Our goal was to act as the glue, fostering connections among members through their unique experiences. We aimed to create spaces for genuine human connection, build solidarity, strengthen community, support collaboration, and connect with local actors or similar communities.
What forms of healing and solidarity do we need to transform our systems?
In our endeavor to foster a sense of belonging and connection, we set out to examine how creating the right conditions for community members to share their stories, experiences, struggles, and aspirations could promote solidarity and cooperation. We aimed to assess whether our community context encourages learning, sharing experiences, and identifying opportunities based on individual interests. Our goal was to understand the community as a network at different levels—individuals, working groups, friends, and people from the same regions.
The community's collective work thrives when we strengthen camaraderie and solidarity among members, align collaboration opportunities with personal interests, and when mutual learning enhances personal and professional growth, even in unrelated activities. Relationships are sustained by shared values and principles, beyond collective goals. Building trust and interpersonal bonds fosters a deeper sense of peacebuilding by understanding the diverse dimensions of an activist or a peacebuilder's life, reinforcing the network on multiple levels.
We started by getting to know each member better through the stories we shared during our community gathering in Sri Lanka—personal stories, struggles, values, skills, knowledge, experiences, and interests. Based on these categories, we expected to bring members together for connection sessions to deepen personal bonds, foster solidarity, and inspire learning or collaborative initiatives. We also aimed to complement the experiment by inviting external experts from our countries to share insights on topics relevant to their interests.
As members of this group we took the experiment further. We always spent about half of the time telling each other how our lives were going, understanding each other's environment, the concerns and challenges we were experiencing, what our families were like, the challenges that being activists and peacebuilders had brought to our lives, among other things.
Our stories allowed us to understand each other at an intimate and personal level. We learned where we come from, what our aspirations are, our pains and personal experiences. We realized what each of us brings to the community and how we can accompany each other. We noticed that those who had the opportunity to share more, such as those who participated in the Shift the Power in Bogotá or those who travelled together doing tourism in Sri Lanka, built different trusting relationships because they connected on a personal level and knew their values and interests better, which helps them to understand how they behave as part of the community and can lead them to be more empathetic and supportive.
In relation to the full community, we acknowledged that we do not know each other as well as we thought and that we may not have reached a deeper level of connection based on humanity, identity, emotionality and mutual aspirations. This might be a weakness in the way the the community develops and it might limit our ability to trust and take a real interest in what is going on in each other's 'universe'.
Inside our group our capacity for compassion, solidarity, cooperation and empathy grew exponentially. This led to a better understanding of our role in the community and a greater sense of ownership. At this point, we feel the need to find a way to visit the other person in their country and get to know their environment firsthand, and to help them achieve their personal and professional goals from our own capacities.
For the next iteration, we will prioritize available members time so other community members can see from our experience the value of these spaces. We will also maintain closer contact with other working groups to track how personal relationships evolve through deeper interactions.
We will continue to consider the challenges we faced:
