Relationships are at the core of the Community. Weaving a web of empathy and collective care within the community and beyond, we are able to foster trust and unlock the potential for deeper collaboration. Together, the Community draws strength and hope from our shared struggles and dreams. Here, we hold each other accountable because we care about each other and our mission.
COMMUNITY AGREEMENTS
As a community, to lean into this culture of care, we:
Move at the speed of relationships
Fumble forward
Express discomfort
Name the elephants in the room
Own our impact
There can be no transformation without imagination. The space supports the Community to seek out new ways of seeing, knowing and creating to explore alternative futures. As a Community, we seek to harness the power of collaboration and unlock our individual and collective potential, embracing opportunities to learn and fail as part of the journey.
COMMUNITY AGREEMENTS
To center creativity in our ways of working, we:
Challenge business as usual
Try new things
Go with good enough for now, safe enough to try
Take failure as feedback
Reimagine Peace is a space that seeks to disrupt and transform power as it currently operates in the systems we are part of. We seek to understand systems of oppression and address systemic injustices. Together, we look for ways to share power, resources and knowledge in service of the community and our mission, honouring our diverse lived experiences and perspectives.
COMMUNITY AGREEMENTS
To help us uphold liberatory principles, we:
Name our intentions
Pause for clarity
Slow down
Use our power and privilege to mitigate for power and privilege
To honour and uphold the pillars of care, creativity and liberation in the space, finding ways for the Community to explore their meaning, and together bring them to life.
To facilitate conversations to support the Community to connect to their purpose and establish the structures for organising and experimentation to begin to reimagine peace.
To host the space in service of the Community, creating the conditions for a transfer of leadership to the collective.
Co-host & Imagination Catalyst
Adriana brought participatory design and futures thinking with a decolonial approach. She supported the Community to practice collective imagination.
See her profile
Co-host & Community Catalyst
Elise harnessed her skills in facilitation, coaching and relationship systems to create the conditions for the Community to pursue their purpose and grow.
See her profile
Inspired by a 6 month imaginaries journey in 2021, that offered glimmers of a bigger potential, an invitation to reimagine in community was drafted by the future co-hosts and inspired us to step into this space.
Some of us stepped forward and became Designers working in service of the Community. Together, we started exploring the purpose that was bringing us together, what we wanted to do over the next 2 years, and how we might organize and collaborate to bring our ideas to life.
Designers and Hosts met face to face for the first time. During a week in Malawi we worked together to explore the roles for the coming months and started co-creating our working culture.
“The meeting in Blantyre was a special experience which allowed us to break the physical distance, and get to know each other. We shared our stories, our feelings, our aspirations and our doubts, our confusions, our fears but above all our dreams, our convictions and our commitments. It was an experience of empathy and co-creation of a shared dream, new ideas and a new space for initiatives, creation and solidarity to make our contribution to building a better world for all… so that we all bring even more audacity and energy to go as far as possible in the Reimagining of our world”
Dirk Shaka
We shared our dreams, interests and ideas as a community. The Designers weaved them together and created: a map of the Reimagine Community land, the first version of our Manifesto, an outline of the potential actions to shape the future of peacebuilding and a proposal on how to continue building our collaboration.
This was our first time coming together as a Community in real life! During a week in Türkiye we endorsed our Manifesto, imagined alternative scenarios for the future of our translocal collaboration, created storyboards of how our actions could take shape in the next 2 years, and started exploring how to make decisions as a group of 25.
“I gained understanding and confidence on the process, and also strengthen my belief in our qualities as humans and power of the people who are working in peacebuilding around the world. But more than anything, it helped me to think out of the box, to call into question my own methods and convictions; and allowed me to move out of my comfort zone, beginning to imagine different ways of approaching and understanding concepts like peace, conflict, resistance, radicalism, and activism.”
Lina Ibañez
We endorsed a Task Force of four members to take on technical roles in service of the Community. Their focus was to develop a vision for a self-managed Community Fund, propose a values-based decision-making approach, and imagine what relationship-centered accountability could look like.
Over three days in Istanbul, with support from our Hosting team, we defined our collaboration approach as a working group, learned from each other's experiences and sense-maked together. We drew inspiration from alternative decision-making methods and tools and began exploring values-based approaches to governance. Discussions about radical transparency helped us to envision a model of relationship-centric accountability. We imagined what we could achieve as a community with our own fund, and sketched an overview of our proposal.
“Turkey was a big space of connection for me. The highlight was getting to know the city together, along with dinner moments, they were moments of radical transparency. I loved listening to your stories. ”
Dzikamae Bere
As a Community, we participated in further developing our proposal for a community fund through a process facilitated by the Task Force. It began with brainstorming sessions where we shared our ideas. This was followed by lab sessions during which we provided input in more specific proposals. Finally, we made a collective decision by testing different methods, such as supermajority voting and consensus.
We agreed on a fluid and shared model of leadership, where we are collectively-led as a community, participating in decision-making and sharing power. We decided to create a participatory funding mechanism for experimentation where the entire community will decide on fund allocation.
We presented our proposal to Humanity United and secured our first direct resources as a Community. We also received support from the Robert Bosch Foundation to fund Community members to broader and intensify the leadership roles they play in service of the collective.
The Shift the Power Summit 2023 was our first event as a Reimagine Peace community. We participated in a global discussion that examined the existing international funding system and provided a platform for communities to share how they are shaping their own futures. We explored new approaches to community governance and were inspired by the lived experiences of those at the event.
