Posts By: Amy Czajkowski

Cultivating Learning and Design Spaces – Part 4

by Amy Czajkowski and Charles Gibbs

This is the fourth and final post of a four-part blog series exploring how to cultivate learning and design spaces for practitioners committed to community-centered peace and development. We understand such a space as one that invites knowledge, experience, wisdom and nuggets of insight from even the most painful experiences to address today’s questions and needs so we can create the new together. We are ….Keep reading this post >

Cultivating Learning and Design Spaces – Part 3

by Charles Gibbs and Amy Czajkowski

This is the third post of a four-part blog series exploring how to cultivate learning and design spaces for practitioners committed to community-centered peace and development. We understand such a space as one that invites knowledge, experience, wisdom and nuggets of insight from even the most painful experiences to address today’s questions and needs so we can create the new together. We are assuming that ….Keep reading this post >

Cultivating Learning and Design Spaces – Part 2

by Amy Czajkowski and Charles Gibbs

This is the second post of a four-part blog series exploring how to cultivate learning and design spaces for practitioners committed to community-centered peace and development. We understand such a space as one that invites knowledge, experience, wisdom and nuggets of insight from even the most painful experiences to address today’s questions and needs so we can create the new together. We are assuming that ….Keep reading this post >

How to Cultivate Learning and Design Spaces – Part I

by Amy Czajkowski and Charles Gibbs

An Overview and Invitation

At a time when people and systems seem overmatched by the size and urgency of the challenges we face, what worked for yesterday’s problems won’t solve today’s and won’t help us create the world we’d like to inhabit tomorrow. In the absence of a shared vision of a whole, healthy system with enlivened, mutually enriching partnerships at all levels, we teeter between ….Keep reading this post >

#InsideOutPeace Continues to Gain Traction

Last week, CFP co-hosted the virtual event, Governance that Centers Communities: Lessons from Afghanistan and Sierra Leone with partners at the International Peace Institute and Institute for State Effectiveness and co-sponsored by the Government of Sierra Leone, and the Permanent Mission of Afghanistan to the United Nations. Encapsulating why centering community in governance matters, Rasoul Rasouli, Former Director General, Citizens’ Charter in Afghanistan said, “Community is the heart of the society, ….Keep reading this post >

UN General Assembly side event – You’re invited

How can government policies invite local community voices to lead and support local priorities and agency in international peace and development? On October 14th, CFP president Libby Hoffman and Fambul Tok director John Caulker will share their experience building a national policy framework in Sierra Leone that has done just that. CFP is co-hosting a post-United National General Assembly event with the International Peace Institute, the Institute for State Effectiveness, ….Keep reading this post >

Funding and Design for Local Ownership: What helps? What hurts?

A guiding question for CFP is — how can practice shift across the whole system (organizations, government, international bodies, and funders) to center communities’ leadership, priorities and capacities in peace and development? To explore this question in the international arena, last September CFP hosted, with the International Peace Institute and the Government of Sierra Leone, a side-event to the UN General Assembly. Central to that event was the exploration of ….Keep reading this post >

Learning from Ebola: Lessons from Sierra Leone for COVID-19

Many nations are facing a dangerous, wide-spread infectious virus for the first time in recent memory and are scrambling to learn and respond from day to day. I recently talked with my colleague and CFP’s long-term organizational partner in Sierra Leone, John Caulker, Executive Director of Fambul Tok about lessons learned in Sierra Leone from the Ebola virus disease outbreak that took place in his country between 2014-2016 with 14,000 ….Keep reading this post >

Whole Systems Peacebuilding and Development

In Constellating Peace, the global gathering CFP hosted this past April in Sierra Leone, one of the central purposes was to name the importance of and actually convene representatives of the “whole global system” working on peace and development. We invited people to participate and to present who were coming from communities, civil society, local government, national government and international organizations. Building on eight years of the fambul tok process ….Keep reading this post >

CFP at UNGA Side Event

Catalyst for Peace partnered with the Government of Sierra Leone and the International Peace Institute to hold a side event in September at the United Nations General Assembly entitled: An Agenda for the People by the People: Consolidating Peace and Advancing Development in Sierra Leone.

The event included a panel presentation that featured the National Framework for Inclusive Development and Local Governance. The Framework grew out of long-term work Fambul ….Keep reading this post >