 Good morning, everyone. It got so quiet, and we were sort of saying, oh, should we start early? But then we remembered that we have a whole webcast audience, and so we should really wait to start. My name is Carla Coppell. I'm Vice President of the Center for Applied Conflict Transformation here at the US Institute of Peace. The US Institute of Peace, as hopefully you know, because you're all here, was created over 30 years ago because we are committed to the proposition that peace is practical, possible, and cost-effective. And it's my pleasure to be welcoming you this morning to celebrate International Youth Day. And I will say happy International Youth Day, although it is not quite International Youth Day yet. But we wanted to welcome you to this event a little bit in anticipation of International Youth Day because we couldn't wait for it to take place. We're pleased to be here co-sponsoring this event with a number of partners, including the US Agency for International Development, Search for Common Ground, Youth Power Learning. And it's great to be here with all of you both in the room, and we have a full house, which is wonderful, and as well those who are watching online, for a really spirited conversation about resolution, UN Security Council Resolution 2250, and the power of youth leadership to foster peace, prevent conflict, and foster reconciliation. Why is UN Security Council Resolution 2250 important? And I won't take too much time, but I'll tell you a story. I have spent less time working on issues related to youth peace and security, and more related to women peace and security, which is UN Security Council Resolution 1325. And I see a bunch of nodding heads, and I'm glad, because the reason I raised 1325 was when I first started working on issues related to women peace and security, I was working with a colleague who said, you know, how many Security Council Resolutions can you actually name by their number? And the answer is very, very few. But 1325, which was created just over 15 years ago, is one of those that a lot of people recognize by its number, and that's very much because it was used as a tool to mobilize and create change around the world. It was one of many tools. It was taken by thousands and thousands of people, a piece of paper doesn't make change, but it is an instrument for driving forward that change. And I would wish a similar legacy on 2250, which is a much younger resolution, but brings within an equally important message about how you harness key stakeholders in countries around the world to change the way conflicts are resolved, to avoid violence, and to end that violence when it starts. And so the legacy, and what my colleague said, was maybe we should all walk around Washington, DC with those big sandwich boards. Ask me about, now we could put in, in this case, 2250, is that we should really use, talk about, disseminate information and stories, and some of the stories we're gonna hear this morning, it's really important to push those out, because ultimately that's what's gonna help us make change in the world. With that, I want to introduce Michael McCabe, who is a friend, former colleague from when I was at USAID, to the, I don't know if you're gonna talk from there or from here. Probably. Okay. He is US Agency for International Development's youth coordinator. He brings over 28 years of experience, working on development programs, and helps integrate youth engagement and youth development issues across the agency, is implementing the youth policy, which was created a couple of years ago, and is a senior representative on youth issues to the interagency and external communities. I enjoyed seeing Michael take flight at USAID, and I know he's both carried forward the agenda with gusto, and so I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say. Again, I would offer you my welcome this morning. I would remind you that you can participate in the conversation using hashtag youthforpeace, and I look forward to a robust conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Carla, and thank you to USIP for agreeing to host us all here. It's wonderful to see so many people who are passionate and interested about it, and especially here in the audience here, so many young leaders that have been able to come out to be part of the conversation today. So again, thank you for the celebration and for our other co-sponsors of this event, Search for Common Ground, Youth Power Learning, and young leaders like Imrana, who will share some of his work in Nigeria. Again, we're celebrating International Youth Day a little bit early this week. The UN has dedicated this year's theme to engaging youth in peace and security. USAID is also going through a really exciting week. Yesterday, Ambassador Mark Green started as our new administrator for USAID. I had the pleasure last year for International Youth Day to celebrate it with Ambassador Green at IRI for a celebration of what young people were doing in civic leadership, and it was great to see his passion and deep understanding of why young people have to be engaged as key partners in development. In addition, USAID this month has decided to dedicate the whole month, not just a day, to really looking and lifting up how young people are making an impact in their communities. So last week, we had the pleasure of having 1,000 young African leaders through Yali, the Mandela Fellows in town for the African leaders forum, and if you've never been part of that summit, the energy of the young people that are working on all sorts of development issues across the continent is infectious. This week, we obviously are focusing a lot on how young people are playing a role in youth peace and security and all different types of violence, prevention and peace building. And then throughout the rest of the month, we'll be highlighting the work that young people are doing, for example, in humanitarian response in the four famine areas and in other forms of responding to conflict zones, as well as how young people are helping deliver on education for all. So USAID is really committed along with the partners that are here on really increasing that visibility and the support to young people to continue making that change. I also just recently came back from Uganda where I was participating at the Commonwealth Youth Ministers Conference and it had about 50 different youth ministers from around the world as well as donors and young leaders. And the feeling that one leaves there with is this tremendous sense of optimism when you meet young people like Achaleli Christian Lekhi from Cameroon who, despite a early involvement in challenging circumstances and violence in Cameroon, has become a true champion and leader of working to combat violent extremism by working with young people in the prisons and help them with the links to the type of skill training and soft skills and counseling they need, as well as a pathway when they come out to reintegrate into their communities and be effective. Or Mohamed Salehle, who was there from Jordan, who was working with young people, grew up as an orphan himself in Palestinian refugee camps there and found a way to create iLearn where he, through his network of volunteer-led organizations, is transforming the way young people get access to education and other livelihood opportunities in refugee situations, whether from Syrian or Palestinian refugee camps and communities there. So the optimism to see what young people are able to do and often with too little resources but with a tremendous aptitude for how they mobilize the use of social media technology and their own networks to really bring about change. That's what we're looking to figure out how do we better lift up and support to expand that impact and development. So today, we're here to explore three things that Carla outlined. One, where we've come in terms of the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 2250 over the past two years in engaging youth in meaningful roles. Two, what we're learning works in terms of violence prevention and peace building with young people, especially around comprehensive community-led and youth-led strategies. And three, some of the new resources that we'd like to highlight that the different organizations represented here on the panel, as well as those in the audience can share so that we're giving the right tools to young people and really building out their capacity in that sense. And then finally, we'll leave enough time for a lot of questions, hopefully, both from the audience here as well as those that are online. Let me start with just a few brief introductions of who's on our panel. I want to start with Imrana Abuba, who is from Northern Nigeria. We need to say happy birthday to him, because yesterday was his 25th birthday, so big happy birthday to you. Imrana is a generation change fellow with USIP, as well as a Yali Mandela fellow. He's a Nigerian leader focused on efforts to counter violent extremism and is the founder of an organization called Youth Coalition Against Terrorism, YOKAT, which is a volunteer-based network working throughout Northeastern Nigeria. He holds a degree in political science from the University of Madaguri, and he was also the 2016 recipient of the Queen's Award for Youth Leadership, recognizing the most outstanding young leaders across the Commonwealth that Queen Elizabeth met with him recently last year. We also have Rachel Walsh, Tasa, who is the program coordinator for Search for Common Ground and the Children and Youth Division and she supports their work on empowering youth to be true agents of conflict transformation in their communities by facilitating knowledge, sharing along with the organization's effective practice development area. She also works through the UN Organization of Youth Peace Builders and has recently worked to lead the global survey on youth peace and security, which gathered input from about 399 youth-related organizations. Aubrey Cox, who everyone here knows, I'm sure, is the senior program specialist in the Center for Applied Conflict Transformation at USIP and she manages the institute's youth portfolio, including the Generation Change Fellows Program and before USIP she worked a lot on double bottom-line investments in