using to describe their work? And so that again was another challenge in this, was trying to figure out how we pull in relevant grants and exclude the ones that aren't really peace building. So we wound up with all of these words through again, feedback from our advisors and also by looking at the grants themselves and doing some research on the grantees and the work they were doing. So it was a pretty comprehensive process. But again, if anyone sees a word and you're like, well, I don't know if peace building should have a hyphen or not, I'm happy to discuss that with you after. And here are just three sample grants I wanted to show you. So there are sample grants found throughout the website, but these are three peace building specific ones with all of the variations in spelling. And I wanted to show you, because it really shows the breadth of the grants that are encompassed by peace building. So you have an alliance for peace building grant on peace building evaluation, which is one type of grant. You also have a grant to a city council, which is definitely a non-traditional recipient on their peace building work. And then a grant to a local work for peacemaking efforts, again on a totally different lens. So this just really represents the diversity within the field of peace building itself, the diversity in funding interests. So you have funders who are really interested in a wide range of geographic contexts, issues and approaches. And then also, I didn't put the size on, but the sizes of the grants also vary. You have really small grants, as you saw before, it was like a $2,000 grant. And then you have really large grants as well. So there is a lot of diversity within the funding field. We had two main challenges to tracking peace building grant making. First is terminology, which I spoke a little bit about, but I'll give you an example of a grant that we have here where it's kind of like, is it peace building, is it not peace building? So we have this grant that just says, we're building a culture of peace. So how many of you would consider that peace building culture of peace? How many would not consider it peace building? All right, thank you, yeah. So yeah, so we don't know. The point is we don't know and we can't make that judgment call because again, we're working in a database. So I can't tell the computer, okay, anything that says culture of peace is peace building because there might be some grants who use that terminology that are not peace building at all, that are something different. So that again was one of the challenges that we had with tracking peace building funding. We also, all funders don't talk about their work as peace building. So people will say, we're supporting civil society work on the ground locally. And so we don't know it's peace building, but it comes out of a peace building program, but we don't have the information so we can't code it as such. So we're hoping that the funding for peace building is actually a little bit higher and that we'll see the change next year once we have more comprehensive grant data. The second problem again was just general support grants, which are terrific for organizations but terrible for building a grant database. So I guess we're kind of lucky that 80% were not general support, but we will advocate for more that despite the challenges it poses to our work. And then the 2013 peace building funders. So get your phones out quickly, you know. It was hard to fit them on one slide. So these are all the different groups that funded peace building work. And some of them actually were a little bit of a surprise because we had never encountered them before. And so we're working to do outreach to pull them into our group, to help them connect again to other funders and then also to encourage them to give more money. So these are again, some of these may or may not be a surprise to you, but if there's anyone who you're like, oh my gosh, you know, my dad funds peace building and he's not on there. And then that's important. This is only a mapping of foundations. And so there are operating foundations are not included and there are some operating foundations doing incredible important work who are not represented. And then also individuals. There's so many individual philanthropists that are PSFG members who are doing work and they're not represented on this either yet, but we are working on that for the future. So again, this is just foundations. And finally using the index. So you're probably like, okay, we have this big website. Rachel, you spent a year of your life, you know, in a coffee place, like, you know, dredging way through these spreadsheets. Like what am I gonna do with this? So here's what you can do with it. If you're a civil society organization, you can scope out new funders. We hope you use it for that. We hope you go on there, you know, find foundations, stock people, get in touch with them, share your work with them, situate your work within the funding landscape. Use it to make the case, you know, only this percent is used for peace building and with this small grant, we can do this or with this large grant, we can do this. Use it to back up your work and to support it. And then make the case for more funding for why we need more funding, because we do. And then policy makers find foundation partners. Foundations are open and interested in working with policy makers and government donors. And so PSFG is trying to help build bridges between different groups to try to leverage funding and make the funding go further. And then learn about peace and security issues if you're not familiar with them. And then finally for funders, if you are a funder, find new funding partners. We hope that you'll, you know, see one of those foundations up there and reach out to them and talk about your work. Help your board understand what your funding fits in. So if you're making the case to a board on why they should maintain or increase a peace building portfolio, you can use this to make that case. Remember, you know, we're having the Weight Watcher's pie. And finally to identify funding gaps. So the cool thing about looking retroactively at 2013 is you can think about some of the things that were happening in 2013, some of the things that are