 Welcome, everyone. So I don't have a glass to hit against here. Thank you, Sandra. So crinkling of potato chip bags is allowed. Well, it is such a great honor and privilege to be in this beautiful, airy, open room, introducing this segment of a conversation between John and Susan Marks and Kristen Lord. And I found myself very emotional over the last few months, thinking about the transition at Search for Common Ground. But John and Susan have been so much more to us than colleagues. They've been deep friends to many of us, fellow travelers on a very, very difficult road in peace building, and members of our community who will be in our hearts no matter where they are. And it's just such a great honor and privilege today to be able to welcome you here to USIP. As all of you saw in the very moving film that you saw before lunch, John and Susan's vision was to see peace where no one else did. And the tribute film highlights that vision and the deep humanity that both of you bring to the deep enterprise of peace. It's amazing that over 30 years, you've had optimism that's always been tempered with a clear-eyed view of reality. And that optimism suffuses all you do. It inspires all of us. In Search for Common Ground, the organization that you have founded and nurtured embodies the deepest values of our field, and indeed, in many ways, has come to define our field. In all of your work, you are locally led. There's never a question of you are coming in and imposing a vision on people in conflict. It's endlessly creative, whether it's soap operas, or media, or training security sector actors. You find the solution that works best for the people there in conflict, and you run with it in ways that are, again, endlessly creative and multifaceted. You always think about the balance of what works locally with what we can learn globally and have tremendous generosity in sharing the lessons that you've learned and thinking about how you transpose that work from one setting to another. And you always care about building the field and the broader enterprise of peace that's never just been about search, but about this larger common enterprise. Search for Common Ground has served as a training ground for some of the most talented people in our field. And it's not at all surprising that the transition has been handled with your trademark brilliance, creativity, compassion, and integrity. And we look forward to the next chapter in your own lives and in the wonderful organization that you founded. And you can count on all of us to carry on the values and the tradition of the work that you started. So we all look forward to hearing your conversation today. And before I get period, I just wanted to thank you again for everything. Now you're dealing with special people when they're, your moderator tears up at the introduction. John, Susan, thank you so much for being here with us today. John, let me start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about starting Search for Common Ground and how you've both then seen it change and grow over time? We all saw the video, but give us your own personal perspective on not just the starting of the organization, but really the evolution of the organization. Okay. Well, I have a confession. I started out, I was adversarial to the core. And I was a committed activist against the war in Vietnam, against the abuses of the intelligence agencies. I worked for a U.S. Senator, who, Clifford Case in New Jersey in the Case Church legislation was what cut off funding for the war. And that's what I did for three years. And I got to the point in my own life when I saw that what I was doing, the work I was doing that defined me was defined by what I was against. And I saw that I wanted to start a new way of being. I wanted to build rather than to tear down. And it was out of that impulse in 1982, when this Cold War was really at its height and to say there couldn't be common ground in that context. And I had enough putzbo or enough, if you will, craziness. I had just gotten divorced, so I didn't have a lot of responsibility. And I just said, this is what I want to do with my life. And I wanted to become a common grounder. I wanted to transform the way the world worked into non-adversarial. Susan, how's the organization changed? How's it really evolved? Because it did start during the Cold War, but it's gone through all kinds of permutations. Well, I'm sorry, we're gonna do this equally, and I'm not gonna, she'll finish my sentences. We started in a small office right off Dupont Circle, you know, which was about as mom and pop as you could be. There were two employees, and now we have 560 employees. And the big change to my mind is you have to administer them. You have to give people vacations and HR and medical things. And that's absolutely, I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but what's really changed from my point of view is I don't get to do the work nearly as much as I like. I get to administer or manage the work. You can identify with that one. I'd like to add a story to this. When we'd grown search to about 40 people, we really began to experience the bureaucracy that was necessary, and there needs to be a balance between the program that we go out to do and the nurturing, the structure that we come back to. And we have a little tiny cabin in Virginia, and we went and we sat on a rock in the river. We called it our vision rock. And we said, do we really want to do this? And what we saw sitting on that rock under the trees was that this field needed institutions. It needed to institutionalize. It needed to grow itself into a player in the world. And we thought that we could build one of those. We think there should be many, and indeed there are. But this is way back, this is a long time ago, and we decided