funding for development, as well as on global health issues in 14 countries and on interfaith youth peace-building programs. And then Jen Hogue is, Dr. Jen Hogue is our co-champion of the Youth Power Learning Community of Practice for Youth Peace and Security and that community practice really works to advance the evidence base on what we know works on youth peace and security and she brings a long background in academia, policy development and programs and activism over 14 years, working both in the US and overseas in the Middle East and North Africa on these issues and she's worked not only with USAID but with the US House of Representatives and USIP. And we'll close the day with Andy Ravens who is the Special Advisor for Global Youth Affairs at the US State Department, where he works in the Office of Public Diplomacy really helping set the stage through the US State Department on how we engage young people across the world in governance and democracy issues and development issues and really raising that voice in our foreign affairs. So we'd like to start to set the tone today just by sharing a recent video that we just completed at USAID on some of the experience and the stories of youth as peace builders. So we're gonna start with this three minute video and then we'll jump right into the dialogue questions that we have, so. At age nine, first I get up to store anything because of hunger. I was 13 when I started boxing guns. Shoot off of me. Man, shoot off of me. Shoot off of people, see me. So I told him, no, I didn't do anything. It was Hezel. So they were looking for me to kill me. The last shot that he made me, he fell on my back. And he came out of my heart. Muslims killed the Christians and the Christians too also killed the Muslims. Let's imagine a house on fire. I'm trying to die inside. I became my daughter. I decided to change because I don't want to get a job. I'm trying to teach the younger ones to grow up in a better way and try to do what you feel you can do, what people think you can do. After I recovered, I started to skate again. I thought, let's create a skate club. We play on Sunday, we worship. When I come back from the camp, I was not deciding to separate the news to my community that the Christians are not evil. They should stop cursing the Christians. They should stop blaming them. Because in Nigeria, there are a lot of women that can promote peace. I'm one of them. To see a nice environment, no more guns, no more young war. There's no way that violence can be a better alternative to peace. There's no way you can live without peace. There's no way you can live without love. A special thanks to Kerry Oates who helped put that together. Bringing the power of young talent at USAID to tell them the stories as well as to a lot of our USAID colleagues who are here in Tom Stoller, our agency senior counselor, who's been one of our main senior champions for youth across the agency. So let's begin. Aubrey, it's been almost two years since UN Security Council Resolution 2250, which put in place a framework for us to think about participation, prevention, protection, the various components. In terms of advances in helping national governments set up national plans of action and really the different ways that young people have been able to benefit from 2250. Thank you. So I'll start to answer that question with a little bit of framing for anybody who might not be as familiar with 2250. So UN Security Council Resolution 2250 was adopted in December of 2015. But before the adoption in August 2015, there was the Iman Youth Declaration, which was developed at the Global Forum for Youth Peace and Security. And out of that forum came documents and coalitions and partnerships that really led to the adoption of 2250. And the resolution was inspired by but also created with youth as partners for this resolution. So where are we in terms of once the adoption happened at the highest levels of the UN to the implementation? So there have been a lot of efforts to link and learn from the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 that Carla mentioned. There's a steering committee and interagency working group that has convened the authors and the implementers of 1325 to take those lessons and learn from the successes but also the sticking points of 1325 as kind of a model or a sister resolution to shape the implementation of 2250. And what we've seen since the adoption of the resolution is we've seen a number of national launches where local governments or national governments are starting to build these partnerships with youth to formalize the adoption and recognize the Security Council Resolution as a framework for the way they're going to engage youth. We've seen the larger international organizations also start to frame their work around the five pillars that are outlined in the resolution which include the participation, protection, partnerships, prevention and disengagement or reintegration of youth. And we can talk a bit more about the five pillars a little later. Great. Rachel, you've been through research for coming around working on the global progress study. Tell us a little bit about how 2250 and the global progress study is telling us how young people are being more engaged or more empowered around this topic. Sure. So the Security Council Resolution 2250 calls on the UN Secretary General to conduct a progress study on how youth are contributing to peace and security with the intention of developing effective responses at local, national, regional and international levels. And this study when it's released will really be a field defining and shaping report similar to Grashen Michelle's report on children and armed conflict 20 years ago which really defined the field of children and armed conflict. This will do the same for youth, peace and security. Part of the process so it's led and supported by technical experts is one of the progress study process is participatory and really focuses on getting youth voices and consulting with youth for their insights on how they're contributing to peace and security, the challenges they're facing and their needs and to contribute to that we along with United Network of Young Peace Builders conducted a global survey of youth-led organizations working in peace and security as far as we know this is the first time to conduct a survey like that at the scale and we had around 399 youth-led organizations around the world respond and fill out 28 questions about how they operate, the areas that they work in, the needs, challenges and their recommendations within the field of youth, peace and security. Of those 399 respondents around 40% of the youth-led organizations came from Africa 20% from Asia and the rest from Europe Middle East and North Africa and the Americas and what we found is that these youth-led organizations are primarily driven by volunteers and what I mean when I say that is 97% of the staff they report are unpaid and then more than that around 50% of these youth-led organizations working on critical issues of peace and security operate on less than 5,000 US dollars a year and when we go up to how many of them there are 1,000 US dollars a year that's 60% of the youth-led organizations working on peace and security and yet despite these limitations these resource limitations youth-led organizations are having impact on peace and security in their communities not only are they preventing violence preventing recruitment to violent extremist groups building social cohesion and interfaith unity and some places they're also the only organizations who have the access to deliver humanitarian aid where other organizations fail and we ask how do they do this and one important part is these youth-led organizations tend to be built on trust a shared sense of values and belonging and they've got credibility with their communities and with other young people which is demonstrated by the fact that most of their funds come from local donations and support from their own members and then another great strength that they have is access to these communities which I mentioned a little bit before and then another way is they overcome these funding challenges is they have creative solutions they might organize a sports tournament when an organization talked about how they organize sports tournaments and then use the ticket funds from selling tickets to actually fund their peace-building work in the community and the interesting thing we found is that both the staff and leadership of youth-led organizations tend to be fairly gender balanced for the field so 45% of staff and 45% of leadership of these youth-led organizations are female which was an interesting finding when we asked about the challenges that they're facing apart from some of these operational issues there also one of the biggest things that came up over and over again was a lack of trust from government and other stakeholders which really makes it harder for them to do their work also they're operating in context of conflict so they face threats of violence which makes it more difficult and we asked what are the needs how can we support them apart from funds partnerships at the regional and international level access to platforms for exchanging knowledge and then I'll just close with one more thought there's a lot more that you can find in the report there's a sheet at the entrance that has a link to the full report but I'll just close with we asked them what are your goals for the short and medium term for 2250 and the first thing that came out was how much trust and youth-led peace building and then after that they really focused on better representation of young people and local and national decision making having young people at the negotiating table basically they're asking to be taken seriously as credible peace builders wow excellent thank you so much for sharing those and especially the information within those organizations how many are driven by volunteer led and the importance of how we invest to allow for that growth of impact so Marana you live in a conflict impacted area on a daily basis in northeastern Nigeria you have worked to build an alliance of young leaders across that region tell us a little bit from your perspective on how your work has