CCTS
Review 40 - December 2008

I: Truce 20-20

Hannah Pennock, in the opening presentation, said Truce 20-20 is a project which works with diverse groups of young people, between the ages of 16 and 21, in Newham and surrounding areas in East London, developing their skills in conflict resolution and mediation. It is run jointly by Peace Direct and Conflict and Change, a local conflict resolution and mediation organisation which has been operating in Newham for nearly twenty five years.

Peace Direct is a small organisation, working mainly at the international level towards a world where the work and knowledge of local people is recognized as essential to dealing with conflict. They fund local peacebuilders in places as diverse as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sri Lanka, Kenya and Afghanistan, and try to ensure that their voices are heard by connecting them to policymakers, and getting their work publicized in the press and other media. Peace Direct's philosophy is that local peacebuilders in conflict areas, because of their intimate knowledge and experience of the particular conflict, are best placed to find ways of resolving it. This philosophy also informs the Truce 20-20 work and there is a direct connection with Peace Direct's international work, in that each group of young people meets and works for a week with an international peacebuilder from a conflict area. Once the young people have developed these skills through the training programme, and gained insights from international peacebuilders, Truce 20-20 supports them in building their own projects.

The work is located in East London, and in Newham in particular, because of the high levels of deprivation. The area is going through massive upheavals at different levels, especially now, with the Olympics in the offing. New communities are coming in, and there is evidence that young people, the majority of whom were not born in Newham, are dividing into separate groups according to their ethic or community background.

Truce 20-20 works with groups of around twenty youngsters and tries to achieve a 70%-30% mix of those who are achieving, and know pretty much ‘where they are at’, and those who have more issues to deal with, and have perhaps been in prison or referred to the Youth Offending Team. The conflicts they deal with are those that the groups bring to them. Some are conflicts with which most of us will be familiar, such as bullying in schools, conflict in families, and conflict with teachers and authorities – very real conflicts but not ones that would necessarily hit the headlines. However, some of the youngsters will have been involved in gangs or had experience of the hard edge of conflicts in East London.

What do young people gain from the project? For some it is learning how to deal with ‘red flags’ – the situations or events that trigger their anger. It was instructive to hear one youngster who had been excluded from school describe in his own words the progress he had made through joining the project. He said he had become less aggressive, less defensive towards others, and more laid-back, not wanting to engage in conflict.

Over 80% of the young people who complete the training go on to develop projects in the local community with the support of Truce 20-20. This is the crucial part of the work. Thus far Truce 20-20 has worked with five groups of twenty people. That is still not a large number, and the impact only really starts to show when those young people take the work further with their projects. The main thing they do is to train other young facilitators. For example, in January, six Truce 20-20 facilitators put together workshops for seventy young people who were identified by four different secondary schools as having anger management issues. The feeling is that this ‘peer on peer’ training is far more effective than if outside adults go in and try to connect with fifteen year olds.
The young people from Truce 20-20 have representation on the Conflict and Change Management Committee. In this way they are involved in the decision making and their insights are fed into the organisation. One of the events the young people on the project have been involved in was a ‘City Circle’ event held by Muslims in London on resolving conflict from Kashmir to London. They have also helped with local murder appeals, and contributed to Metropolitan Police DVDs on Stop and Search.

Challenges

Funding is a major challenge. In Truce 20-20 they were trying to get young people not to see issues in territorial terms, but the funding was tied to work in particular geographical areas. Funders also tended to want them to work exclusively with disadvantaged young people, which was a reactive approach – waiting until the young people were in trouble before intervening, rather that focusing on ensuring that they did not get into trouble in the first place.

Working with the local diaspora community when international peacebuilders come over is important. A challenge is that these groups can be suspicious at first of the international peacebuilders and want to know who they are and who they represent. Building up trust between the parties can be difficult and takes time.

Another challenge is how to reach those on the edges of gang behaviour. The funding is very ‘output’ driven, and when one is required to fill in an eight-page form about the ethnicity, sexuality, level of deprivation (and so on) of the youngsters, it all loses touch with reality.

Successes

The partnership between Peace Direct and Conflict and Change had been productive. It would clearly have been a mistake for Peace Direct, as an international NGO, to have attempted this work on its own. The high retention rate of young people involved in the work is evidence of the success of the system of first training them and then having them embark on projects of their own. Finally, having international peace builders come to work with the young people had proved very popular and successful, and it was noticeable that at times it was young people who had not responded so well in the earlier stages of a project who were most touched and inspired by work of those from overseas.

<< Index

newsletter  |  ccts |  top