Values and Guidelines

Catalyst for Peace provides a platform for the collaborative practice of peacebuilding and reconciliation. Catalyst works with individuals and organizations that share its values and goals, when partnership can create synergy and enhance mutual learning. Its goal is to support locally grounded peacebuilding practice, enhanced by a global learning community that provides opportunities to reflect on experience, interact with and learn from other peacebuilding practitioners, and to develop and act upon collective wisdom.

Catalyst programs:

• Combine clear articulation of intended purposes with collaborative learning processes and emergent design, allowing for on-going learning and the ability to make responsive changes in the program;
• Demonstrate a strategic nexus of need, opportunity, resources, and societal ripeness (or timing) that instigate positive change.
  
• Invite the best of individuals into processes. It is the courage and grace of ordinary people (independent of their social or political standing), expressed in the midst of difficult circumstances, that provides leadership for the whole;
  
• Document the learnings and stories of those who are overcoming in creative and powerful ways to support hope and healing, and to share them with the larger community;
  
• Create partnerships between groups that bring different experiences and skills that lead to synergy and bring out the best in each party;
  
• Value the wisdom of the local context, and actively work to recognize, honor and build upon it;
  
• Are committed to drawing lessons, strength and support from the global context, as well as to teaching forward lessons from a local context to the larger community;
  
• Encourage the development of sustainable processes (as opposed to merely short term projects or one-time events), such that they will continue beyond the initial funding;
  
• Support and include women;
  
• Recognize the unique contribution of spirituality and faith in the process of healing and building healthy communities;
  
• Encourage and model creativity;
  
• Model honesty, integrity, humility, boldness, and authenticity, valuing these qualities more than the size or scale of a project.