evolved and how young people are viewing their role as peace builders in northeastern Nigeria I come from northeastern Nigeria which is the hotspot of the Boko Haram insurgency and like Rachel mentioned in the report like trade like is daily basis we have bomb attacks on daily basis and even my story of how I started a peace building start from such kind of experiences the experience affected me both directly and indirectly I have family members that have been attacked by Boko Haram due to several attacks my friend was kidnapped for almost 3 weeks almost his father was able to pay ransom I personally have a story I have encountered with them when I got admission in the University of Meduguri which is like the bad place of the Boko Haram when I was coming back from school my boss was stopped by suspected Boko Haram terrorists they started to check IDs they normally look at people that are civil servant or student locally I don't have any ID with me because I just registered that day but they pick so many passengers and they take them to the bush maybe they kill them or they kidnap them and that is something that is happening on daily basis and when I look at the nature of the conflict most of the victims are young people and the administrators are young people at the same time that is what redefined my vision and inspired me to do something so in 2010 I founded a volunteer based youth organization like Raquel mentioned that is how most of the youth organizations operate we started on zero budget we don't have any like budget for activities it's just like a group of young people that are passionate about the work we started organizing peace education programs in schools training vocational that participation like to have space to have access to all the decision making process in peace and security discourse and that is very challenging that is what we need more and that is what we don't have for now most of the decisions are taken by elderly people they only like maybe come to consulates maybe after decisions have been taken but we don't we are not yet like part of the old discourse thank you so much Imrana for your courageous work and for translating how this framework really lives out on a daily basis I also want to give an opportunity to Jacob Bool who is here from South Sudan as a Yali fellow as well to talk just briefly about how you are working with young people on building peace in South Sudan for just a few minutes thank you I'm Jacob Bool from South Sudan I'm a Yali fellow on civic leadership track I was at Indiana University and I'm here at USIP for my professional development experience on South Sudan context we operate in a complex environment where freedom of expression and speech is not is not allowed last year after the conflict that broke out in the presidential palace in J1 we came together as a group of creative youth and form a youth movement that is called Anataban as one of the founders of Anataban campaign Anataban literally means it's an Arabic word that means I'm tired so we came together as youth of South Sudan the creative and we formed the campaign as a platform for the youth of South Sudan to speak up on issues that are happening in the country so literally it was an advocacy and civic engagement getting the youth to participate and to give their ideas and decision making we had lost faith in our leaders they had no political will to move the country forward that's what we heard in in our mind knowing that IGAT has been trying to facilitate the peace in South Sudan we came in and started mobilizing youth and going to different states in the country and getting them on board to talk about the issues that are happening in the country because we want them to take the ownership of what is happening to take the ownership of the country and get involved in decision making knowing that the biggest population in South Sudan are the youth they make over 72% of the population so who is there to make your decision to move the country it's all about you to step up and say all is all it's done we have been subjected to generations of war since 1955 until today until 1983 until today most of us were born in war so why don't we step up and create a future for ourselves and when is that future starting is today so that's what we always do with the ownership of the country on 20th of May this year we did an event called Haganah Haganah Festival under the support of USID through Vistas and the US Embassy in South Sudan and we managed to get over 5000 youth to the event and we talked to them about how do they get involved or rather how do they let their voices on decisions making that are happening in the country because by the end of the day the same people will get affected by this war that is happening in the country that the same people will lose their life that the same people whose kids are in the POC the protection of civilians side and the same people whose children are in the refugee camp so we hide them not to get involved on being actually incited by politicians who are just aiming on their political interests so it's more of a specific agenda because our politicians are just being egocentric it's just all about them so we're trying to get to disintegrate that point of them being focusing much on the political interests of the individuals rather than getting what their interests are and envisioning what country they want to have as a South Sudan so it's about imagining what ideal country do you want to have so that's what we do thank you so Jen CVE is a growing experience in terms of what we've learned works and what we're measuring in terms of outcomes tell us a little bit about the evidence on what works or promising practices thanks Mike so I have been working with youth for about 14 years I kind of backed into the CVE space because I really liked working in the Middle East and in Africa so I ended up working with Muslim youth so my perspective is very much a youth informed perspective and one thing that I'm seeing is that there's a lot of commonalities across these regions especially in Kenya told me last year youth often are radicalized on the way out and what he means by that is that youth will join a group such as El Shabab of course this is different from context to context but in this case for a sense of belonging for income, for security because of political injustice and marginalization for all of these reasons that we really think are common across the world and would translate well to why kids would join a gang and the radicalized on the way out piece means looking for justification as you're leaving you want to think of how to justify the actions that you did so long story short we're seeing a lot of lessons that can be learned across the different regions and in youth power there's the learning component which is part of the evaluation and evidence side of youth power but there's also an implementation component and one of our partners in youth power action actually had a great gang violence reduction project going on in Honduras I mean wanted to play a video of that 15 and 16 year old cousins Yuvini and Stephen are mapping out some of their greatest assets their family their family is becoming one of their biggest supports in staying away from violence the neighborhood is divided between two rival gangs and just a few months ago they were at high risk of getting involved in the violence today their situation has changed thanks to support from their family and a unique program called proponte mas proponte mas is a nationwide effort here in Honduras youth and young adults that are highest at risk for becoming involved in illegal activities and trying to find a positive path out of that lifestyle for them the boys and their family meet regularly with the family counselor who helps establish positive relations and behaviors to lower the boys' risk factors for violence proponte mas is a task that was already in practice and it's viable the main difference between proponte mas is the family and the ones that are given the more united the family is the younger ones will have less chance to stay and identify with other organized societies outside of their home it's a big task that is being done in the self-differentiation of the boys the rest of the family we feel well united we have been a well united family today we are more united through the program to be united to be talking I like the family more because they tell us good stories about what they used to do when they were little we work with the youth and the family at the same time because it's very important to impact the choreography of the family in my behavior I think it has changed a lot because I have always been a little more apart from them with this it gives me more confidence to be with them the family's work is paying off Steven and Yovini are showing improvements in their behaviors at home and performance at school they are lowering their risk for becoming involved in violence I have learned many things for example I advise my parents I always ask for permission whenever I am going to play with my brother or I go somewhere else with my mother I go to her house she lives in progress I do my homework I leave the teachers at home and if I go well with the teachers I go well with them they have changed a lot they have changed in the sense that they have more freedom of expression they have changed a lot in their behavior as a collaboration we looked through different positive youth development orientation and PVE this is a new product of youth power you can find it at youthpower.org what we did here as a collaboration we looked through different positive youth development oriented activities and implementations around the world first I want to talk about youth power to say the main goal is to support youth development positive development USAID focus on asset of youth briefly to say the main goal of youth power we talk about positive youth development USAID, which is that we focus on the assets of youth, on the agency of youth, on their contribution to society, and on creating and enabling environment. So those are really the four factors that we recognize are necessary for positive youth development. I will say, just as a side note, that I think we're learning, and youth power