Sustainable Peace Education Project FAQ
What is the Sustainable Peace Education Project?
The Sustainable Peace Education Project consists of a strategy that works towards an enduring peace sustained by promoting a culture of peace initiated at the most fundamental societal levels. The Project promotes ‘peace education’ in elementary schools and universities within known conflict areas that are stable and no longer engaged in active violence.
What is your plan to carry out this project?
A sustainable peace will be achieved by creating a general and broad curriculum that is easily adaptable to time, place, and demographic, following the successful model used by the American Red Cross to disseminate its Exploring Humanitarian Law curriculum. Comprised of a broad and comprehensive curriculum, instructors from grades 1-14 can easily integrate it into their respective subjects.
The curriculum will be disseminated among interested instructors, with additional training for those that desire it, to enhance and facilitate their use of the material as a stand-alone course or as part of any subject within the social sciences. Primarily, the curriculum will consist of effective communication skills, the basic and broad range of conflict resolution, and prevention techniques that are part of a mediator’s repertoire of skill sets. These tools, when employed by lay people in their most basic forms, tend to prevent the frustration that typically leads to physical violence.
The mediator skill set referred to above is defined by Mediators Beyond Borders as follows: “The term mediator is inclusive of a broad range of conflict management and resolution endeavors. Activities such as conciliation, facilitation, consensus building, conducting public dialogues, system design, restorative justice initiatives, and education and capacity building to mitigate or prevent violence are all encompassed within a sweeping definition of mediator.”
These skills are to be presented to both instructors and students in the simplest and most ‘real world’ way possible. In addition, these skill sets may be adapted as needed by the facilitator to enhance their cultural relevance and interest to the audience at hand.
In addition to promoting a culture of peace from the ‘ground up’ by teaching these invaluable skills to students in grades 1-9, this project will also have a collegiate component that will educate and train interested University seniors and graduate students in these areas in order to provide the communities in question with native trainers. In other words, this project will not rely on foreign trainers but will employ the ‘train the trainer’ model to facilitate the acquisition of these values by the target demographic’s own value system.
How will you measure success for this project?
The success of this project will be measured in steps, and as all things properly implemented, so too must this project be implemented gradually. The first step consists of chartering a European Association that will grant our team a legal tax exempt status within the European Union (EU) and establishing a national Non-Profit organization chartered in California to enable my team to be recognized and operate as a non-profit organization within the United States (US). This will facilitate the legal and academic goals of being able to sign Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with US institutions and the official acquisition of interns. The first step should take approximately one to two months.
The second step will consist of signing MOUs with our main partners, e.g. Regional Governments, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, The California State University, Rotary International, Mediators Beyond Borders, etc.. The second step should take no less than one and no more than three months.
The third step will consist of visiting the schools within the Autonomous Communities to present them with the proposal, and set up training dates with interested school principals. Despite the fact that we anticipate support from the local governments to implement this from the top down, we intend first to implement this project from the bottom up. The third step will take no more than three months.
During the fourth step, success will be measured by the number of successful training sessions conducted and number of trainers trained. The fourth step will take approximately six months.
The fifth and final step will consist of oversight, consulting, and monitoring in order to statistically measure the results of the Sustainable Peace Education Project. During this last step, aside from collecting school and possibly local law enforcement statistics, we will also revisit all of the participating schools to collect feedback that will later be implemented in any future redesign of this protocol.
How will you involve others with this commitment?
Who are potential partners?
We have already unofficially approached all of the following principal partners who have tentatively agreed to participate:
*Rotary international who has committed to providing seed funding for the project.
-Madrid Cibeles Rotary Club
-Rotary Districts 2201 & 5340
*The Former Deputy Director for External Relations for The School of Social Work at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, who committed to help as an expert and foresaw no real obstacles with establishing a formal institutional collaboration.
*The President of Mediators Beyond Borders International who indicated that his organization would be very interested in partnering with us on this and future projects.
What challenges do you anticipate in carrying out this project?
What is your plan to address these?
Given the response thus far, we do not expect any significant challenges in securing collaborations. Other parties that we might approach include but are not limited to: the main universities in the participating communities and youth movements within the communities that might be interested in taking an active role and eventual ‘ownership’ of the project. We also expect to be able to partner with Regional Governments given the proper political climate.
We expect the main challenges to be financial, and we plan to gradually address them. We are confident that once we have documented results, more organizations will be willing to support this project financially.
INNOVATION:
In what ways is your project innovative? How does your approach differ from or build upon the approaches of others, and why is it more effective?
How have you adapted your model to the specific context and/or community in which you will be working?
This project is innovative because, unlike other similar projects, it does not target adults or scholars. On the contrary, this project targets the next generation of global citizens, those that live in post conflict zones and those that, due to the forces of globalization, must be global citizens regardless of choice. It empowers them with the basic skills necessary to deal with the few but concrete consequences of globalization.
The basic set of protocols that will be taught to the target audience are simplified versions of the curriculum that is taught in most graduate Conflict Resolution Programs, the kind of skills that I hear my colleagues comment on time and time again when they ask, “Why didn’t they teach us this in elementary school?” These simple processes, when properly applied, can prevent conflict in general and violence in particular by preventing the buildup of frustration that in the latter stages of conflict inevitably erupts into violence.
SUSTAINABILITY:
How does the project achieve sustainability?
How will the project continue to function if the group’s current leadership leaves the region in question?
In addition to promoting a culture of peace from the ‘ground up’ by teaching these invaluable skills to students in grades 1-9, this project will also have a collegiate component that will educate and train interested university students with a background in law, psychology, social work, international relations, peace and conflict studies, political science, communications and other related fields. This will provide the communities in question with native trainers. In other words, this project will not rely on foreign trainers but will employ the ‘train the trainer’ model in its attempt to make these values part of the target demographic’s own value system. As part of the project sustainability, consultation and monitoring may be available depending on funding availability.
