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Far too many of our world’s children grow up amidst great violence and poverty. Over 90% of children live in Majority World (developing) nations. Nearly 80% of the poorest nations have experienced a major civil war in their recent past and some have over half of their population younger than 18. Countries with a high percentage of young people have a much higher risk of terrorism, war, and other violence than older nations. Children in these contexts suffer incredibly from sexual exploitation, disease, and loss of education, families and futures, and children represent half of war casualties. Young Peacebuilders believes that young people provide hope for a more peaceful and prosperous future. In places primed for violence, great changes in thinking and acting are needed. It’s wise to invest in those most likely to change their thoughts and actions—the children and youth. The youthfulness of high-risk contexts represents a great opportunity. However, to seize this opportunity we must invest in supporting young people as engaged citizens and devoted peacebuilders. Critical Partnerships & Research
Cross-sector partnerships are critical to achieve the scope and depth of peacebuilding impact needed to bring durable peace in high-risk contexts. No one group is sufficiently equipped to mobilize a nations young people as peacebuilders. However, if NGOs, FBOs, governments, religious leaders, and other influencers work together effectively, it can be done. It is also critical to show that investing in young peacebuilders actually develops more durable peace. Again, achieving this research with scale and quality requires partnership. Research will help improve efforts and catalyze larger scale investments in young peacebuilders. We want to see a major shift in the dominant method of addressing contemporary conflicts toward investing in young people as peacebuilders. We believe one critical means for doing this is producing world-class longitudinal research verifying the effectiveness of child/youth peacebuilding in multiple high-risk contexts and then having that research promoted widely by a partnership of highly reputable academics, practitioners, and institutions. We start YP Institutes in established universities in higher-risk contexts. Promising research fellows in YP Institutes conduct supervised ongoing research on child/youth peacebuilding. The Plan, YP Groups
We help develop strong and sustainable YP Groups in cities, nations, and regions. YP Groups can start and grow quickly because they are largely independent but highly interconnected. Each YP Group forms a cross-sector partnership in their area. They leverage existing infrastructure, like schools, mosques, churches, and clubs, to help children and youth work with adults and other young people to build peace and avoid the violent destructive patterns that many predict. Young people are empowered to research and help build a more peaceful and prosperous future. We support local leaders in: 1) Catalyzing a YP Coordinating Team, 2) gathering other diverse leaders, 3) clarify the Young Peacebuilders vision, 4) together identify obstacles to achieving the vision in their context, 5) planning how they will over come their obstacles, and then, 6) implementing their plan to nurture large numbers of children and youth with peacebuilding passion and skills and measure impact. After an aspiring YP Group meets some basic requirements they become an affiliated or official YP Group and receive special benefits. Following are the 5 core values of every YP Group.
5 Core Young Peacebuilders Values
1. Share and use information. Collect resources, research, tools, event and other relevant information and find helpful ways to share with the broader community seeking to support young peacebuilders. Keep learning in order to work with increasing excellence.
2. Be inclusive. Involve young and older people, larger and smaller groups, and leaders from different sectors of society, such as, business, government, NGOs, and diverse faith groups.
3. Coordinate and collaborate. Coordinate with others sharing a similar vision and seek to collaborate on specific projects to cut costs, improve quality, and support more young peacebuilders more quickly. Collaborate when measuring project impact and seek shared research measures.
4. Keep leadership flat. It helps each YP Group and participant take ownership and responsibility. YP Coordinating Teams help provide opportunities to hear and coordinate participant opinions rather than dictate objectives.
5. Self Resource. YP Groups take full responsibility for raising all the resources needed to achieve their objectives. Each YP Group encourages and financially supports a YP Champion who helps share the YP vision, nurture expanding participation, and support YP coordination and collaboration. Affiliated YP Groups Commit to and Provide Evidence of:
1. Keeping YP’s mission and 5 core values
2. Having a YP Coordinating Team representing 5+ diverse groups
3. Supporting a YP Champion (i.e. partnership facilitator/coordinator/focal-point)
4. Following Guiding Principles on Young People’s Participation in Peacebuilding
5. Ensuring minimum financial accounting requirements
6. Connecting with or starting a YP Institute in their area
Some of the Benefits to Participating Partners
1. Achieve an organizational goal on a much grander scale than could ever have occurred alone.
2. Coordinated impact assessment saves organizations time and money. It also gives groups additional tools to improve efforts and prove impact, which can be extremely helpful in financial development.
3. Harmonized data collection and research lowers participant’s costs, increases available data, can expedite discovery of more reliable findings.
4. Partnership funding proposals can help partners gain access to new funding sources, larger grants, or funding only available to partnerships.
5. Shared development and reproduction of prioritized young peacebuilders training tools can allow partners access to better and more training resources more quickly and at a fraction of the costs.
6. Coordinated young peacebuilders training events save time and money by train more people more quickly.
7. Young Peacebuilders partnership participants are more aware of training events and tools, funding opportunities, related research, and other information that helps each organization better achieve their peacebuilding objectives.
8. Participants celebrate outcomes of the partnership in addition to individual and organizational achievements. Too many of our world’s children are raised in contexts where they are taught to wage war and far too few are taught how to wage peace. Young Peacebuilders wants to change that reality and we have a plan to do so. Please partner with us in achieving the Young Peacebuilders vision.