learning is in the environment. So those are really the four factors that we recognize are necessary for positive youth development. I will say, just as a side note, that I think we're learning, and youth power are more complexity aware in the way that we approach youth programming, especially youth in peace and security. We need to think about things that are a little bit more nonlinear. And so youth in peace and security is really at the cutting edge of that learning, which is why I'm so happy to be part of youth power learning. So the promising practices document really follows the action agenda that was put forth two years ago at the Youth Summit for against violent extremism. And so that action agenda is the youth action agenda to prevent violent extremism and promote peace. And we have the activities kind of split up. It's a bit arbitrary, because a lot of these activities are working across many purposes. And the best implementations that we see have a lot of different components of activities that kind of play off each other. But there are four main categories. And the first one is to prevent violence and recruitment into violent groups. So we're seeing a lot of programs there. The second is to facilitate youth disengagement from violent groups. The third is to produce and amplify new narratives. And the fourth is to establish meaningful partnerships. Now, I want to actually give some tangible examples of all of these. There are examples in the paper. There are tons of examples from my own practice. But I just pulled out four from the paper itself. And I picked some that really had that PYD forward approach. So in preventing violence and recruitment to violent groups, some of the really promising work is being done around cognitive behavioral therapy and integrating CBT into different sorts of interventions. And so many of you may be aware of the research done in Liberia by Chris Blatman that shows that cognitive behavioral therapy is more effective in reducing violence than cash grants, or even a combination of cash grants and cognitive behavioral therapy ranked first. But the CBT was the critical component there. Also, if we look in that category, yes, youth can in Kenya. I think they're an example of a program that's really evolved. They started as a program. I know this from my time back in the Africa Bureau. They started as a program that was really focused on youth empowerment and increasing self-efficacy. And they realized that we need to create that empowering environment. And we need to work on engagement by talking to small business owners and political leaders and elders so that the youth actually, once they feel empowered, they're able to engage. So that to me was a great example of a program that has made that transition. In the second category of facilitating youth disengagement, there's a great organization called the Elman Center for Peace and Human Rights. It's based in Mogadishu. It's absolutely community-led. And it's a disengagement program for kids who have been part of a Shabab and how to get back into the community. And that, again, is something that is Somali initiated, Ron and Len. In the producing and amplifying new narratives, this has a special kind of meaning for anybody in the CVE world. Because when I started in the fields years ago, we were talking a lot about counter-narratives and who was a good messenger and all this. And I think we've evolved. And this is where the PYD approach is really critical, I think, for the CVE world. Because we can talk about how our job really, sitting here in Washington, isn't to produce those narratives. But it's to amplify and to enable youth leaders to create their own narratives. So USIP actually has a great example of that in Iraq. They have a youth-run, totally youth-run reality TV series called Salam Shabab, which is youth peace. And so it's won national awards. It's a really great example of something where we've just provided that platform and the youth have taken it and run with it. Mercy Corps actually has a program called LEAP. It's the Rift Valley Local Empowerment for Peace program. And what they showed in their evaluation was that once youth are seen to engage in collective action, their community sees them as more trustworthy and then gives them more responsibilities. And that is, again, involving the community in this youth-led sort of peace movement. And then fourth, and it'll stop, is about establishing meaningful partnerships. I wanted to bring in an American example here. So much of this work translates into the US context. So there's a program in Chicago actually called Becoming a Man. And Becoming a Man looks a lot like a program that we would have in Kenya. And so there's three components to it. There's in-school training. There's after-school mentorship with a pro-social adult. And then they also have in-school cognitive behavioral therapy, so bringing that back in. And what they've seen actually through a big randomized controlled trial is that they have a 44% decrease in violence for those who've gone through the program, which is pretty incredible. Again, those lessons can be learned. And finally, on the establishing meaningful partnerships, one of the things that I think is kind of tried and true, but we're looking at ways to be more youth-led about it is intergenerational dialogue, something we've been doing in the CVE world for a long time. But we want to be sure that those agendas are actually set by youths themselves. Excellent. Thank you so much, Jim, for sharing concrete examples. Aubrey, USIP is working on the 2250 Youth Religion and Peace Report. What are some of the important key takeaways and lessons learned from that report? Sure. So going back to what Rachel mentioned, part of the mandate for the Resolution 2250 is to produce an evidence-based study, a progress study. And so the steering committee that's producing this study has commissioned side papers based around thematic issues. And USIP has developed a special report on youth and religious actors engaging for peace as USIP's contribution to this progress study. And so what this report found is, well, and first, Imrana is a co-author of this report. And so what this report found is that overwhelmingly youth and traditional religious actors who tend to be older and based within institutions, they want to work together. There are feelings of different priorities or different values that these two groups have, which can create barriers. But the overwhelming sense was that these two groups want to find a way that they can effectively partner. And so some of the findings were that key allies and bridge builders between these two groups, such as religious youth, and Imrana can speak to his experience as a religious youth leader, can play that kind of interlocutor. They can connect the two groups and can identify with both groups. That the willingness is there, but the opportunities and kind of the how to tend to be the missing link. So if the international community is to facilitate these kind of partnerships by creating space for sustainable long-term engagement, where long-term trust can be built between these two groups, that will foster long-term partnerships. And then also working with the traditional or older leaders to really understand how do they move away from or help them to brainstorm? How they move away from the yes, I want to engage and yes, I want to partner to the this is my plan, this is how we're going to do it. And so that tends to be a sticking point is the actual implementation of the collaboration or the partnerships. And then kind of overall with our youth programming, what we found is that the most effective youth peace and security programs are those programs that are youth-developed, youth-initiated, and youth-led. And so the more that the international community can really support programs that already exist from youth leaders and to provide resources, which often can be a barrier to implementing programs, the more these youth-led organizations like the one in Mogadishu, actually, the Elmer Institute will thrive and that they will create the impact that they want to see. Excellent. Thanks so much. Rachel, I know Search for Common Ground is working on its new Transforming Violent Extremism Toolkit. What sort of tools and lessons will young peace builders find in the toolkit? Sure, so I'll build off of what Aubrey and Jen have already said. So Search every year works with around over a million young people directly through direct programming and also has 35 years of experience working with communities to transform conflict around the world. And we use this experience to develop this peace builders guide to Transforming Violent Extremism, which also there's a link there so you can read the full guide. But what we started with was reframing the challenge of countering violent extremism and saying recognizing that the reasons and motivators driving violent extremism, which Jen mentioned, can actually be transformed into new engagement and agency to build resiliency among communities and to help with early detection to help preventing violent extremism. And I'll just add the three points on top of what's already been said about what we know works with working with young people. And the first adds to what Jen said, which is about recognizing their need for respect, dignity, and agency. And with particular emphasis on agency, what violent extremist groups are often more savvy about and sometimes do better than we do is really giving the sense of power and putting young people in the driver's seat. They recognize the grievances that young people are concerned about, and they give them the sense of devastating impact. Whereas we find ourselves in the development community, and NGOs, a lot of our youth engagement sometimes looks like workshops, short-term projects, and really the impact is kind of limited when young people look at it. So another thing I'd point out is international alert came out with a study recently on young people involved in violent extremism in Syria. And they found that resilience factors go beyond access to livelihoods to alternative respectful livelihoods, apart from armed groups that have purpose and dignity, access to comprehensive and quality education, supportive social