that this is something that we would do. So it was a very conscious decision to grow search from the small beginnings. And when I joined search, search was about 11 years old when I came in. We were about 12 or 15 people. And from there we just opened our first field office and we now have 55 offices in 34 countries. And we saw that that was the model that would allow us to be immersed on the ground, have people who are there year in year are trusted part of the culture. And one of the principles, and I'll end with this, was that we would always have people from the different sides of the conflict working together. And so we would model on the ground what it is we want to see in the world, our vision for the world. So for instance, in our Jerusalem office, we have Palestinian and Israeli co-directors, both women, by the way. And that is mirrored throughout the organization. Yeah, I just want to add, because Susan's left over it, that for the first 10 or 11 years of search, we went along pretty much like this. It was a level not growing, not shrinking existence. Susan joined us about 20 years ago, and since then we've grown at the rate of 20 to 25% a year. Now that's not a coincidence. And I don't think they teach at Harvard Business School that the way to expand is to marry your expansion. But what happens is that we have combined qualities that make for a much more powerful leadership. My skill, if I have some, is probably setting up projects and dealing and always in the cause and within the context of our work. Susan is much better with people than I am. And that combination works very well. So you've talked to some about how the organization has grown and expanded, but actually let's reflect for just a moment on how much the world has changed since search started. I mean, this was an organization that started during the Cold War. You saw the Cold War end. You then saw the genocide in Rwanda, the wars in the Balkans. Many civil wars in Africa actually come to a close. Then 9-11, and now flashing forward to today, all the conflicts I mentioned at the beginning of the day, you know, Syria, DRC, Afghanistan, and so on. What have you learned about preventing and mitigating and transforming conflict in that time? And I'm particularly interested if there are views you had earlier that have really changed. From directly to joint search from the South African peace process. And that's really where I cut my teeth, was on the front lines, we were discovering how to do what we did every day. I mean, the secret that nobody really knows is we didn't have a clue what we were doing. And we did it anyway. And we learned through trial and error. And we did something extraordinary. We the people of South Africa. We the people of the peace process. We the people who said we will move towards a new South Africa. Just as today you meet with people in Libya who hold the vision of a new Libya despite what happened on Sunday. And they still do. So for me, there was a basis that I came into this with where I'd learned some things. But what I immediately knew and discovered and learned was of course that every place is different. However, there's a dance there. And the dance is that while every place is different and everybody we ever speak to and we interact with and engage with in any conflict will say well of course mine is different. And you feel that, we felt that in South Africa. At the same time, there are many principles and practices and lessons learned that can make a huge difference. They can save so much time. They can leapfrog us all forward. And I think that that understanding that all you can do is come and say look, this is what we've discovered. These are some things that have worked somewhere else. Is there anything here that can work for you? And offer that experience to allow people to make it their own. But at least what you're doing is holding a basket of experience. A place to start. In South Africa, we felt that we were starting right from scratch. And I have to say that the trainers who came in right in the beginning to help us, many of them were American trainers. Including Jim Lowey, including Bill Potapchak, including others, that I'm just at this age. Oh, and so it was very important that we were given some tools. However, what we then did was to make those our own and refashion them in our own way. And I think that from that place, it's possible to keep moving, to keep engaging in the many different conflicts of our world, which are so diverse, in an open way that is not just going in and saying, what do you want us to do? Because when people came to us in South Africa and said that, it wasn't very helpful. But in saying, what is it that, these are some things that we can offer. Is there anything here? And I think that was a big understanding that I got. Only once I'd left South Africa and started to move in other places in the world. And I think I got about that same time. In fact, my trip to South Africa, where I met Susan, had a really important effect on this. But what I got was that you could work societally. You could work across entire countries. I think before that, I had been into workshops and trainings, a more individual approach. And in South Africa, I saw a whole society transforming and actually a peace process at the heart of it. Susan was on the regional peace executive secretariat in Cape Town, but I met the people who were doing media. I met the people who were doing community convocations and the like. And what I saw was a whole society transforming using the methodology that was coming out that I wanted to use. And in fact, some of it was born because American conflict resolution experts went down there in the 80s. But the conflict resolutions guys and women all went home. And what happened is South Africa took