 Good morning everyone, I'm Jeff Helsing, I'm the Associate Vice President for Education and Training here at the United States Institute of Peace and it's a pleasure to welcome all of you, particularly since you're braving the rain and the traffic that comes with the rain in Washington. But we are very pleased to host this session of the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Forum. We're very pleased to be partners as well. And this is, for those of you who are new to this, this is the monthly meeting of the forum and it gets together 10 times a year and due to the very good organizing efforts of Search for Common Ground, but there are many partners that are part of this process. And so because this is a gathering, a forum to discuss interesting, new, relevant, challenging questions, issues that are before the field of conflict resolution, before the field of peace building, we depend upon the continued interest of all of you as well as the different partnering organizations and the need to and the ability to put together these events and draw upon the expertise and experience of those who are part of our community. So we always talk about community of practice in this institution and it's always nice to see the convening of an ongoing community of practice here in Washington around these issues. So with that, it is a pleasure to introduce Craig Zelizer from the Department of Government's Conflict Resolution Program at Georgetown University. I'm sure many of you know Craig through his fantastic up-to-date accessible and widespread listserv, but he's also a mentor for many of the young students and many of the young new workers in this field, in this town and elsewhere. And he's been a partner with USIP on many different things, so it's great to welcome Craig back to the building and then he will introduce and then moderate this morning's panel. So thank you Craig. Thank you very much. Good morning everyone. Thank you for coming out on a rainy day. Hopefully you didn't have too much trouble commuting. Thank you to our panelists. We have an amazing panel together this morning. So we have people both from governments, nonprofits, kind of quasi-government organizations who are here to talk about. I think one of the most important topics in the field of peacebuilding is what we're trying to achieve. Is it sustainable? Both in terms of the impact, the programming and the funding, and so kind of the origin of this panel, I think a lot of us have been thinking and talking about this for quite some time. I've got a new paper that just came out. I'm happy to get anybody a copy or can email to you on kind of sustainable approaches to peacebuilding and also looking at some of the recent innovations and kind of to give a little bit of background context. I think anybody who's been involved in peacebuilding for more than a year or two knows both the challenge of securing funding is one thing. How do you actually get funding, whether you're a local, regional, or international organization to do on the ground work? Much of the things we do are projectified. The idea is that we have very complex social problems that we need to turn into discrete projects that generally from the donor perspective last one to three years. But one of the fundamental challenges of peacebuilding, as Lerak talks about, is that peacebuilding takes one or two generations to facilitate relational, institutional change. And so there's almost this fundamental mismatch, which is not restricted just to peacebuilding, but a lot of the donor agendas is that most donors, again, think one to three years. There was one project I worked on, I think it was five years, which was miraculous. But probably the average life cycle of a project now is 18 months. So how in the world do we try to affect systematic, sustainable change when donors, and I'm not blaming donors, donors are doing a lot of things really well. But how do we try to facilitate long-term sustainable change when it's projectifying complex social issues? The second issue, I was reading a wonderful article this morning from the head of Civicus, which is in The Guardian, which I would encourage everybody to read. So more and more research is coming out from the international development humanitarian community. USID's had a wonderful project the past few years trying to put local first. The idea is about 20% to 30% of USID funding should go directly to local civil society organizations. But the research globally shows that only 1% of global development assistance, bilateral assistance, goes directly to southern organizations over the global south. Most of the money going to the global south goes through something that the head of Civicus calls funder mediaries. So instead of intermediators, it's intermediate funders. And so often, as it gets down the chain of command or the chain of programming, the amount of money that winds up in global south is very small. So there's increasing discourse that global south needs more direct funding. But the practice is not showing that. And then the third issue to talk about is really, if you just look some numbers throughout there, the global economy is about $77,000,000,000,000 trillion a year. Global defense spending is $1.6 trillion a year. Global development spending is about $135 billion. Global peacekeeping is about $10 billion. Global peacebuilding, anybody know the number? So it's really hard. We don't have an accurate number. In a book I did a few years ago, I tried to estimate about $3 billion. But that depends how you calculate peacebuilding. If you aggregate all the members of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, which is one of the main associations of peacebuilding organizations in the US, our collective budgets, in the report they did a few years ago with the USIP peacebuilding 2.0, the collective budgets of the peace building community were probably $50 million. I think now we're probably in a couple of hundred million. But if you put that to the international development community interaction, their collective budgets are probably $15 to $20 billion. So one thing is peacebuilding were a drop in the ocean. And so there's a challenge of how do we build sustainable program, but it's not just about donors. And so what are the innovations in the field that organizations are doing to generate their own sources of funding beyond donor driven mandates? Both for service activities, through social entrepreneurship. There's a whole movement in the business world and the development world called social impact bonds, which is basically a fee for performance where the government kind of pays a private provider to implement a public good. And if they meet their targets, the private provider makes money. If they don't meet their targets, they don't make money. There so far there hasn't been a peacebuilding impact bond, but StoneCon right here is thinking about that and other people. So the purpose of this panel is really think about both sustainability in terms of programming, not just from an international NGO perspective but on the ground. And then really think about the issue of funding. How do we demonstrate some innovations in funding? Are there lessons that we could be learning? And just to say a couple of other interesting things, from the article I was reading this morning is a wonderful quote the head of civicus where it says the science of delivery has been strangling the art of social transformation. I'll read it again so the idea that the science of delivery has been struggling, strangling the art of social transformation. So this is another one of the challenges in our field as we become increasingly professionalized. Most of the really innovative concrete amazing peacebuilding at work takes place at the grassroots non-professional level. But a lot of the way the donor community works is we're trying to box organizations, individuals, social changes to projects. And so this is a fundamental challenge. So I'd like to thank Search for Common Ground and Kim and Tina from USIP for their administrative efforts to help put this together. This will be videotaped. So we encourage very robust discussion and we'll have plenty of time for questions. When you do ask a question after the panel is finished, please identify yourself, just which institution if you're a student, a professional, or which organization. And again, thank you to our panelists. So I'll start off Julia. I will not read the panel's bios because we'd be here the entire session. But Julia Roeg is the head of Partners for Partners Global. They just rebranded. It's going to go with their old name. And it's one of the leading peacebuilding organizations in the world working in over 20 to 25 countries. And the reason I asked Julia to go first is, one, their work is quite inspiring. But two, they did a three-year evaluation project that really looked at the issue of sustainability funded by the GE Foundation. I would encourage everyone to look at it and Julia can tell you more about it. But I think it's one of the most rigorous evaluations of an organization that's been in existence for more than 20 years. So look at how they sustain their operations, both in DC and globally. So thank you very much. Thanks very