networks, and importantly, avenues for exercising their agency and autonomy and making sense of their experiences. So these are equally important to resilience as more material well-being is. And so what that means is that strategies to address or transform violent extremism cannot aim to pacify youth or for quick fixes, so not just promoting moderation or trying to fix violent extremism by providing some vocational training. They really have to recognize that youth have legitimate political and social aspirations and provide them with nonviolent pathways for reaching those aspirations. The second point that I'll make is about facilitating collaboration across dividing lines, building on what Aubrey said, not just with religious leaders, also among youth themselves across ethnic religious dividing lines, something we've done in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo was bring young people together across dividing lines, teach them how to do conflict analysis of conflict dynamics and opportunities, and then give them a chance through youth listening clubs and a cultural center to actually talk about the issues that really matter to them and come up with solutions for addressing them. You also saw the video at the beginning about the young girls in Nigeria. That was another search for a common ground project. And then another really important dividing line to cross is that line between young people, government, and security agencies, which is often one of the greatest barriers that mistrust to young people's involvement in policy and programming. And creating those informal and formal channels can be really hard, especially in some of these communities where government might see young people as a threat, somebody who could take away their power, their comfortable job, or they see young people as not really credible partners. And young people at the same time are wary of engagement because there might be history of domestic spying, of human rights abuses, of political manipulation of young people. So bridging that relationship is something really important for NGOs to help facilitate. And some ways that we've done that around the world, we've worked on those relationships. And Lebanon, for example, between youth and internal security forces, we had round tables and then had youth shadow police patrols to understand really the complexities of the work and then to join some simulations together. And Nepal, we brought together youth and police through soccer games to try to rebuild some trust. And then Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, we did things like communal tilling of land, tilling of communal land where security forces and the community did that together. And so what that opens the door for then, once that trust is built, is for things like community policing, joint security planning, which is more effective. And then the last point I'll make really quickly is while we're amplifying these new narratives, it's really important that we are comfortable with a diversity of viewpoints. And not only that we're not demonizing young people who do participate in violent extremism because we do wanna leave the door open for disengagement or to take the decision to step away. But also that we're kind of providing a platform for perspectives across the ideological spectrum because we want people who are both identified with moderate and more hardline ideologies to see that peaceful pathways actually have some benefits for them in addressing the grievances that they're concerned about. And the last example I'll give is that in Indonesia, we supported a youth-run radio station from Islamic boarding schools. And not only did we really try to focus on the technical skills for producing a radio drama that promoted tolerance, we also helped the young people learn how to facilitate conversations, difficult conversations that are comfortable with a variety of viewpoints that are open to questions. What we found was not only the youth who were working on the radio programs themselves but also the community came away with an appreciation of a diversity of viewpoints that they didn't have before. Thank you so much, that's great examples. I wanna move us along to leave enough time for some questions from the audience as well. Aubrey, can you talk a little bit about your recent findings on the intersectionality between gangs and CV and Jen, feel free to follow up on her response. Great, so as Jen mentioned earlier before we watched the video about gang violence in Latin America, when we're looking to apply learnings from gang interventions to countering violent extremism or CVE interventions, I think the most important lesson that I saw was that contextualization is key. And so every community has their own drivers of push or pull factors into violent conflict and that when you're working at the individual level that you won't be able to apply a generic response because these individuals have specific needs and specific grievances or rationales for joining these groups in the first place. But when stepping back and looking at the kind of community level holistic approach, a few learnings that apply to both gang violence or gang intervention programs encountering violent extremism programs is the importance of taking a community whole or holistic approach to these programs. So engaging stakeholders across the board. So engaging security sectors, religious leaders, the education system, youth as a whole, youth led organizations and improving the coordination between these different stakeholders. Engaging key allies was a theme that came up a lot. So in the gang kind of sector, they call it the veteran effect. So if you can identify people who were once involved with gang violence who have left their gangs or disaffiliated with gangs who can serve as mentors or coaches or allies to these people who are kind of balancing that bridge of trying to disengage or trying to leave, they tend to have more trust and more legitimacy or credibility in that field. In both fields, there's a strong emphasis on increasing prevention programs. So by focusing your attention on preventing the problems, either violent extremism or gang recruitment from beginning, then it'll be much more cost effective than trying to solve these problems after they occur. And then a few things that the violent extremism or CVE world can take from the gang, the long experience of kind of cross-sectional partnerships with the gang sector benefits from. So there's still a lot of legislative barriers that prohibit civil society or local governments or security sectors from engaging with those who are trying to disengage from violent extremist organizations. On the flip side, the gang sector doesn't have that. So we've seen in the United States, for example, a long history of the security sector working with the civil society sector or the religious community to develop these community kind of holistic programs for the reintegration of individuals. And then there still is a lack of evidence and a lack of research on this cross-sectionality so that the international community could really benefit from gathering more data points, collecting more case stories about what works when you're trying to apply these kind of lessons learned from one sector to another. Thanks, that's great. Jen, do you want to add any additional insights to that? I would love to. So I think for me, what's really important is to step back and to really take that contextualization very seriously. And when I think about violent extremism, I think about maybe an approach that's been very much of a Washington focus. And when we take a PYD approach and we talk to youth about what they're actually facing in their life, violent extremism may come up on the list but it may not in a lot of the places we work. So for example, in the mahrab, there's a program that I think is fantastic. They're truly youth led and when they went and asked youth, when they have youth, ask youth, what are the challenges facing you in your life? They said drugs, they said gangs, crime, wanting to migrate to Europe and being blocked. And VE was kind of on the list but it was near the bottom of the list. And so when you're really doing a CVE program that looks like CVE and DC, when it's youth led on the ground, it's gonna actually reflect the youth priorities. And I think it's really important for us to really take that seriously and think about that. Because translating across the ocean or south, CVE is, I think if done well, it's gonna look really different and it's going to by necessity incorporate PYD which means being youth led in the design especially. And I think that is my most important point. Thanks. Imran, let's take it down to the local level. What does this look like? Tell us a little bit more about the five components of YOKA and how that is played out and what lessons you've learned from the first few years of implementation. Okay. Okay, before I talk about this, just to add on the gun violence on CVE, like what makes it different like in violent extremism is the kind of the nature of the conflict. Most attempts violent extremism, it has a kind of cross-border outlook. Because of globalization, most of the perpetrators, they move easily. For example, in Nigeria, they'll come from Chad, from Cameroon. So we need like a kind of collaboration. You can't like solve the problem just within like one country. So that is like, I think one of the challenges that makes it a kind of unique. So in YOKA, we have like a kind of five models and it centered on both like prevention and countering violent extremism. Like those that are yet to engage and those that are already at risk. When we started, we focused mainly on peace education because as you watch in the video, like in Nigeria, we have that kind of mutual suspicion between Muslim and Christians. And that is mainly due to intolerance because the nature of the country, like the majority, the Muslims majority are in the North and the Christian majority are in the South. So that kind of division, even before Boko Haram insurgency, we have a lot of kind of inter-religious violence. So most of Boko Haram narratives, they use kind of religious rhetoric, though in reality, they attack both Muslim and Christians. But