happening now in peace and security and say, ooh, did we make a mistake and not fund the right things? So, you know, for example, in 2013, there was not a whole lot of funding, private funding going to Syria. So as a community, a funding community, we can reflect on that and hopefully learn from some of the things that we did or didn't fund. And finally, fill the gaps. So if there is a funding gap, see what your foundation or friends can do to fill it. So that's my 15 minutes of fame. So now I'll take any clarifying questions. So nothing too specific, but if there's something that was not clear about the index, the data or anything, I'm happy to answer your questions, if anyone has any. So the data was pulled from the Foundation Center's database. So the Foundation Center collects data from foundations, not just in the U.S., all over the world, although primarily they are from the U.S., and they also pull data from 990s. So if foundations don't, like, happily submit their data, they just go and search through 990s and then pull some data, which isn't that great, but they still have it. So that's where it comes from. It is from the Foundation Center. And largely it is self-submitted. Foundations do turn over their information, which is terrific. The 3.5 is a piece of the overall pie. So it is a part of that 283 million. It's a percentage of that. So that's what it's in relationship to. And, Rachel, could you compare that to the number in the human rights funding? Because that was quite a figure, but I don't remember what that other figure was. Two billion. So funding for human rights work is at around two billion. So it's considerably higher, those lucky people, human rights. Thank you. That was such a clear, concise presentation. Thank you. So I wonder if I could ask you, Alex, and those of you who are at the Peace and Security Funders Group meeting, since you just had your annual conference, what was the reaction from your community? And it might be helpful also to tell us who's in your community. So we have a sense of what kinds of foundations are part of it. Sure, yeah. So we just had our annual meeting a few weeks ago. Rachel has had a chance to practice this. We, the reaction was, I mean, maybe you could speak to that more than I can, but the reaction was a reflective. I mean, I think we had a really great annual meeting. We explored some of the gaps and some of what the data told us. And there are several PSFD members here. So I'm happy to turn it over to them. I don't want to speak on their behalf. But who they are is we are up to 65 members. They are all sorts of funders and philanthropists, as Rachel mentioned. We have public, private, operating foundations, family foundations, as well as individual philanthropists that are part of the PSFG network. And we seem to be growing almost, I wouldn't say weekly, but definitely monthly. Even the past year, we've got 10 new members that have joined the Peace and Security Funders Group because they want to collaborate with their peers to enhance the effectiveness of philanthropy in this field. Okay, thank you. Are there other funders with Mary or Steve? Would you like to talk about your reactions to the first saw this report? Go ahead. Completely agree with Alex at the meeting that we had a few weeks ago in Portland. It was, I think, a moment of being able to look specifically for me at the very limited funding available for prevention. And I think there's a lot to unpack behind that and why, I mean, some of the very logistical reasons that Rachel outlined. But I think there are also some broader programmatic reasons that account for that real small amount that ultimately goes to prevention, which is an area that Humanity United has really been exploring very deeply the past few years and is hoping to increase our funding and our support in that area. Thank you. Well, I wasn't at the last conference, PSFG conference, but I was present at the creation when PSFG was established. And from the very beginning, we've been looking for a database of what the field, as we define, has been doing. So I commend our colleagues. Do I hear my voice reverberating? Oh, it's your tie. It's my tie, though. It's on your tie. OK. Anyway, so I think that the, I commend PSFG. I think the report, as Rachel has described, there was some practical and methodological challenges. And if you read the end of the report, it says something about how you're going to learn from this and there are other more nuanced approaches as you go forward. So again, kudos. And it's going to do an amazing baseline. This is to be, to clarify, you do this yearly. So you'll be able to update this. So we are, we're going to improve it. It's an iterative product and a database. I don't know, yeah. Sorry. It was on his tie. But I think you put it on my tie. So we're going to do this annually. And, yeah, and it's, as Rachel said, where it's, it, it, there are challenges, but we hope that it's, you know, more resource than it is, you know, a challenge to, to get this data. And just from a thumbnail kind of sketch, because we had the luxury of being piece building, a nice kind of broad, fuzzy umbrella. To what extent did you see the ratios between security and peace? And was it fine grained enough to really capture that? Rachel could probably. Yeah, I think the answer to that is that most funders don't speak about their work so much in terms of security and the grants aren't labeled as such. So I think there generally wasn't stronger security or peace. It was really just totally diffused in terms of the different issues. So you'd see like nuclear disarmament or you'd see some diplomacy, but really it was more issue based than peace versus security based. Interesting. Well there are two sets of questions I'd like to ask you to get us started and then we can open it up to the rest of the group. But I'm very interested in bridge building. You know, how do we build bridges between traditional peace building work and then organizations that are doing peace building work in other sectors? So where you're able to capture democracy groups or governance groups or human rights or climate. And to what extent is that reflected in this index? And even if it's not, how are you kind of seeing this play out in your own grand