Karuna Center for Peacebuilding

Last updated
Karuna Center for Peacebuilding
Founded1994
TypeNon-profit organization exemption status: 501(c)(3)
Location
Area served
Global
Website karunacenter.org

Karuna Center for Peacebuilding (KCP) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Amherst, Massachusetts. The stated mission of KCP is to empower people divided by conflict to develop mutual understanding and to create sustainable peace. The organization was named for the Sanskrit word for compassion. The organization's efforts in facilitating "post-conflict reconciliation" have led to active programs in more than 30 countries. KCP has co-implemented programs with the United States Agency for International Development, United States Department of State, United States Institute of Peace, and Fund for Peace, among others. [1]

Contents

History and purpose

KCP provides educational training programs in conflict transformation and inter-communal dialogue in communities experiencing deeply rooted conflict. [2] With a focus on relational peacebuilding, KCP facilitators aim to create a context in which shattered communal relations can be healed and programs fostering coexistence can be established and tested. [3]

KCP was founded in 1994 by Dr. Paula Green, who came to the field of peacebuilding with a background in intergroup relations, counseling psychology, Buddhist meditation, and nonviolent activism. [4] Dr. Green was a professor Emeritus at the School for International Training Graduate Institute, as well as the founder of the graduate certificate program, Conflict Transformation Across Culture (CONTACT) located on the SIT Vermont campus and in South Asia. She was joined in this work in 2002 by Olivia Stokes Dreier, who became Executive Director of KCP on June 1, 2010. [5]

KCP works internationally with in-country partners to lead peacebuilding trainings and dialogue workshops. Since 1994, KCP staff has led programs in conflict transformation in 26 countries in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa and America. [6] Past areas of work have included training members of Nepal’s Constituent Assembly in collaboration and negotiation skills and engaging community-based peace committees in the Casamance region of Senegal. Other areas of work have included workshops for women leaders in Sudan and South Sudan in partnership with the Hunt Alternatives Fund, and a multi-year program in Northeast Sri Lanka, in partnership with the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, that engaged Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu and Christian leaders in joint community projects and reconciliation following the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Programs

KCP’s first long-term project took place in Bosnia from 1997-2002, first working with women community leaders and then with educators from Sanski Most and Prijedor in Northern Bosnia, most of whom were survivors of Prijedor concentration camps which were discovered in 1993 by reporter Roy Gutman. In May 1997, KCP received funding for a Sanski Most training program focused on survivors of sexual abuse, incarceration, and war-based trauma. The program was co-implemented with the Women’s Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Three years after the program's initiation, in May 2000, KCP funding to implement Project DIACOM, a dialogue program in the Sanski Most and Prijedor. [7] The program was aimed towards “inter-ethnic tolerance and understanding, conflict transformation, and peacebuilding” through educators. This shift collected support from the Seattle-based NGO, Foundation for Community Encouragement. [8]

Project DIACOM was named to signify dialogues and community building in which erstwhile antagonists are led to mend their mutual suspicions and to begin working together. [9] Alumni of this project later developed their own training programs for expanding understanding, trust, and reconciliation between Bosnian Muslims and Serbs, [10] leading to the start of the Center for Peacebuilding in Sanski Most, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Notable impacts by region

West Africa

East Africa

Central Africa

South Asia and Southeast Asia

North America

Collaborations

Karuna Center for Peacebuilding has collaborated with the SIT Graduate Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont, to teach courses in CONTACT (Conflict Transformation Across Cultures), a program that Dr. Paula Green founded in 1997 to provide intensive training and graduate certification in peacebuilding. [25] Karuna Center for Peacebuilding is a member of the Alliance for Peacebuilding.

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References

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