much. Hello, everybody. I think it's right here. Thank you for your time. Well, it's a pleasure to be with you all this morning. And I've been asked, again, to talk a little bit about this evaluation that we conducted. And it's quite a feat to say that we looked at 20 different countries over 20 years. And the final document is about 150 pages. So I brought with me copies of the 25-page executive summary. It's out on the table out there. But it's also online. If you go on our website, you can find it if you don't want to bring the paper home. So there's a lot of data that we collected. But I wanted to really focus today on this issue of organizational sustainability and the investment in our local affiliates. And then what it really means for our business model here in Washington, DC, is an international organization. Because I think that's one of the challenges that we have with regards to how we're really smirking I think the business model really kind of be their supports or doesn't support sustainability of local peacebuilding efforts. So as an introduction to our network, Partners Global, previously Partners for Democratic Change, celebrated our 25th anniversary this year. We got our start in Central and Eastern Europe. And so that's why there's a strong concentration of presence in that part of the world. But from day one, our model was to invest in local organizations that we call centers, Centers for Change and Conflict Management, 100% run by local leaders, local boards of directors, local staff. And it's a bit of a franchise model. So we're Partners Global. There's Partners Slovakia, Partners Columbia, Partners Jordan, Partners Georgia. So we now function as a network of these 18 to 20 organizations. Really also now looking at the role of global civil society, our efforts together, not just bilaterally per country. So I wanted to highlight our method of investing in these local institutions. So in the very early days, so late 80s, early 90s, in Central and Eastern Europe, there really wasn't civil society in that part of the world. And so we were investing in these centers within universities. That was one of the only credible institutions that could play this role of being a neutral convener of participatory policies and supporting conflict resolution skills and methodologies. But very quickly, we realized that the university system wasn't particularly entrepreneurial. And so that was not the right place for an organization that you wanted to be sustaining itself and doing its own fundraising. So we took those centers outside of the universities, and they were re-established as NGOs. So then the second model between 1994 and 2007 was just a fundraise to establish new, this is what I do want to say, these were startups. We started from scratch, where Partners in the US would fundraise for seed capital for about two to three years, and then we would help to hire a director, help form the board of director, do all of the kind of transfer of different skills and business planning, fundraising strategies, all of the organizational development issues. And after that three-year period of incubation, they're on their own 100% locally funded. So that's really kind of what I would say kind of our heyday with regards to our ability to fundraise from the US to help establish a local NGO. That quickly, I'd say around 2007 and 2008, that was not as palpable anymore for international donors, and so we adapted a bit. And our center strategy turned into a fellowship program where we identified social entrepreneurs in target countries, and they immediately registered a local organization, so Partners Colombia or Partners Yemen, and then together we fundraised for programs and projects to help sustain that organization. So those are the three models, and I would say that we're in kind of a new moment now at Partners where we're not looking to build up new startups, but affiliate with existing organizations, and the GE Foundation has been really supportive of us in helping to kind of adapt to this new model, thinking in a lot of the countries where we're working, it's not needed to create a whole brand new organization. So of these countries that we invested in, over the years, 82% of them still exist, and a lot of them have had their 20th anniversaries, those early ones in Central and Eastern Europe. And so we looked a little bit, well, how did that unfold? Why were they able to sustain their work? One kind of key lesson that I'd like to say with regards to the importance of this respectful, global, local relationship is this idea of sustainability was something that we started with. It wasn't an afterthought. And I would say that Partners gets asked a lot to come in and consult other international organizations to help them spin off a legacy organization. So we've been working for maybe 10 or 15 years with our field office, but we now want them to be a local NGO, and they're gonna be our legacy. And that's extremely difficult, I have to say, because this idea of ownership and entrepreneurialism and all of the financial management systems, everything, it has to be baked in from day one. It's very, I mean, we're very difficult to bring this in after the fact. And then this idea of authentic partnership, and I'll talk more about this with regards to this progression of incubating local organizations to them growing, to them being just full-fledged partners with us, but that it's trust-based that we come together respectfully. We are in a relationship of equals, but that this concept of authentic partnership of the role of a US-based organization with an organization that, yes, we helped to start up, but they are equals with us, is a little bit messy, I would say, by the way. It's not an easy way to work. It's much easier sometimes if I was just the boss and could tell everybody what to do, but I can't, we've gotta negotiate everything. And then finally, to Craig's point, building centers for us, it's not a project. It's something, sometimes we have to sell it as a project and we've gotta convince donors that we're gonna do this program and we kinda have to sneak in the center building part to it, but it's a commitment to a lifeline partnership. We don't have an exit strategy with our local affiliates. We're in a long-term relationship with them. We get together twice a year. We have conferences, we're in constant communication with them, even if we're not working together on specific projects. With regards to their work in country and how they were able to kind of stay relevant and the impact of their work, I'm not gonna talk so much about the impact of their work, but if you want more information on that, you can look in the evaluation. But this idea that if we were investing in process expertise, we weren't necessarily investing in specific interventions or specific thematic issues. We were really embedding a way of working on development challenges in countries and transition and countries in conflict. And the idea then is there's an expertise on how to be a mediator, negotiation, collaborative, advocacy, participatory, decision-making, and then those organizations were entrepreneurial enough to find out, well, what is our niche? Where do we now apply our process expertise? And so what the evaluator came up with, much more than any one intervention, it was the partner's way. And that's what we were the most known for was building these relationships, trying to build bridges between sectors, so government, businesses, other civil society organizations, making the link between the grassroots and the policy level. But it was really about this short of even getting the policy, it was the relationships and the way what we were known for was being this kind of neutral convener and really objective, nobody's neutral, but at least an objective third party. So all of that process expertise, the different things that they did, they were able to adapt over the 15, 20 years. So maybe we're working on child's rights, but after that, there's a different coalition that comes together around something else. So the ability to sell themselves and position themselves, it was really important to be able to adapt. There's a lot of different components to this investment model. I mentioned the authentic partnership, this idea of market-based strategies that I'm gonna flesh out a little bit more because that's kind of what the buzzword is right now. But this idea that the ongoing moral support that we provide our colleagues has been identified as one strong aspect of their sustainability. And we were talking about, is it just funding? Is that what we're talking about? We're not really talking about funding. We're talking also about the hard, long slog of doing this work in these countries. And part of it is just the fortitude of accompanying our colleagues to continue to do this work that they don't feel alone. That obviously, I think the organizational effectiveness, really strong organizations doing this work, and that's the tedious business of audits and human resources policies, and how you're bringing up the next generation of young people within your organization and that tricky board of directors. And it's really nitty gritty organizational management stuff that nobody teaches us