We are grateful to Peace Direct, Robert Bosch Foundation and Humanity United for inviting us and sponsoring us in this event.
“In Shift the Power I got a sense of collectiveness, of independence. A huge force of human lights around the world that are changing the oppressive systems we live in. Lots of hope and connection. And a beautiful network that is getting stronger among the members of Reimagine Peacebuilding"
Maria Elisa Pinto
We facilitated two parallel workshops during the Shift the Power summit, where diverse stakeholders engaged in dialogue and imaginative discussions about the challenges facing the peacebuilding system. This was our first opportunity to connect the voices of our translocal community with grassroots organizations from Latin America, along with various stakeholders at the international level.
In the sidelines of the Shift the Power Summit, we held a dinner with representatives of both of the foundations to reimagine funder-activist partnership in the pursuit of peace. The event took place in Casa de la Paz, a venue with deep meaning for peace in Colombia.
During our second face to face gathering with the full Community, we focused on how we wanted to organise ourselves as a collective and decision-making. As part of our commitment to the power of the translocal experience, we immersed ourselves in Sri Lankan experience of peace & peacebuilding, and shared personal stories about our journeys in peacebuilding. We agreed how to be and participate in the Reimagine space and experiment over the next six months with a collective leadership model. This focused on the concept of "Caring for the Whole" as the leadership approach to support our community. Additionally, we created smaller groups, referred to as Pods, that focused on specific experiments aimed at building our community and exploring pathways to peace.
We established clear mandates for both the "Caring for the Whole" group and the Pods. Each of us selected a Pod based on our personal passions and interests.
“ I am both daunted and excited by complex challenges of conflict transformation in today's world and possibilities for creativity. As the Local Host for the event, I tried to curate an experience where my community are exposed to what Sri Lanka has to offer for the peace practitioners' mind, body and soul.”
Hasini Haputhanthri
Each Pod selected a link person to join the Caring for the Whole group. We also welcomed the Hosting team in this leadership formation, to share learning from their experiences in facilitating and leading the space for the first two years and to support an effective transition.
During this leadership phase, the primary focus was on understanding the governance needs of the community and addressing emerging issues. The team explored a model of shared accountability, managed a process to select who would design the participatory funding mechanism, and developed a proposal for the next phase of community leadership. They documented lessons learned and successfully transitioned operations from the hosted space fully to the community.
At the heart of the Pods structure was a desire to translate reimagination into action. We aimed to self-organize into smaller groups that could sense opportunities for the collective to evolve while promoting the spirit of reimagining peacebuilding. We wanted to elevate our profiles as members, build on our expertise, and have fun!
During this phase, we experimented at different levels. Each group came together with a specific purpose for experimentation. We had the freedom to start activities while committing to learning and sharing this knowledge with the community. This phase also served as our first attempt to collectively make decisions about fund allocation. Each pod had access to resources, and we had the autonomy to decide how to allocate those funds, what they would be used for, and how we would hold ourselves accountable within our pods.
Two of our community members took on the role of designing a participatory funding mechanism to support our processes of experimentation. They reconnected us with what "reimagine peace" meant for us as individuals, and created 4 scenarios to help us visualize how different funds could support different types of experiments. They finalized their work by delivering a proposal with three alternative funding mechanisms: The Collective Vision Fund, The Collaborative Initiative Fund, and The Transforming Together Fund.
We selected a participatory funding mechanism that supports bold and innovative approaches to peace through prototyping ideas that reimagine and transform peacebuilding paradigms. This translocal fund focuses on experiments that connect across global local contexts. All community members take part in fund allocation decisions. The Transforming Together Fund enables collaborative experiments both within our community and with external peacebuilders.
The Community selects a temporary 5 person group, including the two catalysts, to learn the lessons from the community experience so far and put forwards proposals for the future governance of the Community.
Our five person team gathers for a face to face meeting to Morocco to build a collective picture of the lessons so far and potential paths forward. Together, we look in detail at the different prototypes and experiences of community leadership and we discuss tensions and trade-offs in the community’s structure and ways of working. By the end of the meeting, we have co-created a set of core principles and values and have a template of a 2 year vision for our governance.
The transition group holds discussions with the Community to help unpack together our collective journey and agree a roadmap for the future. Our first session allows us to reflect on our learning from our first experiences in organising collectively and conducting experiments. Our second session puts forward proposal for the principles and values at the core of our governance approach. In the third and fourth sessions, we explore options for community membership and leadership. At the end of March, the Transition Group’s mandate ends. As a Community we start a self-facilitated phase to understand what full leadership looks for us and collectively shape the path forward.
Simultaneously, the hosted space comes to an end., We invite Adriana and Elise to become Community Members as we did with Maria-Elisa, the Host Operations Lead, in September 2024.
The peacebuilders and activists at the heart of this journey - and those that inspire us. Thank you for your collective imagination, your trust, your power to reimagine in action, to change the world around you and across borders with your thoughtful presence, joyful movement, deep understanding of the connections around you and whole hearted belief in the sacredness of life.
The people who contributed to the facilitation, organization and design of this space from its beginnings, our deep gratitude.
To Humanity United and Robert Bosch Stiftung. Thank you for being audacious, for embracing discomfort and trusting us and our journey.
To Sonder, thank you for hosting this space as it began and inspiring us with tools and processes.
To Visions Made Viable for joining us in this journey and supporting us with flexibilty.