some of those principles, developed what I think at the time was the best core of conflict resolvers in the world and found ways to apply it across their whole country. When I came back, I'm not sure if it was exactly at that moment, but I sort of came up with this concept of societal conflict resolution, societal conflict transformation, that if you worked in a multi-pronged way, in other words, if you did many things at the same time, more one or two might even be effective and that they would feed on each other and having the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. And the place where we took this out in the beginning was in Burundi in about 20 years ago when the place Rwanda had just gone through its genocide and Burundi was next to her with the same ethnic mix and the thousands of people were getting killed every month it just wasn't yet genocidal. I'm not sure what actual genocide is, but we went in and we did radio, we worked with youth, we worked with women, we had a national drumming contest. You wanna communicate with people in Burundi, drumming is where it's at. Well, that hadn't been in my toolbox before, I wanna tell you. And it wasn't something that I even, it could imagine because I was sitting 5,000 miles away but Shyamal Idris who is my successor was our country director in Burundi at the time and he said we should use drumming. And one of the strengths of search has been that we have field directors who are not, need, don't have to sit there and do what headquarters tells them. They have a great deal of autonomy in terms of what's going on in the culture and what programs you should use and that's one of the secrets of our success it seems to me of not trying to centralize this from a programmatic point of view it's our local leaders, our local staff that comes up with the best kinds of ideas. Well, all of this I think I knew on some level but I never knew how to apply it and it was being engaged. Napoleon said, en sainte-gage-puis-en-voix one becomes engaged and then you see what the possibilities are and to my mind that's the core operational metaphor of the work we do and try to sell that one to a foundation or a government funder. And I'd just like to add that Sandra Malone who's searches executive vice president and I'm sure known to most of you was our first director of our women's peace center in Burundi and so she went out on those very difficult days and it's that experience on the ground that's equipped her to just come back into Europe and then into the states to be the leader that you all know her to be. So search for common ground is a big idea and it's also an organization that's greater than the sum of its parts but the body of work is really right now a very large collection of initiatives and projects. Do you have a favorite? Is there, do you have a personal favorite or is there a time where you said ah, now I know we've made a difference. Do you have children? I do. Do you tell one of them you like them better than another one? I have solved this problem by having an only child. I do but I'm not talking. I mean some cultures you resonate with you really like it, you get into the problem and others don't do that for me but I'm not gonna get into which ones are which. Michael over there shipped there probably could guess. Well I'd like to talk on a slightly different level about this I think that if I look at three things that I just, when I see the growth of the organization to where it is today and I see the treasures of search which are the people, the people who come to search by the way 81% of our colleagues are nationals so this is very much rooted in the ground and when I go out into our programs and see who we have in all our different offices in Washington and Brussels as well the treasures of our people who have come to us who've been drawn to us who, to me this is a magical thing, it's complete magic because all the right people as the video says turn up at the right time. The second thing is the pioneering of media for peace building has made such a huge difference and for us it's not just the media because what happens is in the DRC you saw a tiny clip of it but the programs are taken out on mobile cinema. There are facilitated conversations. The programs are used for listening groups and these are radio and television programs around the world and so often the media becomes the jumping off point for much deeper conversation and program because for people it's quite often really hard to talk to each other and this provides a gate through which they can go as well as of course reaching millions of people and the third area that is a particular love of mine is our work, our track two work, we have a track two division, we actually for our track two are quiet behind the scenes work that we do as well as the people to people work that we do this and you saw on the video the little bit about our work between the United States and Iran that's been going on for 18 years. It's again this longevity is one of the things we've learned is staying with things and staying with things through the tough times and when they dip and we all feel like giving up because nothing happens, that's the time when we can actually do a lot because keeping the connections going, keeping the contact, keeping ourselves in good order and good shape, keeping ourselves optimistic is an important piece of them being able to work with the players with the protagonists and so staying with things when times are hard is often difficult and extremely important and it's something that we can do even on the phone or with Skype, we don't have to be there, we can do it without money if the funding runs out for a while but it means when something starts up again, we're in place, we are connected, we're known, which has happened for instance with Iran and of course there are many other places that we're working which I won't mention. So I find that work and the facilitation of that work and holding again, holding that space for people to truly connect with each other. I know that this room is full of facilitators and isn't it the most wonderful thing? Isn't it just something to be able to do this, to have people trust us, to allow us to facilitate them except when they don't but they mostly do? So we are blessed, what we do in the world, who we are in the world, and I want to come to that a bit later, is as important as what we do but what we do is an extraordinary thing because it demands that people allow us to do it and they do and they do because of who all of you are, not in your titles but in your essence, in what you bring and that passion and commitment and care that you bring. Yeah, I want to go back to the thought, two thoughts ago for Susan, what she was talking about with that long term thing, we called the Woody Allen approach. Woody Allen and Annie Hall says that 80% of success is showing up and you have to keep showing up in this work. This goes absolutely against the grain of the funders who want to know your exit strategy. We've been showing up between the US and Iran for 18 years. Every five or six years it gets really interesting but if we're not doing it, if we're not there, we lose totally the ability to keep doing the work and we were able to, or Ambassador Bill Miller who works as our Iran coordinator was able to be the key negotiator in the freeing of the hikers because we had been showing up and again with things coming near Dayton, we're in a position that we have the connections, we have the contacts to start track two up again to be facilitating and mediating and carrying messages and the like and that is impossible if you have this break or you go off and work in something else or whatever and it's just a very key part of our work. Well, let's talk about the tough times a bit. The film's a lovely tribute to you both and you know this luncheon is very much a tribute to you both but I think you both also know all too well how very hard this work can be. What are the biggest challenges you see for all of us for the peace building community going forward and what are the things we most need to get better at in order to deal with some of those challenges? I think that the biggest challenge is being taken seriously in the annals of government and this work needs to be something that policy makers call on. They don't right now, it's an adjunct, they might fund an occasional workshop or training but it's not part of the core thinking and I could get into long reasons why that's so and like it doesn't fit, the field has some problems and all of that but I think getting taken seriously and having real resources put into this. I'm not talking about the kind of resources that we all scramble around to get, I'm talking about serious kind of resources because you can do things and then beyond that I think that the notion of preventive action needs to be assimilated, it needs to be taken into the guts of people in the policy making world because it's not now. There's no government I know really practices prevention. They practice crisis management, they practice after the fact post-conflict. I think post-conflict is a dangerous concept because it's pre-conflict is the much more interesting place, it's the place we can be much more useful than in the post-conflict world but the governments move from crisis to crisis which means it's already gotten to the point where there's nothing to be done probably because they're in a crisis where the war started, where the genocide started. We need to work much more preventively and the policy makers need to understand that. And I would just add to the first point about being taken seriously starts with us taking ourselves seriously and I don't mean taking ourselves seriously in our work, we all do that but taking ourselves seriously in relation to policy makers, in relation to high levels of leadership. It's a difficult thing in some cases because many of us come into this field because we care deeply about community and we're not necessarily that good at connecting with those high levels that's aemic around the world but there's another piece to it and that piece to it is for us to stand in our feet firmly on the ground recognizing our own worth. Recognizing our own worth not only as individuals but as people who are doing this work and knowing the difference that this work makes in the world and you know there's a real shift in energy when we stand for who we are and I think so often we go cap in hand or we go feeling a little bit, we may not name it as this but we go feeling less than and this is an old chestnut but I do know that every single person in this room and all our colleagues who do this work have the right to stand and be counted and be listened to and taken seriously and we need to claim that in our hands so that is what energetically we communicate to the people that we're with and never doubt that that energy is really the essence of what we all receive from each other and we all give to each other and that's operating every second of our lives so stand for who you are, you are wonderful you are amazing, you are doing extraordinary things in the world and what we need to be doing is be doing more of that and making it, taking it into places where we get the resources, where we not only get the financial resources but we get that credibility that allows us to move forward. Let me ask you one more question before we turn to questions and answers from the audience. Do we have microphones available for the audience? Good, so we're gonna ask you to just identify yourself and where you're from before you ask your question but before we turn to you, let me close with this. What words of wisdom or advice would you have for all of us? These people here assembled today are working hard every day to promote the shared vision that you and we all have. What words of advice would you share? I'd like to expand on what I just said which is to really recognize that who we are as peacemakers in the world is what makes the difference that the transformational is what makes the difference. The technical is in service of the transformational. The technical is in service of the transformational and so we have to look to our own lives, look to our organizations, look to our partnerships, look to our relationships. And we're all gonna be making mistakes and we're going to be, I know I do every single day. Every single day I fall off this line that I set for myself that I aspire to, that I want to be. What I've learned to do is pick myself up and come back again and again and again so that I can really live the way that allows me to be effective. And it's all about effectiveness. It's what the military calls the readiness. It's about readiness and who we are is about readiness. And when I did some work with the United States military, I've worked with militaries and police all over the world. When I did work with the United States military at D.O.Me, the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, what I discovered there to my absolute joy was that who we are was seen as one aspect of readiness. And so this isn't just me. This is something that is recognized. And I offer to you that from my heart and from my soul is that we need to be the piece we want to see in the world and not just say those words. It's the best and most important thing we can do. I hesitate to say this because after what Susan just said, I'm going to sound quite technical, but I would say don't be swept away by this notion of metrics and measurement and the like. It doesn't work for prevention. How do you prove something didn't happen? And it's very, very difficult. And I see it as a real threat to the field. And it gets people into lowest common denominator kinds of projects because you need, you can measure them. If you have a workshop that reaches 30 people, you can do a very precise measurement afterwards 98% liked it. Whereas if you do something like we're doing TV in Kenya, we reach four million people a week. You can't measure that the effect, but it probably it's at least as important as a workshop. And this notion of measurement and results and everything else, my sense is having a very negative impact on the field. And it's something we all go along with and we do. Search has this great evaluation, DM&E thing. I'm not saying we don't do this. And it's very important to do it, but it's not the field and it shouldn't define the field. Could I just modify that a little bit and add to it and say that I think it's a both and that we really can do, there are some things that are measurable. And I think what the difficulty is, is trying to apply measurement to things that are not measurable. And much of our field is not measurable. And I would just add that to what John was saying. I agree, Ms. Gidee, we have things to talk about you now. But there must be some common ground, always. Mostly. Let's take a question. Yes, sir. There'll be a mic coming. David Steele, currently adjunct faculty, Brandeis University, also. I'm sorry, I can't hear you, David. Currently adjunct faculty, co-existence program, Brandeis University, but also been a consultant in many places in the world. My start was with Search for a Common Ground when it was a six-person office in Washington, D.C. And we didn't not only get health insurance, I didn't get a salary. I remember John telling me, stay with us, don't go get a PhD. I ignored his advice. And later when I saw him after I got my PhD, I said, I probably should have stayed with you. I'm not sure how much the PhD prepared me, but look at how your organization has grown. Tremendous amount of work that both of you have done. I really want to thank you for the model. I have a very basic question. You are a large organization now, and I, you know, laud that. When you talk about having longevity of support around the world is something I absolutely agree with. Even if it doesn't coincide with funding cycles, I completely agree with that. I've been able to do that probably once in my life. But most of us don't work for large organizations. So my question really is, how do you prioritize what you do, who you build relationships with that you continue for 18 or plus years? How do you go about doing that, you in your positions, but also most of us who don't have staffs of four or 500 people around the world, how do you manage that, given the kind of context that we work in, the kind of funding cycles that we have, problems with M&E that you were just talking about, which I understand, how do you do it? What recommendations do you have? How do you prioritize it? Yes. Look, there's no single way of prioritizing, frankly. Sometimes we went into barindy because we were afraid of genocide. Stopping genocide changed my priorities. In other words, we put a lot of energy into doing that. Sometimes we've gone into new countries because they're next to the countries we were already working, and there was an opportunity. I think you have to be open to opportunities and you can't do everything and you have to make choices. But I don't like to make the choices until I need to make the choices. And I think to try to prioritize in the beginning, in the abstract, through a central planning process, is probably not the best way to be an effective conflict resolver. Now, we have some standards. In the beginning, we could go into a country off the seat of my pants. I'd get on an airplane and go. I even had one project I'd put on my credit card. I don't do that anymore. We're too big for that. And now we have to find money. We have to find funding to be able to do things. So that becomes the bottom line. Not that that's where we choose, but if we can't find funding, we can't do it. And so that is kind of a leavening aspect. And you need to make priorities, but it's not totally clear that you can make them in the abstract. Well, and the other part of your question, David, which was, and hello, what the other part was to do with how to, and I've just lost my thread. How do you build the relationships? How do we keep them from the place that we are? We don't. We're very localized. At some years ago, at one of our gatherings, bringing people in from the country directors in, there was a discussion about, are we an international organization with local chapters or are we local organizations with an international kind of headquarters over there somewhere? It reflected an experience, I remember going back to Burundi, our first Africa program, which John and I went to open initially, and going back a couple of years later and people welcoming us to search, not search for common ground in Burundi, but search for common ground. And it was the most wonderful thing because what had happened is they'd made it their own. So the relationships and the funding are all local now, just about, and there are things that clearly that we will be doing as well. And we keep a network, a web of relationships alive and we have now a much broader management structure. Just to finish on this, we have this very broad management structure with Sandra and others who are all making the connections. I don't know what to say to you when you say most of us don't have that. And I know that in my own life, and we have at search is we do what we can do. And I think each of us has to do what we can do and trust that that which we are doing and that which is possible for us is what we're meant to be doing. I don't think scale, we've talked a lot about scale, but I don't think scale is a measure of our effectiveness or a measure of our success. I really don't. I think what's a measure of anything is that we feel that we are now doing what we're on this planet to be doing and that we're meant to be doing. And whether it's with a community group here or whether it's on a bigger scale is not the issue. And I think it's such an important thing to say. And I don't want it to sound weird coming from us because we've been talking about the scale. That's just what is. We just are at that scale and we've set out to do that. But it doesn't necessarily make it the thing that other people should aspire to or measure themselves against. In fact, the opposite is true. Let's take another question in the back please. Hello, there we go. Can you hear or can you not hear? Speak loudly. Okay, can you hear better now? Yes. Okay, marvelous. So my name is Joel Brannold. I'm the project director for the One Voice Movement. And I'm gonna just walk forward because there's no way that I think you can hear. So hold up. He's a project manager with one voice. Hi, can you hear better? Yes. Okay, marvelous. So my name's Joel. I'm the project director for the One Voice Movement. And the question I have for you now that you guys are transitioning out and sort of are going to be thought leaders in this space is that the majority of innovation on the donor side is very much in metric driven philanthropy. So impact investing, sort of looking at how you can use your endowment. But for those of us like my foundation that work on sort of, as we heard in the last session, complex systems that require a lot of non metric driven or provisional metrics. How can we encourage non metric philanthropy innovation? Cause grants are just drying up and you guys have so much expertise and thought leadership. What are your suggestions for the field? The question was how can we, how can people develop, how can we all develop non metric driven philanthropy? John is with One Voice who we know extremely well and have from the beginning. And the question is how do we, given One Voice which is working in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where things so much is not measurable, as we were saying, how do we generate a field of philanthropy? That is not metric driven cause it is moving in that direction. And particularly with individual philanthropists, there's an insecurity I think that demands metric. So we need to make them secure for one thing. And one of the best ways to do that is to take people with you to the field. I think the best way of enrolling anybody is for them to be engaged and to see, I get enrolled completely. Every time I go out to one of our programs, I fall in love. I mean, it's as simple as that. And I become an advocate and then I move away and go to another one. And so I do think that that's one of the things that we all need to be doing. It's a part of also educating people. It's the question we went to earlier about being taken seriously by policy makers. And as much as possible, our programs on the ground are involving, the embassies are involving the policy makers and I know one voice does this very well actually. So we have to be very strategic about this. We have to really put a huge amount of effort, and it does take a huge amount of effort into generating the kind of resources that we need, both in terms of the money and in terms of support. I have to say that if I had the answer to your question, we'd be a much bigger organization than we are. We could spend much more money usefully, but I have some ideas on how to get there. One is organizations like USIP, and with Kristen's leadership and Steve Risken is involved in this, are trying to develop sort of funding