Empowering learning for just and peaceful societies

Empowering Learning for Just and Peaceful Societies

Our Mission

To empower people and organisations building societies that are less violent and more equitable. We do this by creating, sharing, and implementing peacebuilding methodologies that allow for adaptive learning, building collective agency, psychosocial wellbeing, and the advancement of everyday peace for people in conflict-affected settings. We network and energise other local and international organisations to acheieve these changes at scale.

Values

Our Values

Empowerment

Adapt Peacebuilding recognises that peacebuilding takes place in contexts of pathological inequity, and that peacebuilding in many ways requires the transformation of unjust power relations. We favour methodologies, accompaniment approaches, and accountability models that challenge hierarchies in the development sector and conflict settings themselves. We try to live empowerment values in our own organisation and partnerships, by encouraging autonomy, sharing decision-making, and recognising our privileges at all levels.

Systems Transformation

Adapt Peacebuilding values approaches that can recognise and account for the wide variety of factors that influence peace in a given context. We also recognise that peacebuilding requires coherent efforts of many local and organisations to be effective. We specialise in methods to analyse this complexity and work collaboratively to transform, in ways that generate lasting changes to societal norms and institutions.

Justice

Peace is not merely the absence of violence, but societies in which all people are free to life the full flourishing of the potential. Peace is the liberation of structural violence in all of its forms, and is not something that it is only of concern in places of direct violence, but in countries all around the world where people are suffering from marginalisation and negative discrimination in all of its forms. We work towards a world that is not only more peaceful, but more just.

Rigour

We understand peace not just as an abstract set of national conditions, but as that which is experienced directly in the lives of people in conflict-affected settings. We value and innovate rigorous ways of measuring and working towards these results, through evidence-based theories of change and methodologies that can be more effective.

Adaptive Learning

We value partnership agreements and methodologies that allow real time learning and improvement during implementation, and advocates for the broader development sector to take a less prescribed and more innovative and locally-responsive approach to implementing peace work.

Inner Development

We believe that the quality of our external relationships, communities, institutions, and societies are ultimately reflective of the quality of the internal conditions of each of us. We ground our practice in mindfulness and pay attention to how we build peace in ourselves and our own relationships.