to get most of the recruit, they use this kind of jihad to say killing non-Muslims is the kind of jihad you get with what you go to heaven. So when we started, we started with organizing peace education programs to teach young people about the concept of peace and tolerance. And we use USIP curriculum, peace building toolkit for educators to teach like the teachers on how to engage them. And we have succeeded in training 26 teachers that facilitated such classes. And we have established peace clubs in 46 schools. Each of the peace clubs, they have their members. In total, we have over 600 members and they meet regularly like every Wednesday within the schools or within their communities to organize programs. But we consider like just organizing the class like in a kind of class setting is not enough because much younger audience, they may not pay attention. So we started using theater. And that is what Rachel mentioned, the kind of stage drama where we have actors and the stage drama about peace, about tolerance. And we also use documentary, for example, use documentary of change agent, people like Malala Yusufzai. When we go to villages, we project her documentary and after the session, we ask the student what they want to do in their communities, how they can be change agent, how they can be peace builders. And in 2014, after many attacks like Boko Haram attack, many schools, most of these students that survived the attacks are likely to suffer severe trauma. Left unchecked, many of them will grow up like believing that violence is the only solution to coping. So we started trauma healing program which is a kind of peace education but it has a mentorship component. We have psychologists, volunteer psychologists that have a one-to-one session with them to counsel them and to organize a kind of sports activities to engage them so that they can overcome the trauma and move on with their studies. Then we have skills acquisition training for unemployed young people because Boko Haram have a kind of like different strategy, a kind of flexible strategy. When they meet you like, if you are already employed, you have a job, they can't tell you like, if you join us, you get employment because you are already working so they have to use religious rhetoric maybe to use jihad. But when they go to the villages where there are many unemployed young people which are mostly at risk because they don't have jobs and they have that kind of frustration which most attempts is legitimate. They finish schools, they don't have jobs and they see politicians like their kids are studying abroad, they get jobs easily. So such kind of frustrations, they get attracted to the terrorist narrative. So we started apprenticeship program where we match them with young people that have the skills and after they train them, we partner with government agencies that give them capital to start business. Then part of our partnership with government is in the form of intergenerational dialogue. Last year we had partnership with minister of religious ideas where we train 100 religious leaders and out of the 100 religious leaders, 20 were selected to form a kind of interfaith council with both elders and young people to develop counter narrative messages as well as to engage government on how to promote peace and tolerance. So on last day we started a partnership with United Nation Counterterrorism Center. We attended three trainings on supporting victims of terrorism to develop counter narrative messages on social media platforms to share stories of the victims of terrorism to challenge the narratives because most of the victims when they go to their camps they see a lot of things. For example, they see drugs, there is not a religious. So such kind of stories if they share them they can like challenge their narrative. So many people that join because of religion they can actually understand it's not religion and the kind of good life that they show like on their videos like they enjoy the half food or something most attempts when they go there many of the people that leave the camps they complain of hunger, they don't have food sometimes they spend many days without food they will be running from one camp to the other. So such kind of stories when we share them with young people on social media platforms they help in reducing the appeal of Boko Haram. This is basically what we do and this is our model. Thank you so much for really giving us a rich context of how you're working and applying a number of the promising practices that we were just discussing. All of that on a budget that's under $5,000 reaching 6,000 young people, 600 volunteers 46 peace clubs, all those components. It challenges us to think how do we invest better how do we get the resources to youth led organizations to really scale up that impact. They're on the front line often at the very front of where the greatest risk is. So in very concise way if we could go down the line talking about where we look for resources resources in the form of networking, tools financial resources and others. If each of you wouldn't mind each just summarizing where some of those resource opportunities are and then we wanna go to the questions in the audience. Let's start with you Rachel. Sure, so I think it starts with the recognition that as many resources, tools and funding we have available unless there's youth ownership and we're able to overcome the silos between organizations and sectors for a collaborative approach then it won't really add up to much in the field. And so the interagency working group on this issue has really committed in their framework for action on implementing 2250 this collaborative approach to resources and funding for young people. One way they do this at the surface level there is an online platform called Youth For Peace with the number four dot info where all of the information and knowledge exchanged around 2250 and its implementation is available online. Another way is by committing to collective advocacy with regional instruments and institutions for increasing engagement, partnership and funding for young people. And a third way is by promoting and supporting regional and national collaborative partnerships among youth-led organizations and youth organizations working on peace and security. So we're not just incentivizing them to work in silos and compete against each other as funding increases for youth-led peace building but they actually have opportunities to exchange knowledge and learning and to work collectively for joint activities that have greater impact. And then just a final point is search is piloting something that is really interesting. I'm excited to share, I'm happy to talk about it later where we take this one step further, this collaborative approach. And we say at the very local level we're taking a collective impact approach which has been applied for other fields like health and education to youth peace and security. So it's not youth in isolation, it's youth at the table with stakeholders from government, developers, business, everyone sitting at the table and figuring out solutions to peace and security issues with a long-term, like I'm talking 10 years kind of process aspect. We're doing that Sri Lanka and Nigeria, happy to talk about it later. Excellent, thank you, Jen. So youth power learning actually is a great resource. So there's a couple of, there's four community of practices within youth power learning and Maria Brindomeyer and I work on the youth and peace and security community of practice. And we're in the middle of selecting some grant winners and we had 114 applications for what's gonna end up to be three or four grants, which just shows you the overwhelming interest from these youth organizations in getting more funding. And so for the next round of grants, we're gonna, I really wanna think seriously about what it means to be youth led in the design of those grants themselves. And so working within the constraints of USAID, trying to lower the cost of each grant and up the mentorship based on all this research, and we're welcoming input in our community of practice, how to do that better. But I will say the grants this time are gonna be announced in about a month and we've had some fantastic applications and we're looking for ways to kind of give them all a voice and also give the voice to everybody who applied. So we're trying to think of other non-material ways that we can support those excellent and worthy grantees. Thanks. Imran, what sort of resources does YoCat and your work most need right now to allow you to go to the next level of impact and scale? Most of the resources needed is funding. For sure, like most of the project require a lot of resources to expand and not just the resources, but a kind of space as well in the national discourse in the area of peace and security. Most of where we are now is more of like just to access for partnership for one or two projects, but we need to like to be part of the discussion, to be part of the national committees where all the decisions are taken, as well as to have resources to expand and to have a network of more young people that are doing greater. And I think youth for peace is one of great areas that I get a lot of collaboration as well as generations that I'm sure open to talk about. Excellent, Aubrey, tell us a little bit about the Youth Peace Building Fund as well as some of the other USIP youth. Yeah, so what we've heard is that the funds are critical. Getting the funds to youth-led organizations and the Interagency Working Group on Youth Peace and Security that Search for Common Ground and USIP participated in, has launched a Youth Peace Building Fund that will hopefully address some of that need. In terms of in-house contribution, USIP is a youth community of practice that includes our Generation Change Fellowship Program. And this Fellowship Program is a two-year Fellowship Program where we deeply invest in youth leaders like Imbrana who have founded youth-led organizations and are running these organizations. And we recently expanded the community of practice to include youth-led participatory action research. We're training youth with participatory action research skills so that they can go into their communities and engage