when you go to graduate school for conflict management. So lots of different aspects of authentic partnership. One that I would say is what has been key is finding the right people to work with, the social entrepreneurs that we share each other's values, because lots of conflict comes up on the road. 25 years is a long time. And when we say there isn't an exit strategy, you gotta be willing to work it out with the people that you're working with. And that really finding the right people that it's about values. But if you can imagine the difference between somebody in Tirana, Albania, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, finding some kind of common ground with each other, this idea that we share a mission and we share values and that's what strengthens us. But then they share enough with each other that that's also what helps them to be sustainable in their own countries. So this networking and the bridge building and being a catalyst for collaboration has been a really strong aspect of the sustainability of our network. I thought you might be interested in seeing just kind of the growth cycle of the organizations. This is, again, very nitty gritty. But we really looked at what it took to sustain the growth. And so this incubation period really did end up being about four years of us having to really accompany the growth and strength of our local partners. And then they were in a growth period for another, let's say, four to six years. And you see, we're not talking about a lot of money. What Craig was saying, it would be nice, although be careful what you wish for. We had a couple of colleagues who grew too fast, got a lot of money directly from USAID or others. And that presented its own challenges, quite honestly. So the sweet spot for them has been about a half a million dollars of annual revenue a year doing really good work. Most of the centers have between five to seven donors or sources of revenue. And so they have succeeded in diversifying their local funding. What we're experiencing now now is there's the moment where you're really mature at about 11 years, but then what happens afterwards? And I'm really interested in having this conversation with our community because right now we're kind of interested in the next sexy thing. So let's have a, I don't even know what to call it, like the tech challenge of the new entrepreneur that's got the cool idea and it's like the student we're gonna get behind them and yes, that's all good. But what about these groups that have been struggling to kind of stay alive and do good work for the last 20 years? How do we help them reinvent themselves and take on these new business models and these new ways of working and have deeper constituencies with these social movements where all the exciting stuff is happening? So we're in this kind of moment of after kind of 16 years plus, then what? Either reinvent yourself, there's succession planning or there's decline and you wanna try and kind of avoid that and that's a new role for us to be playing to help our local partners. I'm not gonna, I talked a little bit about this about these different moments of incubation, growth and maturity. What I would say is we do play a role here in the U.S. with regards to marketing the centers and their work and positioning them and helping with their kind of global positioning and we definitely see that as a part of our role and helps them to sustain their work. So finally, these market-based approaches. There was a couple of key findings that came out. One, as I said, diversifying and increasing their funders, funding streams. Several of the centers throughout the world have created for-profit arms so they do have consulting services. I can talk a lot about the minefield of different problems we've had with that but most of them do at least 30% of their revenue comes from fees and contracts and services. The idea of kind of multi-year funding has always been important, as Craig said. Building up your reserve fund, we talk about if you do that contract, squirrel away enough of it and put it into a savings account that takes a lot of kind of financial planning. Several of the centers have decided on investing in fixed assets so many of them own their own office, for example. These are like the nitty-gritty. This is not like the fun part of like what are you doing in the community but this allows them to keep doing their work. Increasing cost efficiencies. We do a lot of work as a network of looking at how do you save money? How do you make sure that you're using the right resources locally that has to do with your human resources policies? How much staff do you bring on board? How many consultants do you use? When do you partner with other organizations? And that makes more sense. I talked about the value of the partnership and the global network. All I'll say is that we have seen and I included an article about the power of kind of global civil society in helping to sustain local efforts. We do try and create opportunities for collaboration. So for example, if we're doing kind of security sector, reform work in Mexico, then our colleagues in Nigeria or our colleagues in Yemen can take those methodologies and processes, bring trainers and then they have a whole new capacity that they sell locally and we've seen that over and over and over again throughout our network. And so I do think the power of networking for the impact of our work in country is important but it is also a key sustainability strategy for our colleagues that has been. And then I'd say, we have an emergency fund in the DC office so that sometimes, for example, the EU is such a challenging donor. Sometimes there's a lot of upfront costs and by the very end of the project, you owe them, you've got to pay out 60,000 euro for that last little tranche before you get the last payment. And for these organizations, if your annual budget is 200,000 a year, 60,000 for that last three months is a huge amount of money. It doesn't happen often but I think every single one of our affiliates has used our emergency fund at one point or another and that's just like having a safety net. All right, so I'm finishing up now. I do wanna say this one thing about quality control. I talked about, I am not the boss of these organizations. We are an association, we come together, we talk about our own kind of quality assurances for the brand but these are autonomous local organizations and it's challenging to make sure that we're all representing ourselves to the highest standards possible. So we self police, we have lots of negotiations about that. And then finally, I just wanted to let you all know that we do have a current project that's funded by several different foundations now to look at this issue of social entrepreneurship for democratic governance and peace building. Specifically, how do we support existing organizations locally to adapt these market-based approaches to sustaining their work? A couple of key points that have come out of some initial kind of surveys and conversations that we've had is how important this issue of organizational capacity and financial management is to having the credibility to sell your services. That it's not just about having a new brochure and better marketing. You have to have that reputation ability to deliver. Of course, organizations in our space are really worried about their neutrality and the objectivity if you're receiving a contract directly from an extractive company. How can you kind of be that neutral broker? The idea that corporations sometimes speak a totally different language than we do. We've got our jargon, they have their jargon just with regards to being in relationship with each other, that's been a challenge. And then finally, where does this seed capital come from so that you have the breathing space to innovate and think about products and services that you wanna develop? Companies get capital to invest in their products. We don't really think about that in the peace building field. That was a lot of information to give you, I'll stop there. Thank you very much. So just a couple of quick points. If you're on social media, the hashtag is just CPRF if you want to tweet about any of this. The Ford Foundation was on Julia's list, so Ford Foundation just made a pledge this week that they're gonna give a billion dollars out of their funding. 