picking? Please. Sure. I think that's a really tough question because even though while I think all these different sectors, whether it's human rights or governance or humanitarian or peace building, we're all working towards a peaceful and inclusive society ideally. And yet we're still very siloed in our individual work. And I think all too often our individual efforts aren't actually adding up to some of these broader goals that we all have in mind. I think forums like the Alliance for Peace Building are actually a wonderful entry point for having some of these conversations. So is PSFG. And I think individual private donors also have a role to play in terms of incentivizing different sectors to be collaborating and to be brainstorming. Even within sectors, I mean all too often, policymakers are very disconnected from what academia is doing. I think that's also a role where private philanthropy can play a role in bringing together these various different actors to be sharing research and recommendations and to really be working together towards this ultimate goal that we all are trying to see. That's a perfect segue, Steve. Didn't you just get back from Denver looking at bridging that gap? Yes, indeed I did. We have a focus at the Carnegie Corporation and the International Peace and Security Program that we like to think transcends all our work in bridging the academic research and policy gap and certainly the work in peace building is relevant to that. On the bridge issue, unfortunately, as you know, I wasn't here the first two days of the conference, but in looking at the agenda, it seems to me that there are a lot of bridges that have been built and are being built. And I'm not really sure what traditional peace building means anymore. And when I looked at the survey, it was pretty evident that we have everything from nuclear security to gender issues. And as was suggested, it raises a question what was left out and not only somebody's father who has worked on peace building, it wasn't recorded, but there are lots of activities that don't have the P word in it that obviously some could make a plausible argument under a loose constructionist definition of peace building that are relevant. For example, at Carnegie, we've had a longstanding program in reforming higher education in a sub-Saharan African countries. So what's that to do with peace building? Well, if that is contributing to the health of the university, which is contributing to health and well-being in society, then that could also be included. Exactly. Well, one thing that I've noticed, and it was part of the planning of this conference for this year, is I have not in at least three years had the conversation of, is peace building a field? Because that was the conversation for so long. Are we a field or are we just some, Field in the making, so I have to put it. But I think people are also comfortable with the fact that this is a very integrative field. And so that there is some border with these other fields that we can help, we can encompass. I mean, the World Bank just last year, we were at their FCB conference. So the World Bank just last year, rejiggered their strategic goals and overlaid five, one of which is fragile conflict and violent states, the World Bank. It's a squarely development. And another one I think is gender-based issues. And so I think there's sort of this understanding that it isn't, okay, here's peace building, okay, here's development, here's, and I don't think we need to water it down. I don't know that we should be merging with the Environmental Grantmakers Association. But I think that there are some, there's a Venn diagram where they all kind of, we can help each other out across sectors and learn. Yeah, I think the SDG process also brought this, in a very central way where we now actually do have a goal focused around peaceful and inclusive societies and governance. And it was in a highly political process that led to that. I mean, I know there was an intense amount of negotiating and earlier on in the process, a lot of people saying, this shouldn't be part of a development agenda, and that it was quite heated at moments. But ultimately, I think it speaks volumes to the fact that at that big of a forum, you actually have that as a central part of an entire development platform. There's a kind of deja vu all over again, sense to this for me. I started in philanthropy at the end of the Cold War. And in those days, a lot of us were talking about how the emergent problems in the world were inherently interdisciplinary, and therefore we needed to have interdisciplinary solutions. And one could argue 25 years later, that's even more the case. And I think in terms of peace building, the fact that it is so expansive and integrative is to use a cliche, both a challenge and an opportunity. It's an opportunity because it's inclusive and it can reach out. But it's challenging particularly for some funders because it's difficult to get your arms around. Well, I wonder, we have a good sense, I think within our community, of what the advocacy looked like around goal 16. And as we came up to the World Humanitarian Summit, Nancy told us this morning that peace and conflict prevention were very much in the center of those discussions. What did the philanthropy discussions look like during that advocacy period? Were you involved with advocacy? Were you thinking about your own programs, reading the tea leaves about how some of these new orientations would be shaping up? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, over the past couple of years, we've been developing a new initiative at Humanity United, which is completely focused around prevention of deadly violence and responding to the risk of violence. And this was while the SDG process was being negotiated. And I mean, I think it really did speak to a desire, particularly post-2013 with the crises in South Sudan and Central African Republic, in which we really were caught off guard and did not have the tools or resources to respond early and to anticipate those crises. And so with the SDG process happening simultaneously, I think what it really did was animate and deepen our commitment to be working in this prevention field squarely, as well as I think a lot of excitement that we're not alone in this and that there's a huge amount of energy and a burgeoning community that we also want to be better linked to. And at Carnegie, was that kind of on the radar or were you kind of defining problems a little differently? Well, let me put it this way, if you're directing a program on international peace and security and you're looking at the condition of the world as it is, that means either, someone like me is either needed more than ever or needs to find different employment. But the challenge is that a lot of what we're doing was already relevant to the new goals. But our view, we've tried over the years as best as the specifics of the agenda has changed to not succumb to the kind of institutional ADHD that can lead us astray. So under certain rubrics, whether it's nuclear security or relations with China and Russia, a lot of these subset issues that were reflected in the new goals we're addressing, but not, we've kept our eye on these for a long time and how they've evolved. And just to add that the Council on Foundation, one of our sister organizations, very, very broad, but they have a track right now that they're looking at the SDGs and how funders can play a role. They're starting to facilitate some conversations. And the European funders are actually pretty jazzed up about the SDGs. So I know the European Foundation Center is particularly looking at how funders relate to the SDGs. So I wonder if we could talk for just a minute about some of the gaps that we saw in the index. One that was mentioned already was prevention. And I had just a couple of thoughts about that. The first was in our fragility panel this morning, Sarah Cliff left us with a challenge of how do we have a better typology of violence prevention, comfort prevention, CVE, and atrocities prevention. And then I also had a conversation with Aaron at lunch this week when I asked him, Brother Bluntly, well, what did he think about the fact that prevention was only 6% of this total? And Aaron, I don't know if you'd like to give me your answer, which I thought was actually very comforting. Aaron works at the Carnegie Corporation in New York. No, no, no. Sorry about that. My answer to the question on conflict prevention was that I think there are a lot of, it depends on how you code some of these programs that different foundations are working on. And then there's a lot of things that go into conflict prevention. Conflict doesn't come out of one thing. It's more bulbous than that. It comes from society, which anybody who's in the system's thinking earlier understands is quite complex. A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil. So kind of my summary of that comment would be that I think there's a lot of things that go into conflict prevention that wouldn't necessarily be quoted specifically as conflict prevention. And so if we were to change the way we coded it, we perhaps would get a larger number that we would say is focused on conflict prevention. But I also understand why you would code it in certain ways. Well maybe Rachel, I don't know if you wanna say something. Yeah, so I was actually talking to CSO this morning about that very thing. So the Conflict Stabilization Office of the State Department. So basically the conflict prevention piece, we actually did it as a strategy as well, prevention efforts overall. And that also was only 6%. And it's a little bit broader and encapsulates a little bit more. It includes track two diplomacy. It includes work on mass atrocities and genocide, which actually is not so much preventative that we're seeing in the grants. It's actually more reactive. So it's working with survivors of atrocities, working with prosecutions, which again, there are those that make the argument that is part of prevention. So it's a circle and where does it stop and where does it end and where do you start and finish it? And so it is pretty broad. We did end up with a pretty broad definition of what constitutes prevention efforts. And even within that broad definition, it still is a pretty low number. And definitely there are some issues within the field itself on defining what is prevention and what isn't. But I think that what's represented in the index definitely isn't as conservative as it could be. So the number in fact is probably a little bit higher than what it actually is. If you kind of remove some of the things that some may not consider prevention, like for example, prosecuting perpetrators 20 years later. Because those were a bunch of the grants. I think only four grants in 2013 went specifically to early warning systems specifically. So it is a very, very small piece. So in that early warning, just some of us who were funding early warning 20 years ago, the argument then was, and I think now is still the same, that we know enough about early warning. It's what to do when we have the early warning. So maybe that prevention, quiet prevention has defined 20 years as Aaron and others have described has evolved. So. Yeah, I think also the response language is a little bit different as well. So we didn't see like early, we used early response as a keyword as well and it didn't yield a lot of, because most people don't talk about their program as early response, right? You talk about election monitoring or access to justice. So we did put in words like that to pull in those grants because again, our first round of things, we had early warning, early response and it was zero. We said there's gotta be more than zero and there was, we just had to dig a little deeper. I mean, I think just what this conversation just now, the past couple of minutes is illustrating is that it's very complex, it's tough as you all know all too well and one of our challenges was to make something that is so 3D, so tough, so evolving and dynamic into something that those not in this room, those that we need to convince to fund more, do more, get more active that they can feel like they're part of it, they get it, they're like, oh, okay, I got it. This is what peace and security, this is what peace building is, this is how I can plug in and so I think we did the best that we could. I'm not trying to be defensive about it but it's gonna be hard as you all know and it's, I think we're trying to, part of what