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PeaceCon 2023

May 16, 2023

The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) held its annual PeaceCon earlier this month. We had some concerns going in. It was, of course, the first time we had held it even part of it face-to-face since 2019 and really didn’t know how many people would show up. We also decided to live stream the plenary sessions and have some online only virtual sessions, none of which I got to see. We also had to move the second and third days to Trinity Washington University. They are for our members and supporters only after a first day at the United States Institute for Peace which is open to the public free of charge.

I’m glad to say that it all went off without a hitch—at least that I was able to see.

And, because we had more than 1,000 people attend at least one session on site or on line, no one individual could get to everything. In my case, as one of the few people who have been around since the beginning of PeaceCon, joined AfP in its third or fourth year, and whose job includes mentoring young peacebuilders, I found myself pulled in every possible direction and didn’t always have the bandwidth to fully focus on the sessions I attended.

Still, I am pretty confident about the four conclusions I reached about PeaceCon itself and where AfP is headed.

Melanie Greenberg Award

First and perhaps foremost, I’m delighted that NAFCM (National Association for Community Mediation) and its President, D. G. Mawn, won this year’s Melanie Greenberg award for American peacebuilding (that’s the two of them in this picture).

I’m glad to say that it all went off without a hitch—at least that I was able to see.

Still, I am pretty confident about the four conclusions I reached about PeaceCon itself and where AfP is headed.

Melanie Greenberg Award

Given my belief in transparency, I should point out that I serve on the NAFCM board of directors and was one of the people who nominated it for this year’s award.

Named for one of AfP’s founders, former CEO, and early proponent of our working in the United States, the award honors an individual or organization that has done particularly noteworthy work toward that end. Community mediation is an outgrowth of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. NAFCM itself was created almost thirty years ago to promote the work of the roughly four hundred community mediation centers in the United States and Canada.

As Mawn likes to put it, NAFCM centers are among the best kept secrets in the peacebuilding world, because so few Americans even know they exist. Yet, they have played a pivotal role through their efforts for racial equality, access to mediation and other services for all members of those communities, addressing critical issues like the threat of mass evictions during the pandemic or the difficulties returning citizens have after being released from prison, to its role as a founding member of the Trust Network and all that it does to protect American democracy.

If you want to learn more about NAFCM, just sign up for its Momentum May online event at 7.00 PM (Eastern) on 23 May. It is a now annual (in other words we did it last year, too) in which its member centers and their friends gather to take stock of what they have accomplished this year and what they plan to do in the year to come. That will include our first in-person assembly which will be held at Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter School of Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University in Arlington VA in early October. Trust me, I’ll keep you posted as that date looms.

At the Grownups Table

PeaceCon itself is now a fixture. It’s not South by Southwest or ComiCon but it is a big deal in the peacebuilding world which is itself expanding. And that’s a reasonably big deal.

A few years ago, our board chair, Julia Roig, lamented that we peacebuilders didn’t have a spot at the grownups table at our equivalent of holiday dinner parties. By grownups, she meant the people who mattered in both the public policy and media worlds.

Now, after three years of uncertainty caused by the pandemic and everything else that has shaken our country and our planet, it’s safe to say that we are routinely asked to the table for the occasional “snack” and, on some global issues, have earned ourselves a regular “seat.” We still have a ways to go, but a couple of examples should suffice.

First, each year, we attract better plenary speakers for PeaceCon. Many come to the first day at USIP and include senior administration officials, representatives from the UN, and leading academics.

This year, we saved the best for our “private time” during the second day at Trinity Washington University where we heard board member Alan Fitts interview Sherrie Westin, President of Sesame Workshop. As many readers of this newsletter already know, Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee were the first recipients of the 100 and change award which it won in 2017 to help educate children displaced by war.

Second, we decided to encourage members of our board of directors to attend in person. Because of term limits, former members joining the administration, and more, we had had to replace about 80 percent of our board in 2022 and 2023 and encouraged all of the members—new and old alike—to attend this year’s PeaceCon, which most of them were able to do. After the second night, Fitts hosted a dinner for the board (with Sherrie Westin as a special guest). As is her wont, Julia had everyone introduce themselves and why they had joined the board. It took us more than half an hour but were blown away by its racial, professional, generational, and ideological diversity. We have members who have served in Democratic and Republican administrations, a few corporate executives, an academic, and more. As the dinner was breaking up, Julia sat down next to me and we almost didn’t have to say anything. As the two longest serving members of the board, we were both in awe of the talented people who had agreed to join us.

We still have a long way to go to have a permanent seat at the grownups table when decision makers decided what American foreign and domestic policy should be. None of us, for instance, are fixtures on PBS, NPR, or the Sunday morning television news interview programs. But we’re getting there, and if our new board is any indication we’ll get there sooner rather than later.

We are Trying Some New Things–The (Peacefully) Dueling T-Shirts

As an organization, we are trying new and adventurous things, two of which ended up in a nerdy fashion show that involved dueling t-shirts from new initiatives that were launched on the third and final day of the event.

Julia has long pushed us to think about reaching out to the American public through television, film, and the internet. We’ve spent the last few years figuring out how to do that and, frankly, hadn’t made much progress until Julia and our staff worked with some creatives in the advertising world and came up with the idea of a Peace Force and presented an initial drop to the audience at Trinity.

Instead of asking young people to enlist in the armed forces, we are asking them join the Peace Force instead. At the moment, it’s still a germ of an idea, but Julia and the team developed some initial t-shirts which sold out so quickly that I couldn’t get one. Over the next few months, we will be developing the idea and other AfP members will develop their own “drops.”

Not everyone loved the idea of taking on memes that the military has used. Nonetheless, there were lots of delighted gasps in the room as Julia and her team presented the visuals. And the shirts literally flew out the door.

As regular readers know, I’ve been developing the idea that we should think of peace as a verb, as something we actively do and build rather than as “simply” a goal we work for, which is what my session focused on with Jenn Brandel of Hearken and Zebras Unite, Ambassador Miguel Diaz of Loyola (Chicago), Abby Rapoport, publisher of Stranger’s Guide, and Rebecca Crall of Rotary International (who couldn’t make the trip because she was sick). Our presentation may not have been as slick as the Peace Force’s, but we all came prepared wearing t shirts of our own.

Unlike the Peace Force, our goal is to build grass roots movements in which people activate themselves by treating peace-as-a-verb. That is more consistent with the way I’ve always organized my political life and reflects my understanding of the way sweeping social change occurs. The jury is still out on which theory of change makes more sense, but they had the better t shirts….

In the end, both Julia and I are on to something, and we will be doing both. And, we both agree that AfP would not have been able to do either just a few years ago.

I’m Still Not a Fan of PeaceCon

In concluding, I only have one last point to make. After more than three years in near total social isolation (other than an average of four Zoom meetings per day), I had forgotten what it was like to actually go to real meetings indoors with real people. Thus, walking to USIP the first day, I was struck by the fact that I was walking behind someone who was smoking a cigarette. A once everyday event was now a shock to the system.