with youth in their communities that are often unheard. And that puts youth leaders at the center of the research that then will inform international policy. Excellent. And I'd be remiss not to mention, USAID has an incredible cadre of professionals working both in our missions and in our headquarters, both on violent extremism through our VEI task force as well as through Central America and looking at gang prevention across Central America and the Caribbean through CARSI and the ways that we're investing. And I will say from my participation with those professionals working on that, the tremendous understanding and increasing commitment to looking at how do we engage and invest in young people in gang prevention, in general violence prevention to create a safe pipeline and safe households, safe schools, safe communities, and leading to hopefully safer environments where we can address some of these drivers that lead to violent extremism or other forms of violence. So we wanna now turn to you and ask a few questions. So if I could take three questions to start with, and I think we have some mics around the room, yes. Please state your name, your organization, and very briefly your question. Great, thank you. And thanks to all the panelists for their conversations. I'm Brian Kelly with the International Organization for Migration. My question's for Emrana. In Nigeria, the government has been gathering larger numbers of Boko Haram detainees, either through defections or through combat or through security sweeps. And the question that I have for you, for your youth organization and youth organizations like yours is what role do you see in relation to reintegration? Of these Boko Haram youth back into their communities. And additionally, what role is required from local government, national government, in the military to allow you to be able to do what I hope you're just about to talk about? Thank you. Excellent, great question. Two more questions. We got a hand there and a hand back there, and someone here, no. So we have two hands back there. You wanna stand up and... Good morning. My name is Cynthia Kumalo, I'm a Yali fellow, and I'm currently doing my professional development experience at USAID, and that's my host over there. I'm curious to find out, I hear the conversation regarding basically creating a network where we can cultivate some form of peace appreciation for lack of a better term, but I don't hear much of the conversation about protectionism. I come from South Africa, and I used to volunteer for a youth journal program basically to reduce recivitism, but the challenges that we're primarily facing was that the ones that became champions were the ones that were mostly targeted, and despite the fact that we tried to create some form of collaborations as far as security is concerned from a police perspective or from a community perspective, the gang's approach was much more much more challenging in the sense that they had more power to interrogate, to intimidate, to penetrate different aspects of this children's lives. So what role, I'm basically asking, what role do you play as far as facilitating protectionism? Protection of those and making sure no harm to the party. Great, and then there was one other hander in question. Hi, good morning. My name is Kevin Russell, and I'm here with Democracy International. My question is just to kind of get a sense of your thoughts. Within the CVE realm, there seems to be a lot of emphasis and focus on programming within vulnerable and marginalized communities and focusing on at-risk youth, but how do we account for a case in Bangladesh, for example, last year in 2016 in Dhaka, where this terrorist attack was led by youth that were not from marginalized communities. They were actually led by youth from the elite of Bangladesh from a very high socioeconomic status and were well-educated outside of the country. Great question. All right, why don't we start off? Who would like to take, do you want to address the first question, Emra? Okay, thank you for the question. And this issue of reintegration of ex-bokoarum fighters is one of the hot issue in Nigeria. Government has set up a center in Gombe State, which is in northeastern Nigeria, solely for reintegration. And that issue, they have many ex-bokoarum fighters that surrender, that denounce the group, and are taken care of by government, and they have a lot of programs for them, a kind of psychological support, and they are thinking of reintegrating them back to society and giving them capital to start business or something. The challenge is acceptance by society. Last year, government has a meeting with civil society leaders, with community leaders and some of the stakeholders, and I was there part of the meeting. And one of the community leaders, when asked like, how will you accept ex-bokoarum fighters to go back to society? Like most of the community leaders, they said no, they can't accept them. How can I allow somebody that kill me, like kill my brother, kill someone, like I just allow him to come back and even to see him having a business or something. So it's still that fear of acceptance. Many people like still have that kind of thinking, they are still thinking like bokoarum affected them. And if you go to refugee camps, you see thousands of people that don't have even access to food, even water, they are still struggling, a lot of humanitarian issues. So if government like give funding like a kind of support to ex-bokoarum combatant and ask them to go back to society, people may end up killing them because they feel like they are not taking care of, but they are taking care of bokoarum fighters. And even some of the bokoarum, like the condition that make them to denounce the group is something that, for example, one of the guys we saw there at the camp, he was saying like he decided to denounce the group because they don't have food at the camp for so many days, they don't have food. So if you hear someone saying like this, imagine if they have food, it means he won't denounce the group. But seriously, this is something important. If we do not like integrate them, we keep them there, we can't convince other fighters like to accept government issue. But for now like civil society organization or youth organizations like mine, like we don't have any role to play like in the form of reintegration. Government make it like the kind of exclusive program for them, they don't allow organizations to handle the issue themselves. Excellent, thanks. Aubrey, do you wanna handle the second question? Sure. The question was where does the protection of children and youth come into play with 2250 and then within our organizations as a whole? So 2250 has five pillars to kind of the implementation and one of those pillars is protection. And so this pillar, it reinforces and draws attention to the importance of applying a youth and children lens on protection of civilians. So it urges member states to kind of re-examine their methods of protection of civilians to ensure that they includes protecting children and youth. And then in terms of USIP's role of the protection in youth and kind of linking that to the role of youth in reintegration, our role in our youth portfolios really to elevate and support the work of youth practitioners. And so some of our fellows, one of our fellows in Kenya is actually leading efforts to reintegrate al-Shabaab youth into society. And so by supporting the work that she's doing as a generation change fellow, we are helping her to protect and to kind of shepherd or steer returned al-Shabaab fighters into society in a safe way where they can go through the proper channels and be protected by security forces. Excellent. Jen, would one of you like to take on that third question? I can, oh. I have a little bit for two and three. Okay. So I'm gonna do two and three if that's okay. Okay, so for protectionism, I consult and one of the organizations I consult with, their model is really to work countering gang violence and countering violent extremism by engaging the most at risk, which means people who are still in these organizations in the gangs or in the extremist organizations. And that's kind of how it also incorporates protection because they're actually not encouraging people to leave the groups necessarily. They're encouraging them to not engage in violence. And so they don't actually pose a threat to the group, which then allows people to decrease their violence level. And so it's kind of a method of protection that is I think unique, but really promising. And actually their evaluations show an incredibly promising drop in violence in the communities where they work in the US and also internationally. So that would be my answer to two. For three, yes, actually the Holy Artists in Bakery attacks are in our report because we talked about the fact that it is really important to look contextually, right? We can kind of generalize about and the report splits out OACD countries and non-OACD countries, but we have to actually think individually. And to the case of Bangladesh in particular, I was there last year. And what I heard very clearly was, there's a real need to kind of, and I feel like I'm speaking truth to all this power. There's a real need to think about post-colonial legacies and what is perceived to be a neo-imperialist world order. And so when you see wealthy, connected, educated youth in a place like Bangladesh harboring these resentments, I think we actually really need to think about how they got there and not to over-generalize and talk too much about its corruption or its lack of jobs or whatever because there is actually a global power here and we're living in an age where Daesh is able to spread that kind of message around the world. So we need to be honest about that as well. And we find that there's a lot more similarities in the backgrounds of gang members than in the violent extremism space where it can come from lots of different backgrounds of where they've suffered grievances or marginalization. And so it's a much more difficult kind of audience to try and target in the appropriate ways in different areas, especially because it becomes transnational. Final words, Rachel. Sure, I'll just add to both question two and three as well. So