20% of it can go to unrestricted funds to help build the capacity of social justice organizations. And then Julia did raise a very important question like sometimes money is not, often money is not the issue. So I wanna, I think we all wanna advocate for more money, but I think we've all been involved with projects that are a lot of money which actually do more harm than good. So the question we need is smart money and that has to be diverse kind of portfolio of activities. So I'd like to turn it over to Lauren Ben-Mitra who's the acting vice president of the Academy at USIP and has had a very long and distinguished career. Again, if I read her whole bio, we'd be here for the whole session. But thank you very much. Thank you. And just one other thing, we head of the peace and security funders group, Alex Toma. So we've been talking for years about the lack of data. So she couldn't be here today because she's meeting with the Ford Foundation with Darren Walker. But she has told me that starting March, 2016, or April sometime in the spring, the peace and security funders group which is the main network of foundations, US based funding this field, they're gonna start putting out annual reports about the level of giving across the sector. And it should be annual. So we don't have defined metrics for all of peace building funding, but it's a really important step to at least that she's announced that we'll be coming soon. And hopefully we can be doing that in other sectors. Thank you for following that time while I got adjusted here. I really wanna thank Craig for the opportunity to speak today on USIP's work on research, especially in the context of his report which outlined promising new funding activities for the peace building field. USIP three years ago established a Center for Applied Research on Conflict. I think in response to many of the issues that Craig raised in his report that we're in the middle of sort of that second generation of peace building with the blossoming of new community based organizations, state level institutions adopting a peace building agenda as well as the international community. But yet at the same time, a decline in funding in terms of peace building that we ourselves experienced as an institute but also saw some major donors pulling out of the peace building field. And the response, the reason we felt partially was because we as a community had not done a very good job of evaluating the impact and success of our work and communicating that those lessons to the peace building field and to donors. So part of the reason we established ARC is a little bit different. We do what we call practice evaluations and I'll explain that in a minute which is that we look at a field of practice. An example that I'll use is preventing electoral violence. We look at all the approaches that are related to that practice. So for example in preventing electoral violence we looked at monitoring, mapping, training of security sector forces, the management of a good electoral system, peace messaging, youth engagement, preventive diplomacy and we took five countries that were at comparative risk for electoral violence and we looked at the practices across those different countries so that we could determine what were the most effective practices which has serious implications in terms of funding, right? And so what we found in this comparative study was that there was a direct correlation between the level of violence and prevention efforts. So the more money that you put into prevention the less violence that those countries experienced, okay? Important message to give to the donors and funding community that prevention in terms of electoral violence works. The second thing that we found out is that prevention does work but domestic state actors hold the key to peaceful elections. That is the most effective methods and approaches that you could use in terms of electoral violence were the management of an open and transparent electoral system and security sector forces, deployment of good security sector reform around elections. Another issue to raise with donors so that in most cases for electoral violence it probably is the state. The second thing in terms of most impactful instruments available to international prevention actors were election monitoring and mapping. For us in the peace building field the peace messaging and youth engagement was inconclusive on the impact that had on election prevention. I'm not saying that it doesn't have an impact. I'm saying that we're in the process now of collecting more data on those particular approaches through our grants and fellowship programs. But these are important stories to tell about a whole it's not just project evaluations is what works in terms of a practice. The other area we're doing this right now is in terms of reconciliation. We have just done a significant two year study on this was a little bit farther back. I think in terms of electoral violence there are clearly articulated approaches and practices. In reconciliation it wasn't a systematic. We went out and reviewed 180 different projects around reconciliation in order to systematically evaluate what we as a field call reconciliation practice. And we also found that unfortunately our evaluation processes around reconciliation were extremely weak as well as an understanding of what the indicators of reconciliation look like. So what does a reconciled society look like? How can we identify indicators that would tell us we have gotten there? So there USIP is looking to do two things. We're looking to improve the evaluation of reconciliation practice through our impact program which is designing effective evaluation tools that could be used by the broader community to collect data together on reconciliation practice. And the other thing we're doing is doing work on indicators pulling in a fellow that will look at how local communities identify indicators for reconciliation which may be very different from what we as the international community view with indicators for reconciliation. So that work is ongoing again with serious impacts in terms of funding. The final issue that I'll, sorry, I don't know how I did this. I put these slides together and I didn't plan them to. The other area of practice that we're looking at right now is resilience. I know this is sort of the buzzword of the community right now is resilience practice. We're all gonna go out and build more resilient communities but in terms of an area of practice, I'm not sure exactly what that means. Sometimes it looks like exactly what we're currently doing in terms of peace building and development. So here we've taken a step even further back in terms of resilience and we're saying what does resilience look like in communities that are experiencing violent conflict. So we're doing a three country comparative case study in Afghanistan, Nigeria and Kenya looking at how communities themselves identify their capacities for resilience against violent extremist actors. So we're getting them to define what their resilience is and we're also having them identify what the violent extremist threat is. We're doing this through a mixed method process and I will say the findings are pretty interesting right now that those communities that are able to correctly identify the extremist threat are those that can develop strategies around them. I'm not saying that's not particularly profound but there are a lot of things that happen to communities that do not allow them to successfully analyze the situation they're in and we have other findings as well. But the reason that's important we felt is that before we all go charge ahead on resilience practice, understanding what resilience capacities truly are within those communities is important before we then go enable to test and experiment with resilience practice in this area. So that's it a little bit in terms of these larger practice evaluations. Craig, I did wanna tie it back a little bit to your work in terms of funding and sustainability. I really truly believe sustainability depends on funding what works. So practice evaluations are critical for the field in order to prioritize funding but also to determine what practices may need to happen in conjunction with other practices. So you're not out there alone wondering why your practice isn't working when it really needs to be done in conjunction with other practices and building funding around both or multiple approaches. This marrying of funding and analysis I think is absolutely critical as we consider new funding routes such as your crowdsourcing to be really provocative out here. I think we as a field might wanna consider quality assurances in terms of what works as we're beginning to discuss these new funding initiatives. I was really struck recently by a study that Chris Chrisman did in the UK looking at all the research that was done around radicalization and violent extremists. And this is a real lesson to us in the peace building field which is analyzing our analysis because when he went out there and really looked at all of these studies and evaluated the rigorous methodologies around those studies, he found that only 20% of that research actually led to conclusive findings. So what are we basing our practice and our policy decisions and our funding on? And so this idea of quality assurances in terms of the research and our practice and giving it that sort of stamp of rigorous analysis and evaluation is important. This gets to Julia's point. One of the other things that we're also doing at USIP with the support of State Department and USID is we're building a network of local researchers around violent extremism called Resolve. And we just had a big meeting in New York but it gets to Julia's point about sort of the funding of local initiatives and the role of the international community. And we did a lot of work with these local researchers and found that there actually is a very good and solid role for the international community. The fact of the matter is that our practice around CVE, especially our international and national practices around CVE would really benefit from local insights and local research. So how do we develop that local capacity on the ground in terms of research? So some of the things that we're doing are developing a shared agenda for research on violent extremism so that you are looking at one or two themes across several different countries so that you're beginning to collect data across countries at the local level around the same set of issues. And that's something that the international community can help facilitate because believe me, local researchers want to make sure that that shared agenda is important to the international community, that they're feeding their results into key international questions and issues and they are also very interested in again this idea of quality assurance that the international community and researchers around this effort are giving them some sort of assurance that their research is of a methodological quality because that attracts funding for them so that they can go out and say, my research and the methods that I employ have been developed with mentoring relations with other international research. That also in terms of funding and sustainability issues also means we need to be a little bit more pragmatic. I am constantly struggling on my side with folks that want really, really rigorous research from the field and I think facing the realities of what our local researchers find out there so tempering our research methodologies to the realities of the field but also in building in ethical considerations I think are important. The last thing I'll say, I was thinking about this in terms of Craig and these new funding initiatives and I think we need to do a better job of really rigorous some analytical frameworks for over the horizon analysis to really capture the ideas and imagination of funders. Ten was involved with an exercise we did on a scenario analysis of the Russian periphery right now because I honestly believe that is sort of the new arc of conflict that's emerging but how do we tell a powerful story to funders that's rooted in an analytical framework that's been tested by experts across the field and so these types of stories and analytical frameworks and adopting them in our research in our work to get the best decision making out of funders and policy makers I think is critical and with that I will leave mine. Thank you very much to Lauren and I would encourage you to look at USAB as a wonderful website but find this Center for Employee Conflict Research and just to say Kickstarter recently passed $2 billion total in support that's been given through the projects. Crowdfunding is not a magic solution to anything. I mean none of the things we're talking about if you do crowdfunding, social impact bonds, none of these are magic solutions they're just another tool in the toolkit but I think the peace building field is behind on a lot of these things so we need to be thinking about it so I'd like to turn it over to Ambassador Ken Yalowitz who's the director of the, my boss the director of the Georgetown Conflict Resolution Program had 35 year career in the Foreign Service was ambassador to Georgia and Belarus and was that Dartmouth previous to coming to Georgetown so thank you very much. If thank you very much Craig if you don't mind I'm going to sit I've got a pretty bad cold as you can tell and I want to try to preserve a little energy I have left. First of all Craig I wanted to congratulate you on an excellent paper which I enjoyed it was very provocative and I thought right on and both to Julia and Lauren for two excellent presentations. Julia I'm a member of, I work very closely with the Eurasia Foundation and we went local in the caucuses establishing three independent organizations based in each of the three countries and as you were going through that evolution it brought back a lot of memories but I say I just congratulate both of you on the excellent job that you're both doing. I'm going to speak a little bit differently. I, as Craig mentioned, am a basically a practitioner and I'm going to talk about some of the things that have concerned me in particularly three areas and the areas that I know best are the unresolved conflicts in the former USSR and I wanted to talk a little bit about and this will be more of a case study if you will why they have defied solution and sort of any ideas on how to take positive steps and what can be done what can be done to move these things off of dead center, frozen conflicts as we call them and also to sustain long-term funding for these efforts. To me, one of the most fundamental problems that we're all facing here is that headlines drive attention and policy makers are focused on ending immediate threats of violence or outbreaks of violence and not necessarily working long-term at the roots of the conflict and that's something that Lauren addressed and I can tell you from experience that when you're working on some of these efforts and a Syria, a Ukraine or a Libya emerges the funding supplies drop off very, very, very quickly because attention is focused elsewhere and another issue that I think is one that needs to be looked at very closely and we're doing this now we've just instituted a program at Georgetown of scholar practitioners and our first resident scholar practitioner as a retired army general and no secret to any of us in this room that when the US looks at issues overseas we generally tend to look at the military first in terms of resolving them and I think that's a very important lesson that all of us have to keep in mind that in this business we're going to be working with the military all the time and it's very important to I think understand their culture they have a huge amount of resources and capabilities and they're going to be on the ground in many, many, many places so that's just a word based on my own experience. Let me talk briefly about these three conflicts in the former Soviet Union for which I've spent many years working on. Two of them are ethno-territorial, Nagorno-Karabakh, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over an area called Nagorno-Karabakh which in Mr. Stalin's infinite wisdom back in the 1920s it's a majority ethnic Armenian area but it was put in the middle of Azerbaijan so that was always going to be a problem for the future and then also Abkhazia and South Ossesia very much in the headlines in 2008 when Russia and Georgia fought a war over South Ossesia and the separatism there. The third one is between Moldova and Transnistria and that is more an issue of power and style of life rather than ethno-territorial issues. All of these are very complicated for many, many reasons I'm just gonna run through some of the reasons. One is the outside intervention of major powers Russia, Turkey, the United States and Iran. In many cases these countries have sided with one or another and that of course makes a lasting peace very difficult but what has bedeviled us over all these years? All these conflicts are still basically unresolved and I would submit that the Nagorno-Karabakh one is dangerous. That is one that we're watching very, very carefully but why is that? The conflicting narratives are very powerful in each of these cases and the notions you're having one side argue usually territorial integrity and the other side arguing national self-determination and you have these principles involved that gets very, very, very difficult to do. The negotiations that have taken place have been at the top level usually president to president and there has been precious little done at the ground level the kind of work that all of you are talking about. The particularly Nagorno-Karabakh there has been almost a total break in person to person context and the narratives built over violence, ethnic cleansing all of these things have taken hold. They're very, very deep and very, very hard to overcome. The leaders in these countries and both countries unfortunately suffer from authoritarian types of political systems. The leaders have taken no steps to prepare for peace and reconciliation. The kinds of things again that you all are working on which should be done are not being done. So that's another important point. There are no peace agreements in any of these agreement situations. There are no peacekeeping forces. They usually just cease fire lines and those are very, very dangerous. So all of these things make for a very, very, very difficult situation. It is going to be a long-term situation in terms of dealing with things and I agree with everything that's been said here. You're looking at 20 years or maybe 30 years or maybe even longer to deal with it. But let me just make a few general comments. Now again, as a former person involved in the policy process and watching what your good work is and how to perhaps make it a little bit more effective, I think you've gotta do a better job of convincing policymakers, not just donors and that's important and other NGOs that the CR work is relevant, useful and productive. When we examine our CR students at Georgetown and ask them to tell us examples of where this is work, sometimes it's a little bit like pulling teeth and I think it's just like the elevator speech. You've got to be able to explain in a few minutes why this work is useful and what it has produced. When there are so many competing forces out there for funding, this is going to be very, very, very relevant. A second thing and this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine is try to minimize the jargon. Policy makers do not wanna read a bunch of jargon. It will turn them off right off from the very, very beginning. If you can write clearly and very directly, that will be very, very helpful. The another point again from my own experience in the field as an ambassador, I always tried to get the NGOs working in Georgia, there were many fewer in Belarus to work together. If there was one thing that I had very little tolerance for and patience for was the unending competition and the inability of people to talk with one another and that meant a lot of repetition, overlap, particularly in countries as we're all dealing with here, you probably have a limited audience. You have a limited number of people with whom you can work and if they're all getting approached to do the same things by different organizations, I can remember in Georgia very frequently, individuals would come to me and say, please help us out, all we do is meet with your NGOs and people who wanna help us and we have no time to do our own research and our own work. I would also argue that one thing that's very, very helpful in terms of writing about what you do, don't dismiss the popular types of vehicles. I'm talking about op-eds and articles and popular foreign policy journals, not just writing for each other, but to get the word out there to people so that they have a better sense of what you're doing and the impact that you're making. Now I just wanted to offer, again, we've been struggling with these issues in the former Soviet Union for many years and we've seen with Ukraine, with Georgia, these things can spiral into violence and really cause a great deal of difficulty. But the things that I would recommend and probably many of you are already doing these things, but it's the absence of contacts at the ground level, particularly between Armenia and Azerbaijan. This is a really serious shortcoming. A second thing that, again, from my experience with the Eurasia Foundation is to work with youth and educational reforms. I mean, you're talking long-term, but there is nothing to me that's a better investment than working with youth. Certainly better coordination, as I've already described, I think that's going to be very important to do. I think also you've got to do a good job, perhaps a better job, to work with governments and Capitol Hill. Don't forget the Congress, in terms of explaining to members of Congress and their staffs what it is you're doing and why it's important and why it must continue to be funded. You can't get anything done in this town unless the congressional staffers are on board. And another thing that I think is very important, I don't know how, I've mentioned already the importance of understanding what the military is doing in this field and keeping abreast of what they're doing, but also make sure you keep talking when you're overseas to embassies, U.S. government officials. I can tell you that for me, I learn more from people on the ground who are doing the grassroots work like you folks than I often learn from my own people in the embassy. I would often just call people in and say, tell me what's going on because you people were on the ground and had very good contact. So I think, as I said, that mutual dialogue is very, very important. Another couple of things, for any of you who work on the former Soviet Union, Turkey and Armenia came closer a few years ago to a very historic reconciliation in which borders would have been opened and that would have been a very important thing. It went off the rails, but again, if there's anything that can be done to increase contacts, not just between Azeris and Armenians, but also Turkey and Armenia, I think that would be very, very important. And another thing that I found useful is when you have these major political differences between, say, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the one thing that seemed to work was technical cooperation. When you, you know, what would frequently happen is Azerbaijan would say no to anything that would seem to bring any benefit, you know, to Armenia, whereas Armenia was always more than happy, but where we were able to have some success is things like water planning, environmental issues. I think, you know, areas where there is such a clear need, you know, for cooperation, I think this is also very, very useful. So I think I'll just stop there and I'm glad to discuss further. Thank you very much, Ambassador Yalovitz. I think it's a perfect transition to the work of Theo, who's the legislative secretary for the Friends Committee and National Legislation. And just to put it in a plug, Julie and I are both on the Board of Alliance for Peacebuilding, which is one of the co-sponsors of the CPRF. And one of the great things about the peacebuilding field is now people are talking about the need for increased coordination. So I would say in almost every part of the world, there are at least national or regional networks that are at least doing information sharing. And AFP is trying to also work on advocacy. So whatever your sector in the field, please make sure you join the right organization to not just work in isolation. And the Friends Committee and National Legislation is really doing a lot to try to bring the peacebuilding voice to Capitol Hill and so turn over to Theo. Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Craig. And thank you to my fellow panelists. That really does, I think, lead well into few of my remarks. So as Craig said, I'm Theo. I lead the peacebuilding policy program at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. We're a Quaker lobby in the public interest and a lobby in the truest sense of the word. And my job is to speak to Congress and to help explain the complex long-term nature of conflict and what all of that involves and how do we then design peacebuilding programs, interventions, how do we fund the relevant parts of our government that could carry out these programs outside of congressional budget cycles. And that could be a scary thing, but it's actually a fun job and I actually do have a lot of fun doing that. On the one hand, we're driven by headlines, as the ambassador said, and that's where so much of our attention goes to. And even in our advocacy organization, while our tactics can seem inherently short-term, I think at least for FCNL, the way we articulate our work, it's very much connected to a long-term vision. Long-term vision and planning, at least from our perspective. Our mission statement begins by saying, we seek a world that is free of war and a threat of war. I think that actually goes beyond Lederach's generational framework. We have a long way to get there, but that's our stated goal in our mission. Achieving this long-term goal for us breaks into, breaks kind of naturally into political cycles in some ways. Yearly congressional calendars, biennial election cycles, and of course, every four-year presidential cycles. And we pick our issues based on what Quakers tell us that we should work on. We have a board of directors, our governing body is a 220-member body that goes through the process of using a number of process matters, not just out there, but also internally within our organization and how that drives our work. And that sets out our policy statements and our annual work, our everyday work, flows out of that policy statement. So my particular work in the Peacebuilding Policy Program, in a nutshell, breaks down into lobbying for conflict prevention and peacebuilding funding, particularly for programs within the State Department and USAID. And as part of that, one of the work that part of our programmatic work is coordinating and leading a working group that brings together search for common ground, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, plenty of other organizations that do peacebuilding and conflict prevention work. And this is a prevention and protection working group that is lobbied for a lot of these accounts over the last number of years. For FCNL itself, and I wanted to get into what our base of support looks like very briefly, to give you an idea of how, even though our vision states, our mission states that our goal is to end all wars and to seek a world that's free from war and a threat of war, we're not there yet. And we're probably a long way of getting there. And yet our base of support keeps coming from our supporters. So about 45% of our annual support comes from individual donors, about 7% from foundations and from grants. I think our ongoing support from individuals is because of the narrative that FCNL has been able to build out, that our specific projects, our specific advocacy initiatives, our campaigns is actually connecting into the bigger picture, to building longer term peace and to connecting into that larger vision. In lobbying for peace building on Capitol Hill, some challenges exist. Members of Congress are often looking for fixable problems, are looking for solutions. My job is to go into their offices