They catalyze authentic cooperation between leaders at all levels and their outside partners where the unique experience, wisdom and resources of each are valued and utilized to co-create healthy communities and a more peaceful world.
They build peace from the inside out.
They believe the resources and wisdom of ordinary people in local communities—those people and places most impacted by wars and conflict—are too often ignored or undervalued in conventional international approaches to post-war justice, development, and peacebuilding.
In this ‘outside-in’ approach, problem-solving resources and capacities are brought in or worse imposed from the outside and the locus of leadership stays at the national or even international level. This leaves critical resources for peace untapped, makes the results less sustainable, and can actually leave communities worse off and less able to handle the next challenge they face, whatever it may be.
They believe this needs to change.
They know there is a harder, better way to build peace: from the inside-out.
At Catalyst for Peace, they see local people and communities not as problems or as victims—but as leaders, peacebuilders, healers, and agents of change. They use their talents and resources to create space for local leaders and solutions to emerge. That means working in-depth, responsively, and over long periods of time, so that programming springs from locally defined needs and desires. They build and advocate for long-term structures and systems to address difficult, real-world problems, while also developing the local resources required to sustain the healthy systems. They want the legacy of outside support to be more than rusty NGO signs littering the landscape, but whole and thriving communities, capable of leading in their own development and peace.
Their longtime program partner is Fambul Tok, the groundbreaking, large-scale, locally owned and led peacebuilding and reconciliation program that is helping people and communities all across Sierra Leone to heal. Co-creating, funding and partnering from the beginning of the program has given us an intensive living ‘collaboratory’ for learning how to cultivate insider/outsider relationships that are mutually nourishing and strengthening at every level. Helping to shepherd Fambul Tok’s courageous and committed reconciliation and community development efforts to a place of strength and success, they have seen firsthand that building peace from the inside-out works.
Building peace that supports local agency and is also strategic and systemically impactful has required a strong, multi-disciplinary platform for practice and learning. Under the leadership of Libby Hoffman, the CFP platform has included:
And now they want to see it grow.
They want to see more work that builds peace from the inside-out. They want to explore the lessons of an inside-out approach and practice for other settings and other arenas. As they share their experience and their learning, they invite you to do the same. Let’s learn from and with each other to magnify their potential for good.
As a US 501(c)3 private foundation, part of their work involves providing catalytic funding for inside-out peacebuilding practice, including storytelling that supports this practice. They do not accept unsolicited proposals.