for the whole field. In other words, they're doing things to make the field be able to receive funding. And that means new sources of funding. I hesitate to say, but most governments are not into what you're talking about. They have a need to talk to their parliaments, to their congresses, and it's hard for them to sort of do loosey-goosey sort of funding, which is what we're talking about here. But private philanthropists can do this, and one voice has, let's just say, sells a lot of humus. It has commercial ventures which are connected to it, which support it. Individual donors get past this thing. We don't have the right mix on this. We are starved as an organization for core funding, as most organizations are probably in this room. It's a terrible tragedy for us because it means we can't be as effective as we really could be in the world. If you were starting, somebody were investing in a new business, they wouldn't say, we're not gonna let you have computers or we're not gonna give you any money for your rent or your electric bill, because we feel that's wasteful somehow, and that's the situation that most of our funders called us in. We wanna pay for projects. We wanna pay for real results, but you have to get results you need overhead as well as project money. And there's a shortage of those who do it. So this is something I'm hugely concerned about. I spend an awful lot of my day worrying about it, and there is no easy answer. But I think organizations like this, people, every time I talk to a funder, I say this. I mean, this is not something that I keep secret. And I think there can be, let us say, a groundswell of people saying this after a while, they might even hear it. But I'm not too optimistic this is gonna happen in the next day or so. So we have time for one last question. So who is a question that's a suitable last question so we can end at a high point? You look very confident, so I'll call on you. So first of all, thanks very much. I think it might be a super last question. My name is Kiran. I'm from the International Storytelling Center. And first of all, just wanna thank you for sharing your wisdom, your experience, your stories. So my question is really what you were saying when you said we came into this because we cared deeply about community. Based on your experience and your wisdom through these years, what recommendations do you have or what guidance might you have for how we can encourage young people, the next generation of peacemakers to stay committed in their belief or caring for their community in the challenges that we might be facing in the future? Could you hear that? Well, I think there are hundreds of conflict resolution peace study programs in universities and there are essentially no jobs. And so one way we could do this is to create jobs. We, at any given time, we're trying to employ these young people, but I don't think most people who come out of these programs get to work in these fields even if they want to. So that's one thing that could be doing would be job creations, a problem all over the world clearly, and it's a conflict problem but it's particularly acute in our field. And so I would start with that. What would you take? You know, my own experience of young people is that they've got more passion and commitments and love and longing for a different kind of world than we can contain and that they can contain. There's so many who want to make a difference in the world. And for us to be mentors, everybody in this room is a mentor, you're a mentor to somebody and you can be more so for us to be mentors, to be encouraging. We need to encourage each other, by the way, as well as encourage young people to be of support in sharing what we have, sharing our knowledge, sharing our writing, sharing everything that we can. We're an open source organization. We made that decision many years ago. We discovered Linux, do you remember, any of you remember Linux? And Linux was this open source in contrast to Microsoft and we were so entranced with the idea that this was something that didn't belong to anybody, that we made that a principle of our organization. That we're in all our evaluations, warts and all, I'll put on the web, for instance. But everything, you can go into our sites and you can find step by step how to make a radio soap opera because we put everything we can out there. Share everything with young people and encourage them. When they come to see us, which they do a lot for informational interviews, which I didn't know that term when I was looking for a job. And really what I encourage young people to do is to get experience, to go to one of the marvelous mediation centers and community centers and get practice at being mediators. Do back fence dogs barking, whatever it is, but get that experience. Because when somebody comes to me as an employer and says, you know, I've done this and I've gone into the court system, I know they're serious. So I think we can help young people to take themselves seriously, knowing as John says that many will not get jobs in this field, but they will take that essence into whatever they do. And in the end, that's what we need. It doesn't, the field is just one thing. But in every single area of the world, every single strand of the world, there is conflict. Whether you're in health or education or you're a canoeist, there's gonna be conflict. And if we can generate and encourage people to take these skills, this knowledge, this passion into that, we will be transforming the world. So I think there are many ways that all of us in our daily lives can be making a difference. And I love your question, which is, how can we make a difference with young people? And thank you for allowing us to end on that. Let's really, okay. John, Susan, I wanna thank you for.