and talk about the complexity of crises, the complexity of conflict, and to say that these are actually not fixable problems, at least not in the short term. How do we get systems thinking into congressional political cycles? I think that's probably our number one challenge. The other challenge is that many of the tools that we have is actually quite nascent. Peace building and conflict prevention as part of the US government architecture is new, and in many ways untested, at least from our perspective in our work in lobbying Congress. The tool that is well tested and of course needless to say well funded, the military continues to be the go-to tool for crisis response management, et cetera. And I think that's where the communication pieces are really crucial for our community. Whereas true peace building thrives in the nuances, whereas policymakers and more importantly the American public look towards solution oriented answers. So then if we are successful in preventing conflict, and I think we are, especially preventing election violence, there's prevention words, how do you then prove a negative? Attributing specific transformational changes to specific processes becomes extremely difficult, especially in a congressional office. So if I may offer just some principles to keep in mind, articulate your theory of change. I think at least for the peace building community and certainly for the humanitarian community, this is kind of part and parcel of who we are. We think in theories of change, we at least I think we do. But I think articulating that to persons outside of our own little bubble community, outside of your own organizations, I think it's absolutely crucial. How does your particular intervention or your program actually connect to larger change processes? And why does it do that? And what is the narrative that you build around it? And when there is failure, what's the reason for those failures? Continue to build your body of evidence. Be as Lederach and others would say, be a reflective practitioner. And I think that involves continuing to build that body of evidence, reflecting on our successes and our failures and continuing to tell that story. I think this is where getting out of our specific project cycles and kind of siloed forms of thinking is absolutely crucial. Is that where particular projects may fall into 18 months or two or maybe three years, and then we move on to the next project and look for funding for those projects. I think stepping back and being reflective and feeding that into the larger community is absolutely crucial. So yes, peace building has graduated to a peace building 2.0 as a discipline and a practice, but there's still a lot that we don't understand. And certainly, I think grant makers and policy makers don't understand. I think so building your body of evidence to that community is absolutely crucial. This has already been said, of course, go local, truly build capacity within local communities. Because once the international community leaves, it's our local partners, it's the local civil society organizations that are carrying the long-term work of peace building forward. And I think for FCNL, I think this is absolutely important. Finally, is effective communication. For an organization that is an advocacy organization, our work is very much rooted in the grassroots, in educating the American public about conflict, about peace building, and about how all of these processes interact and work together. Effective strategic communications on how you tell the stories. I mean, the ambassador's point about, get out of your fancy DC Beltway jargon. How do we sell this to the American public outside of the Beltway? Look for stories. I think stories are really powerful. And look particularly for emblematic stories that connect to the larger transformational change. And I think keeping that in mind, as we get out of our project cycles, is absolutely crucial. So I'll actually end there. Those are my remarks, but I look forward to questions and a lively discussion. So I'd like to thank the panelists and the audience. So just three quick summary things. So I think everyone is talking about the need to demonstrate more effective impact based on evidence and stories. And this is something as a field, I think we need a better job. I'm almost looking for the metadata about meta impact. So what do we know that we can show to a high degree of certainty is true? And what do we don't know? And what do we need to know? And I think as a field where, I mean, the global peace index is probably doing the best work, but we really need a lot more there. The second thing is really local, local is where it's all at. So we need these intermediaries or inter funder, whatever was the term, fundemaries, that we came from Civicus, but local organizations are gonna be around and doing a lot of the long hard slog of peace building. And that we really need to do a lot more information, share and get our put our egos aside and just increase impact. And just one very short note how I try to sometimes put this into practice. So I still do consulting work and sometimes people ask me to do consulting work. And often I'll say, I'm not the right person. And I say, I know here's somebody who's from the country, the neighboring country, who can do it better, cheaper and more effectively. And it has all the knowledge that I don't have. So I think sometimes like, how do we actually put that into practice? In terms of both organization institutionally that often bringing in outside North American is not the right choice. Sometimes it is. And just kind of questioning the assumptions of why things are done. So we have about 15 minutes for questions. So if you can keep them short, just say your name institution. If you want to tell a story, question, comment, say something provocative, we would welcome that. And thank you very much. So any questions, comments, concerns, frustrations? We'll start, Bob. My name's Bob Schley-Huber. I run an organization called Peace Building Connections. I guess I'll do a frustration question. I wanna, I guess I highly disagree with the relationship with the military and the peace builders. And I wanna know if the overwhelming funding and overwhelming attention to the military will continue to stifle the growth of the peace building field. And if we just instantly comply and say, all right, well you're here, we'll work with you if that is actually gonna do us damage long-term. So I would be curious to hear a little bit more on your thoughts. And when you ask a question, maybe direct it towards the Pacific person, or you can just say it for everybody, so. I'm the ambassador, I can direct it to her, I guess Theo as well, kind of touch on that. Okay, so you wanna. I mean, for FCNL, we're a Quaker organization and we are hard work and our programs are based on Quakers as a pacifist religious group. But at the same time, we see the military is the biggest player, and particularly for the US. In conflict areas, the US military plays a big role. And if our community isn't talking, isn't communicating with the military, then I think then we're really selling ourselves short. And I think certainly there, in my own conversations with plenty of people within the US military, they are sometimes some of the biggest supporters and advocates for peace building. And particularly civilian led peace building. And because they've experienced what they, they know what they can and can't do. And they know what their specific mandates are. So yeah, so that's what I would offer from my perspective. I feel that was an excellent answer. I would agree with every word you said. I've had a lot of experience working with military over the years. And just to reiterate, they're going to be there. There is no two ways about it. And you have to be realistic. They are going to have resources. But again, what I have found is that particularly the general officers, the generals, the admirals, they will understand the destruction of the weaponry that they command. And almost to a person when I've talked with these folks, they don't want to use those weapons. They would much rather see diplomacy work. They would much rather see conflict prevention work. And they are very open to what we do. As a former State Department officer and an ambassador, it was always incredibly interesting to me that the Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, then was the biggest supporter of more funding for civilian resources, including the State Department. Because he said there are things we can't and should be doing that civilians should be doing. We know we're getting the lion's share of the resources, but I think it ought to be changed. So again, I think you need to keep in mind that the DOD, the image of the guys running up the hill shooting everybody, it doesn't always work that way. And I think there's a lot that you can do with them. And as our general said the other day, our visiting scholar, he said, you in the field doing peace-involved work, you're going to have to have security. You've got to be able to work in a reasonably secure environment. And if you're in Afghanistan, if you're wherever you're at, that's the job of the military, is to at least to provide a