we're trying to do is to make it so that, make it like, yeah, 3D thing into a 2D thing so that it's a little bit more accessible to folks and I don't know, I mean, maybe in a few years it'll look a little bit differently and we'll have different keywords and that's, we really do want you to, I mean, we do say this, we're not just saying it, we really do want your input and your help and we are gonna be forming another advisory committee, hopefully, right, yeah, for this year. So, yeah. What form of feedback would be most helpful? The email, is there a place to comment on the website? E-mailing, my email address is on the website so if you go to the, think frequently ask questions about us, you can find it there and I would love to get emails from people, honestly. Yeah, really, no, really. Before I open up to the floor, so I know many people have questions, I wonder if I could ask each of the four of you a question which is, for next year's index, what would make you most happy to see included or changed in next year's index? I know Rachel's answer. Rachel, can I do a start? So for me, we had our little spectrum of conflict and right now that's how the grants are divided so I'm hoping we're gonna change that so that we're looking more in depth at the issues themselves so next year hopefully you'll be able to look at peace building, see the funders, see more information about the grants themselves, see where those funders are working so just more comprehensive and a better resource for people in the field and also foundations as well. Thank you. I think that when you get the comments from various foundations and foundation offices are not usually shy about expressing their opinion whenever their work is displayed in a report that next year's will be even more nuanced in terms of the categories, the coding and that will make some foundations even happier. I definitely agree with Steve's point and I think it would also be wonderful to see how we can actually use the index over the course of the coming year to be generating greater resources for some of these very under-resourced gaps that we've already discussed. So would part of that perhaps be working with our community, could we be doing op-eds or other kinds of social media or outreach? So there's kind of this communication between the funding community and the grantee community about where priorities could be. Yes. I do. Yes, please use this as the basis of, I mean Rachel said it, how you can use it, you know, of op-eds of drawing more attention to the field, helping us make it better. One thing that I, et cetera, et cetera. And we have plenty of ideas. So do get in touch. One thing that I would add that I think could make it better is, and we're trying, and you kind of got a preview of this at the annual meeting, is that it does not include operating foundations. It does not include individuals. This does not include bilateral or multilateral aid, which we know is a lot. So we're trying to work with our partners, the Foundation Center to see if there's a way in which we can integrate that data and again, make it a more comprehensive picture. I'm a sense of empathetic with the challenge and it seems to me the tension between defining the field, whatever we call it, too broadly and too narrowly. But many of us have been involved in the debate over what it is. I think we have to move beyond the semantic argument. But by the same token, I wonder, I've used this line in many contexts and it occurred to me in peace building, the Moliere character who discovered he'd been speaking pros all his life. There are many peace builders who might be surprised that they're doing peace building, but that's okay, but it does also raise the specter of diluting the object of analysis. So I don't have a brilliant idea on how to balance that, but I think that that's a living challenge with this kind of survey. When you say diluting, do you mean it's not really peace building or do you mean in the sense that what we really should be looking at is capturing those stray electrons who actually are doing peace building and get them into the orbit? Well, again, it's sadly, it gets down to a semantic argument. A Norwegian NGO on whose board I served two weeks ago decided to drop the term peace building from their title. And the argument was that it's kind of passe and too narrow. And I was the only American on the board. And by the way, you in particular, Mellon, you'd be intrigued to know that the new term that came up was conflict resolution. So I very diplomatically is the only gringo in the group trying to explain that there had been a discussion about this a couple of decades ago. And in fact, peace building is rather expansive and everything you're trying to do. So at the end of the day, I shut up and I figured out that what they were gonna do was more important than what they called it. So if we look at it, if we can somehow delimit this universe, so it isn't everything and nothing at the same time, I think we'll be okay. So interesting. So you're not changing their programming. It was just the way of what's being described. Okay. On that note, let's open up the board for questions. And why don't we cluster a few at a time? We have mics going around. John Rudy, Lines for Peace Building and Elizabeth Town College. We've heard this week, the Institute of Economics and Peace, I believe, says violence costs 14 trillion for the globe every year. If we could have like 0.5% of that, we'd have a pie so big we'd be obscenely obese. Can we connect? Are you connecting the social impact bonds and the social enterprise in that database? And would that just, if those kinds of things come online, as they come online, how is that going to change the nature of what this panel's discussion? Great, thank you. Let's cluster a couple of questions. Beatrice? Yeah, Jackie Wilson. Very interesting presentation. My question is about the other, if I'm understanding the numbers correctly, 9% of the funding. So what is the other 90% going toward? Are there big categories? I haven't been on the website. And is the reason for the gap in peace building funding because of challenges with monitoring, evaluation and delivering are being able to demonstrate impact? Or is it some other reason that kind of builds