for protection and the peace building field, we start all of our programs at the design phase with a conflict sensitivity lens. So weighing what the potential risks and harms or the benefits are to young people who would be participating in the program. And one example that comes to mind for me is in West Africa we recently completed a study, youth-led participatory action research on the worst forms of violence against children. There were a lot of considerations we had to take into account for protection. One of them was that during the program, the Ebola crisis broke out. And so as these youth researchers were going to villages, if we didn't do some awareness raising and work with the community in advance, they thought there were rumors that people from outside were coming and spreading the virus everywhere, spreading Ebola. So we had to do some work on awareness raising as well. And then another thing that came up is while these young people were interviewing other young people about their experiences with violence, there was a lot of trauma there. And so we had to make sure that we had set up relationships and ability to refer young people who needed it to the appropriate services or agencies for support on that. So that's one way that we, in the peace building field, address protection. Then I would also just add there's a Mercy Corps study. I think it's from 2015 and the name is Escaping Me. That is, I think it looked at three different countries, Columbia, Afghanistan and I'm slipping on the last one. But what it came away with was the biggest motivators for political violence is not joblessness. It's not poverty. It's witnessing injustice and experiences of injustice and human rights abuses and corruption and this perception of injustice is a stronger motivator than joblessness. Yep. Excellent. I wanna thank all the panelists today. And before we turn it over to Andy, just a big round of applause for all our panelists. So now I wanna reintroduce Andy Ravens who is the senior advisor on global youth affairs at the Department of State to kind of give us a closing context to all of this and the path forward. So Andy, welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Good morning to everyone. I see a lot of partners, youth practitioners, organizations and I also wanna give a special shout out to the folks watching from overseas. We know you all are on the ground and you guys are the tip of the spear in doing incredible work. So we thank you for all that you're doing. Firstly, happy almost international youth day, 2017. What I hope to do is just kind of try to tie things up and talk just very briefly about some of the big wins that we've had over the past couple of years. You've heard the Dynamite panel talking in a little more depth about some of those earlier and then just talk about a couple of ideas for where we can go from here. We've heard from the panel about a couple of, a few of the big wins that we've had over the past couple of years in the youth and peace building space. We heard about the great strides that changed the narrative of youth as partners for peace rather than as drivers or victims of conflict with the unanimous consensus adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 2250, the first ever youth security council resolution on youth peace and security. We heard from Jen and from Rachel and some of the others about youth power and search for common grounds work in Aubrey as well on efforts to really identify youth influencers, identify best practices of what's working in different pockets of the globe and also for trying to map out some of our potential role models and peers, youth led organizations that are doing impressive work on the ground. We've also, we know that we've taken the military fight which I think we didn't get into too much this morning but it is an important piece of the puzzle. We've taken the military fight to ISIS and other extremist organizations on the battlefield and I think the gains that have been had recently in the physical battle space in Iraq with coalition forces reducing ISIS control actually goes a long way in the efforts around and trying to lift up youth in the peace building space as well. And my argument now is that I think we have this unique opportunity and we have this unique moment based on the gains of the past couple of years to try to deliver that knockout punch in certain pockets of the globe to this extremist ideology. And if we're gonna do that, I think we really need to do a better job of enlisting young voices, youth influencers, youth led organizations and partners like folks in the room to really be able to push that to connect with young people and try to change that perception among youth going forward. As many of us are well too aware and we heard them Rana, we've heard folks talk about this, that extremist organizations continue to pray on vulnerable and disenfranchised youth and local grievances by offering a false sense of dignity, of adventure, of economic opportunity. I often think about this through this lens of pancakes and guns. And I know folks remember, but a few years ago, ISIS tried to launch a campaign on social media where they had a series of tweets that talked about and showcased a stack of fluffy pancakes, trying to appeal to young people. A stack of fluffy pancakes with some syrup dripping down. It then was followed up with a couple of tweets of young people holding a gun to represent dignity. And it was this case of trying to appeal to young people in different pockets of Syria who were fighting a civil war, a rock, different pockets of the globe that if you were to join the ISIS efforts, not only would you have these fluffy stacks of pancakes every day, you'd have economic opportunity, which we thought that represented, but you'd also have the dignity of a gun in a sense of appreciation from a community that you're gonna be a part of. And we recognize that governments and organizations themselves couldn't be the answer to just push back against these voices. We know that research shows that young people are deeply moved by their peers. They're deeply moved by youth influencers who they know can touch, who are part of the community or the larger area in which they work, and also by role models and influential individuals who could actually connect to them on a personal level. So we really need to enlist partners, youth voices, youth influencers in a more meaningful way if we're gonna be successful in pushing back against some of these narratives. If we're gonna be able to show that the pancakes that are being offered don't actually taste as good as they might appear. That the picture of someone with a gun doesn't actually produce the dignity that someone might be appealing to. That there are better alternatives to those hollow pancakes as a whole. That there are opportunities that organizations and youth on the ground are providing that could provide waffles or crepes or French toast or you name it. Different, more positive alternatives that we can give to young people that will push them back down a more positive pathway. And furthermore, we have to make that cool and attractive and exciting. And we have to change the image of kind of the young person with the gun, the AK-47, and to maybe the young person with the keys to their new business as a young entrepreneur or someone who's creating positive change in their community with a decent job. And the good news is that as we've seen some examples of today, we have the community of young people, of youth influencers, of role models, of dynamic individuals who can lead that effort. We have people in the room like Imranah who we heard about earlier, Generation Change Fellow from 2015, the work he's doing in Northeast Nigeria. We have folks like Jacob who we heard about earlier who's working in South Sudan with the Anataban campaign. We have others in this room like Luis and Valerie who I saw earlier from the Young American Business Trust who have a great network of youth leaders all across Latin America and the Caribbean and elsewhere in the world. And we can name, go down the list from search for common ground, youth power, USIP, USAID. There's a network of young people that we are in relationship with that could play an incredibly powerful role in terms of trying to stamp out that appeal of extremist ideology once and for all. So I think one tactic that we can explore going forwards as well is the possibility of actually using some of our skill sets that we've learned from fighting global health epidemics and try to actually apply that to the CVE and the youth empowerment in peace building space. The idea of isolating the disease and those vulnerable to it, finding the credible voices who can connect to the population, educating the population through those credible voices about prevention and more positive alternatives and then making those alternatives and small behavioral changes, something that's hip, that's cool, and that's actually empowering. And if we can come together and try to actually do that collectively, tapping into the networks that exist in this room and overseas for folks who are watching, I think we could actually take a shot at making a knockout blow to extremist ideology in many parts of the globe. And as young leaders, as peace builders, as peace building organizations, I think we can potentially be that vaccine that tries to inoculate the nasty ideology that's trying to creep into some of our communities and countries, including the United States. And to me, that's a goal that's truly worth fighting for. That's something that I think the US government is truly committed to trying to achieve and something that we wanna work on more forcefully and collectively with all of the peace building partners in this room. So let me stop there and say thank you guys, thank the panel one more time for a great session this morning. Happy International Youth Day and we look forward to more collaboration going forward. Thank you again for all joining us. You can find all the resources mentioned either at the Youth for Change site, youthpower.org or on the USIP site and we welcome you to spend some time with us afterwards just getting to meet with some of the young change breakers here. Thanks again.