security environment in which you can do what you're going to do. I mean, these are dangerous places and the military is there, but they are the ones who are responsible for security. And to do what you're doing, you're going to have to have some security. So as I said, I don't look at it as a zero-sum game. There are inevitably going to be conflicts. I've had them myself with the military. When it comes to resources, it's intensely frustrating when you see the imbalance in resources. But what you do is you look for ways to work together and it can be done. Yeah, I just wanted to say a small thing also about the, we've decided it's really important to be in these conversations, not just with US military, but with local militaries in the countries where we work. And I think there's always this fear about either co-optation or that you're going to somehow have to kind of sell it on your values. But I think we are uniquely positioned to support productive conversations that need to be happening. And they are a constituency and security sector reform and right sizing. I mean, these are policy issues, but it's also like people's lives are interacting on a daily basis with those in uniform. And to be helping to facilitate those conversations happening between community leaders and those in uniform, I think are necessary. And so we have to have those relationships. And over the past, let's say five or six years, we've made a really strategic decision to build those relationships. More I'd say with local militaries, but it's always controversial. I want to thank actually a panelist for the great job you've done. My name is Kamara Ibrahim, and I've been around UCP and ICNC and Woodguards University for quite a long time. My concern is the regulatory frameworks that will be in place for incubating organizations. Because out of experiences I've gone through and I've seen a lot of organizations, whenever they're like funding or they're like opportunities for younger institutions to come and join them, they create some bottlenecks. So as in this case, it's like, I mean, trying to draw the attention for the central body to have some moderate principles to broaden the scope whereby you'll get more CPUs on the ground that will give you effective input. So that is my concern. Yeah, no, absolutely. I do want to say that I think we need to acknowledge in our field, we do have some issues that we need to address. And I think entry into kind of the civil society kind of elite in certain countries and the way, like I mentioned, how we're bringing up the next generation and what kinds of links we have with constituencies and how we self-police ourselves, how we're holding ourselves accountable. And I think that there's different ways that we've been talking about do that, whether it's kind of NGO report cards in different countries where we really know how transparent we are. I mean, some of we work on transparency with government but how transparent are our own colleagues. And so I do not disagree with you at all. I do think that there's kind of a development jet set that has developed that really holds on to its own role within countries, which is part of why the funders have gotten kind of tired of the same old, same old. And they want to go to kind of find the new people to work with and invest in. And we're trying to help work with those same old, same old to kind of break open. And like I said, part of it is succession planning because 20 years ago there were leaders that were breaking open a field who have perhaps a different perspective than young people coming up today. Hi, so I'm Maria Fernanda Sierra. I'm from Colombia. And while my question is more based in my experience in Colombia. So when you're dealing with conflict for so many years, conflict has a plurality of actors. And also people adapt through behaviors. And we're now talking about building sustainable peace. But we do know that there's a plurality of actors with different perspectives, sometimes conflicting perspectives. And we also know that world peace is built from the ground, from these different actors that it takes time, long term, and that many people have to heal. But then what do you think? And this is an open question for anyone who wants to answer it. What do you think are the key, some key things that you could do in the short term, like today, to ensure bringing the building blocks towards sustainable peace in the long term? So basically how do you incubate or accelerate the possibility of long term peace by doing short term things? If I could, the experience that I had in Georgia might be a little reflective. And certainly Colombia, congratulations. I mean, it looks promising after many, many years. One factor was I found in Georgia, they went through civil war, separatist wars. And what I found was that people were tired of war. And when it came close to governments' forces clashing and the risk of war, that there was sort of a sense within the population and the political and military elite not to go back, that the costs were simply too great. And I think that's very important is to just constantly keep reminding people of what they went through and the horrible costs every time that they may get close to picking up guns, to remind people what they've gone through. That was actually fairly helpful, I found. I'll just, my research portfolio in ARC is actually on resilience. And you can tell by my presentation I have actually myself mixed feelings about the concept. But one of the things that I think is really important in talking to folks in some of the work I've been doing in Kenya and in other regions in Guatemala, et cetera, is that to really reframe some of the thinking around communities and their experiences in conflict. Because I found actually that coming at these issues and this analysis and this practice from a framework of risk and vulnerability and weakness really sets you on a path, I think, not as satisfying, but also there is so much strength and capacity within these communities. That I think coming out of the work in Kenya, at least I've done, that isn't even recognized by the communities themselves. So things that they have been doing on the ground when it comes to regulating the acts of violent extremist groups, they don't even understand as resilience capacities and strategies. So that's one thing is offering them a framework for understanding their own strength and capacity is really critical. And I think the other issue, and it's one of the commitments we've had in our resilience research, is allowing them to understand the strengths and capacities that other communities themselves have used so that there's more of a community on community learning from communities that have gone through those shared experiences. The only thing I wanted to add was I think this is where defining and understanding your theory of change is really important in terms of the short term. And I think in Colombia is really a good example of this. And one thing that I can think of specifically in Colombia is building the constituency for peace. The longest running civil war in the world. And finally, Colombian president has the mandate from his public to move forward with a peace agreement with the FARC. And in spite of the ups and downs of the process so far. So we just need to get it through the finish line at this point. And I think so continuing to build on that to get this larger peace agreement I think could speak volumes. Really quick thought about Colombia where we've been doing a lot of work is the thread between all three of these comments is how important a communication strategy is for reframing, for building constituencies, for telling a different narrative in a story. And I think it behooves us in our field to be in relationship with professional communicators. And it's something with the Alliance for Peace Building. We've been trying to look at who are the people who frame issues for society? Who are the people who get messages out? Maybe in a very much more sophisticated way. And so I think that that's kind of a short-term thing. And there's some very cool communication stuff with advertising agencies and different social media professionals in Colombia. That it sounds like window dressing, but it's actually not if they're in relationship with us so that we're getting kind of the right messages out. So I want to be respectful of time. So I think we'll finish in one second. Just to make a comment, so in the Alliance for Peace Building, we're talking a lot about how do we sell in brand peace. Coca-Cola is one of the best markers in the world. You buy a can of Coke, you feel happy. What's the equivalent for peace? We don't have it. And how do we kind of brand it in locally created contexts? There's really interesting experiments going on. So I'd like to thank these speakers for taking time out of their busy schedules and the audience for coming. And I think most of us will stay around if people have questions. Please look at the CPRF website, which is that, you want to say anything about upcoming ones? Yeah, SDGs, and then we'll take a break. Well, yeah. So please look in the search for a common ground website or partners or the reports. And thank you very much to USIP for hosting us.