on what this gentleman was asking? Thank you. Beatrice, down here. Hi, Beatrice Polini. My question, it doesn't have to do with eliminating the field or the definition, but the remarks Steve you made about the agenda the past two days and the type of issues and the type of disciplines were brought in. But there are all those two. One of the challenges, the big challenges is that, and as you know, because we've known each other for a long time, among many people here, I like to take risks. And I think the way we, he said yes. The way we, and it doesn't mean that we fail when we do that, but we try to push the envelope and try to understand better, try to find ways to do our job better. The problem is how do we finance when we bring in other disciplines, when we do things that are unusual? There are countless of projects. Many people here could talk about the projects I've tried to do that were on the edge. And you cannot find, it's very difficult to find funding in the usual suspect, in the usual donors. Very difficult, for instance, the terms of neuroscience in the neuroscience community, they have trouble finding money to work on that. So how do we, how do we resolve that? And sometimes we're lucky to have people like USIP put in the first, taking the first risk, but you still have to raise more money if you want to do the work. So how can we, how do we do that? And we have people like Ina who are helping to push the envelope. But I think on a number of topics, we need to find a way to tap into new resources in order to take those risks, to risk to fail, to push the envelope of what we are doing and bring other disciplines and other people in our field. So why don't we take these three because they're such substantive questions. The first was on the remark of just the percentage of the 14 trillion, but are we also looking at some of the social impact bond, social enterprise kinds of funding? From Jackie, where is the other 90% going and is M and E still a barrier for our field for funding? And then the question around, how do you fund risk? Do you want to start, Alex? And take any or all. Yeah, I, I'll just take the one of them and I think Rachel has more of the data she can answer that a bit. But at the PSFG annual meeting a few weeks ago, this is a panel that we specifically had was on different types of investments and different types of social impact bonds and divesting investing things like that. I mean, it's not exactly what you're talking about, nor what the first gentleman asked about specifically, but I think there are conversations that are starting or continuing to happen. I haven't, I've only been in the field 10 years now. So perhaps, you know, maybe this is deja vu again, but there are new ways of thinking. I think two, to that point, that maybe to answer a little bit your question, there's a surge in Silicon Valley philanthropists who do have experience. And if you're not failing 80% of the time, then you're doing something wrong. And I think that thinking is coming online now and you're starting to see some new foundations popping up who have much higher risk tolerance. And there's lots of reasons why, you know, different types of risk tolerances which my colleagues can talk about if they want. But I think it's, it's not an easy answer, but I think there are some new players on the scene. I mean, I think this point about failure is a really, really important one and I think our community as a whole needs to get much better about talking about failure and about being honest about it. Because, and donors absolutely, I think have a really important role in encouraging more open and honest feedback about failure. Because I understand that if, you know, you're talking to a donor about a project or an initiative that didn't turn out the way you thought it would, that can make you quite nervous about that perhaps jeopardizing future funding. And I think that's, you know, a concern that's, you know, not an irrational one on the part of grantees. And, you know, at H.U. we talk a lot about adopting a fail smart approach. And by that we mean, you know, if we are on this, you know, in the Silicon Valley more risky side of the philanthropy space, you know, if we're saying that we want to take risks and we want to be funding on the cutting edge, we need to be comfortable with the fact that some of the things we fund will not succeed. What's important though is understanding why it didn't succeed. And then how can that learning then inform future partnerships as well as then how can we be pushing that learning out to other donors and other actors in this space? My boss, the inimitable Vritan Grigorian has written and talked about what he calls the illuminating failure. And at Carnegie, we understand the philosophy behind that, but it's difficult in practice. If I had enough illuminating failures, I probably wouldn't be here today. But let me say a couple of words about the new philanthropists and the old dinosaur philanthropists. Because as you well know, after the financial crisis, there was this, I was gonna say, obsession with, and I will you say obsession, with strategic philanthropy. And what's happened in a number of philanthropies is that our guidelines have become more narrow. That's been the practical effect. So trying to be interdisciplinary, trying to be creative, recognizing as we did 25 years ago that these are inherently interdisciplinary problems when the actual guidelines are written in a very narrow way suggests great creativity needed on both the part of the grant writer and the grant officer. That's old philanthropy. And new philanthropy, I think there is a great opportunity. However, and I claim no real understanding of that sector of philanthropy. But it seems to me that the real challenge is explaining that promoting positive social change is a long-term undertaking. As we heard this morning, in the World Development Report in 2011, generational 20 years. And my sense is from the handful of new philanthropists I've met, that there is perhaps even more impatience to see the fruits of their investments as they did in the private sector. So the discussion, Robert Sigliano's way termed it, you need to have a North Star and a Near Star. I think the Near Star is more easily addressed in