Liberia Peacebuilder Initiative
About the Liberia Peacebuilders’ Initiative (LPI)
The Liberia Peacebuilder Initiative aims to create and maintain a community-based network of peacebuilders who will foster conflict resolution, reconciliation, and sustainable peace and development.
In order to ensure diversity as well as build trust and mutual understanding across ethnicity, religion, age, gender and class, thirty five community leaders representing all the tribes, religious groups, and the traditional council of Liberia are being recruited and trained various skills including compassionate Listening and leadership, conflict prevention & resolution, community development, as well as social and environmental sustainability. The core team includes equal representation of elders, women, and youth leaders but more emphasis has been placed on higher number of women participation. The core team, along with PCO and GCJ and other partners, holds three-day national Peace Summit to share and learn skills (traditional practices, Compassionate Listening, Restorative Justice, large group dialogue), exchange experiences, and co-create a peaceful future for all Liberians.
How the Liberia Peacebuilders’ Initiative started
On September 18, 2004, in partnership with the Liberian Refugee Welfare Council, PCO established the Liberian Tribal Leaders’ Peace and Reconciliation Forum in the Buduburam Refugee Camp, then home to more than 42,000 Liberian refugees who fled the civil war in their country.
The goal of the forum was to provide a space where the camp’s elders, chiefs and traditional leaders came together. With the help of facilitators, they explored the underlying causes of their conflict, expressed their anger and grief in a safe environment, developed new understandings of each other, consider issues of responsibility and developed a mutual plan for addressing the underlying causes of their conflict, promoting trust and better working relationships between their communities when they return home.
Now in Liberia and with many of the refugee leaders returned home, PCO has decided to continue this commitment to grassroots peace building and community development efforts. Thus, in 2009, came together with the Global Citizen Journey, a US-based non-profit focused on conflict resolution training, to establish a broader national initiative titled “The Liberia Peacebuilders’ Initiative”.
Current LPI activities
Presently, members of LPI Core Team conduct weekly community peace meetings in their various constituencies.
Core group trainings in Compassionate Listening and other Leadership training will be held in May
To read more about the project please visit the GCJ website: www.globalcitizenjourney.org
To see pictures from out pre-Summit in Gbarnga please click here
Here you can download the Liberia Peacebuilder Imitative brochure.