the new philanthropic world. The North Star, which is really important one, investing individuals and institutions over the long haul will be the greater challenge. But I speak from a great foundation of ignorance on that subject. And John Paul Adirak in his remarks this week talked about decades thinking. So you're not seeing a trend in foundations towards that kind of 10-year, 15-year support. No. Just checking to see if there's some undercurrent. But I do think you see long-term commitment to the same goals and ideas. It's not like foundations are flipping every three to five years. They do have 20, 30-year strategies. The grant cycles may just be short within those 20-year, 30-year strategies. Even if they are supporting. Strategies or issue areas. Because I'm not sure what strategies mean really. Strategies probably maybe some five to 10 years, depending. I think it's difficult to have a 20-year strategy in any context. That's Keynes said. But just in regards to the other 99%. So we are part of the 1%. So that actually is, you can find some information on the Foundations Center website, but it's really in a variety of areas. Not every sector has done a mapping. So it's not really a beautiful pie that you can just look at and say, okay, education is 75%, healthcare is 20% or whatnot. So there is some information on the website, but we are definitely a very small piece of the pie. In terms of including social impact bonds and alternative forms of funding in the index, it is a challenge. The Foundations Center, unfortunately, is a little bit bound by their name. They do work with foundation data. And so even operating foundations, it's difficult. They support who essentially fund their own work. It's difficult to quantify sometimes the amount of money that is being poured into certain areas and kind of match the data with grants data. So we are working with them on it and it's a long-term endeavor to get them to include different types of support and funding. And also just to echo Alex, the individual donors and next-gen funders as well are a huge opportunity. And so I hope that you don't see this as, okay, there's only 38 funders. What are we gonna do now? Because there are so many new funders entering the scene and looking for things to fund and who have enormous amounts of money. And so we just need to tap into them and convince them to get on our boat and join our team. So we have time, I think, for two more really quick questions and then maybe an answer and a wrap-up before we end our day. So yes. Thank you so much. Hello. Can you hear me? Joanne Lauder-Young Kelly with Corona Center for Peace Building. I live and work in Myanmar. So very challenging context and a lot of discussions in the last year about funding and funders. Those more cynical than I, who talk about the Peace Building Industrial Complex. And a lot of discussions around conflict sensitivity and Peace Nexus did a report recently looking at South Sudan and Myanmar and donors and conflict sensitivity. They found that conflict sensitivity tends to get pushed down the chain to the implementers. And by the time you have an accepted proposal and a contract and a log frame, you're really caught between a rock and a hard spot to implement if conflict sensitivity wasn't part of the country strategy of the donor in the first place. So I'm curious to know your thoughts on that if any of your organizations, if that's being discussed, if you've ever used a conflict sensitivity advisor or just your thoughts about having that more at the strategic level then sort of pushed down the chain to the implementation level. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, Bob Rie. Woo! With some peace direction, USA. For Rachel, could you comment on the amount of funding for beneficiaries or United States? And also then to broaden to the other funders. What's kind of the discussion in your space around the absence of peace in the United States and the role of philanthropy and particularly your types in U.S. domestic peace building? So would you like to start, Rachel? Then we'll go down. Sure, so there's actually, when we developed this, we realized there's actually two questions, right? It's recipients who are in the United States and working on issues within the United States because we do have a lot of organizations that are doing U.S. policy advocacy versus organizations based in the U.S. that are doing work abroad. And so we tried to separate that out and you'll see in the report there's a little discussion on that. And we did find that it's not an 80-20, it's less than that. So most organizations are, I think it's just above 50%, I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's not all U.S.-based organizations. There is a lot of funding going to other countries and other contexts. You can see it on the website, peace building specifically in this iteration, you cannot see the breakdown of where the funding is going by region geographically, but you can see within the resolving space, kind of how that funding is broken down. But it's really clear on the website, so I really encourage you to look on that on the website, it's beautifully represented. On the conflict sensitivity question, in recent years we haven't supported direct on the ground peace building. We have supported a lot of research that elicits and applies local knowledge, which is our mantra, particularly in Africa. And almost as a matter of course, and by the way, just to mention, we know that local voices and getting local insights has been around for a long time. We don't romanticize the local, we don't treat it as a monolith, but conflict sensitivity issues inevitably come up when people are writing who are living in conflict-affected regions, so it's been a knock-on effect of some of the work we've supported. I mean to the conflict sensitivity point, I'll use the example of our work in Burundi over the past year, where Humanity United has worked with a number of groups on the ground, as well as some international advocacy as well. And with our grant making in Burundi, we intentionally used or gave our grantees maximum flexibility to adapt their programs, particularly over the past year as the crisis has really unfolded. Some of the projects and ideas that we had over a year ago by the end of the grant cycle were pretty much irrelevant. And so the way that we did that was, we set up monthly phone calls with our grantees that we did in lieu of them filling out a log frame and used those as really real-time learning opportunities and those conversations definitely fed into our subsequent grant making, but also made sure that we were up to speed on how things were changing on the ground and how our partners were adapting accordingly. Yeah, and I'll, I mean my sort of last message as we're running short on time is that, you know, the peace and security funders group exists because funders want to collaborate with one another and with partners. So Mellian and I have a very regular check-in. So we do plug in, we're trying to not just, you know, be over here and every funder sort of doing their own thing. We work regularly with USIP, in fact. We have, the risk end is a very close partner of the PSFG and even within PSFG, I mean there are two working groups that come to mind, the locally-led peace-building working group where funders are really trying to hear from those on the ground and share lessons and then there's the conflict and atrocities prevention working group where, again, there are bridges amongst funders themselves but then also between funders and the practitioners who are on the ground. So I think, I mean, what my sort of takeaway message for you all is that funders aren't just sitting in their offices being like, oh, yeah. Not that people are saying that that's what they're doing but it's what they're, except for Steve. Steve's never in his office. He's always on the road, as is Mary. But I think that there's really a, what was, someone who was with us for our annual meeting who is not a funder but was there in the capacity of representing a funder said that, you know, it's really, she pulled me aside and said this, it's really heartening that you're having these really tough conversations and that you do it with great intention and with great humility and with really just open minds and open hearts and she's like, I didn't know that this happened and it does every day and this is why Rachel and I are employed. And so, you know, we do need email us because we do want to engage. And so that's sort of what I would like to close on what I would like to know to let all of you know as well. Well, I want to thank all of you first for this tremendous resource. It was just incredibly rich and seeing, I know the work that you put into it over the course of the year. So thank you for that but also to thank all of you for your partnership that just in the very truest sense of the word, I feel that you are engaging with us, you care about our values and we really feel supported in the best possible way. So thank you for being with us today and for your candor and your insights. And it's time now for us to close our conference and I'll say a few words then Nancy Lindmore can have the final word but every year at a Passover Seder you say next year in Jerusalem, I'd like to say next year to USIP and for all of us to come together again for another set of wonderful conversations and fellowship. So many people have come up to me over the last few days and said, I feel like I'm home, I feel like I can talk about these issues that it's just a place of not only excitement but also a bit of sanctuary. So I thank all of you for making that atmosphere possible and being with us. I wanna thank all of our peace builders who came from around the world and it just was very striking to have your voices here and I also want to thank all of our American colleagues for being very open about that peace building doesn't happen over there but we need a lot of it here at home. I'd like also if we could bring our AFP full time staff here so we can give a group, thank you for everyone who's worked so hard. So I don't know, is Sarah here? Thank you, so thanks to all of you, Emily, Liz or Bob. Did you want to have a few words before we close? Well, last week I attended for a whole week a conference of Europe's leading academies of sciences and I am here to tell you it was dull. This week, this week, 155 speakers which made us a lot of new friends. Wonderful issues, evaluation, finance, youth, team building, storytelling, proposals to work on media which I think we better take advantage of systems. We launched a really important report on smart security which is necessary for smart peace and by golly I hope one of these wonderful funders will help us with a marketing strategy for something that I think will have worldwide implications. The SDG-16, the neuroscience. This field is so dynamic, so cutting edge, it's just thrilling to be with you and to hear your stories and to hear your ideas and your work. So thank you very much, bravo to you and bravo to you and you. Thank you Bob for making this day possible at USIP. Well I will just simply add my thanks to everybody who's here today. What a great day and the close of three really fantastic days. I think a conversation that's happening at a time that is more important than ever. And it may in fact be iterative. I'm looking off stage here where we're rediscovering truths that we knew or practices that we've known in the past as Steve mentioned but the time has never been more urgent and we are seeing an important coalescence where the World Bank, as Alex was saying, held a fragility form in which the overwhelming banner was no peace without development, no development without peace. So there's an important moment of coalescence here. The conversations that you all have had, I think are critical for validating, for coalescing, for crystallizing things that we're all thinking and doing, we are delighted here at USIP to be able to have this event here for the fifth year of partnership. Alliance for Peace Building is an incredibly important partner for USIP and it encompasses this extraordinary membership that you have. So I want just to once again thank everybody for being here at USIP today. Thank you to Robert Berg for your wonderful leadership and energy and please join me in once again giving it up for Melanie who has been a stalwart in this field for so long. I like your membership surveys. And her wonderful team, thank you everybody. Enjoy the long weekend.