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Didn't operate as individuals but as a group. Formulation of ecosystem, and how networks are established, maintained... empowered and embedded in broader paradigmatic approach to address issues.

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VE - embeds you into community/econsystem/ things you've been missing; that's what counter messaging/cve is missing

specific initiatives don't look at reradicalization holistically; if you provide community and significance than you can have greater impact at root of problem

don't agree with action taken by radical for radical purposes, but the intent makes sense; therefore need to provide opportunity to act in nonviolent way but still have impact

in many places religion is central, can't pull them out of that influence so need to create ways to see meaning / relationships within that context

Is cve it's own thing, or just combination of pyd, peacebuilding, connection building, etc? Is it a western construct?

have theories/approaches developed under peacebuilding and other topics, but don't use in CVE (but should)

academic paper produced on this, well received

leaders have the assets, but how to leverage for "good vs bad"

cannot assume that everyone has the same values, some are okay with autocratic structures for example, so need to recognize that when entering communities

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Topic 1 notes: You can get the community to define what would be considered "resilience" through PAR

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Topic 1 notes: You can get the community to define what would be considered "resilience" through PAR

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The vast majority of young people disavow violence to begin with. So they're already resilient to VE. PYD lens is probably better because it's reaching a much more significant portion of the youth population.

Anne: Collective problem-solving and decision making can be indicators of resilience

If youth are empowered to make decisions, that can help them build their resilience. It's important to allow youth space to make decisions .. PYD!

Interviews with youth in Philippines show they think of resilience as basic needs like being able to get to school safely. They think they are resilient if they are safe enough to live day by day.

Working with youth to reimagine future in a changed/different context.

Resilience v. resistance? The ability to digest content that's being pushed on you and find the truth in it and either walk the other way ... is that being resilient? I think yes, but maybe that's expanding the definition.

Sometimes the more resilient youth are more vulnerable to VE recruitment. Youth with the most to offer in their communities with no opportunities are the ones who may be the most vulnerable.

Framing is key; you can't go to community in Gaza and say "we are going to empower you so you don't join ISIS." We need to frame resilience in PYD framework, not CVE.

Anne: Do you think PYD framework is well-received? Evidence on PYD implementation in LMICs still lacking. The contribution and the agency part is still missing in our implementation. Ministers of Youth still see youth as threat.

Anne: We still have to change mindset. Youth get it but adults don't always get it. Just being seen in the community in a leadership role has made a positive impact on youth.

Youth bulge in Pakistan; virtually no economy/jobs ... youth highly vulnerable to VE recruitment. Key to provide youth with alternatives.

If there is no enabling space, you can give them all the assets and agency and it won't be effective. How do you give youth space/enabling environment?

I don't know if it's about giving space ... agency/assets. Youth working with youth on issues doesn't listen to mainstreaming of engagement. It keeps them segregtaed in some ways. But if you can create intergenerational relationships, it starts to change the dynamics.

Example of youth empowerment in Kuwait ... youth were able to identify legislation that did not exist on home-based businesses and they were able to push that legislation through ...

Focus groups with youth in egypt right after Arab Spring ... very emotional energy that needs help in being chanelled. Empowering youth workers is important!

Research on how youth globally are energetic, political, they want to play a role. They don't trust political institutions. So how do you channel that energy when they're not willing to engage with traditional institutions? Once the change comes about, young people are left out again.

Examples of where youth have been successfully integrated into political parties? Example from Pakistan -- reforms of youth wings of political parties. But parties also need to be more appealing to youth as an institution.

There are ways to marry what young people are doing in the streets and what political parties are doing.

Guatemala example: There's only so much we can do on building youth capacity ... political parties are very corrupt. Building a new pol party is very difficult. So you have to build youth capacity and reform political parties.

Philippines: Reform of youth council so that young people get elected in national-level positions. It's always young people from political families who get elected. We've been encouraging young people to run for office, but it's a challenge.

basic needs are very important but there is something about belonging that is really important as well. Dignity and sense of belonging is important! If you don't channel it in the right way they will join a VEO. T

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Kyle - "radical" has been appropriated. Historically, applied to individuals like Jesus and Mandela....Missed opportunity. Need to parse "deradicalization", "reradicalization"; maybe re-orient to "re-radicalization"

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FHI 360 presentation PeaceCon 2018_10.26

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-       Common to overromanticize resilience: Alchemy indoor skateboard and education center

o   Resilience developed through being attacked and forced out of a community

o   Hungry for acceptance and would go to great lengths --> tenacity and resilience

§  Knowing you fail many times before you succeed

o   Despite this, there is still violence within the community (skateboarding in this example)

§  Due to a lack of mentorship and leadership

o   Empowerment and ownership – and the risk that follows (shop break-in example)

o   Look out for the blind spots (engendering the program)

-          Thinking from an ecosystem approach (biological perspective)

o   Resilience is a spiderweb, if one part gets cut off you can still survive, still move forward

-          Do no harm approach and PYD:

o   Unsustainable expectations for youth following these programs

o   Parallel networks- in order to combat VE (network) you need to establish another network

-          The power of connections

o   Belongingness and purpose- challenging to establish in VE contexts

o   Physical spaces where people feel they belong, social connection and a physical space for belonging

o   How do we create a center of safety? Virtually and physically (unseen places where youth gather where they feel at peace or safe)

§  We must go and meet youth in those places they meet

-          Well-being and human flourishing

o   Articulating the vision of human flourishing and what does that look like?

§  First imagine that for themselves and then sharing with one another- in the process of sharing, discuss the differences together. Unpack the diversity of perspectives on what it means to belong and flourish in a community

o   Instead of someone bringing youth to a new place and dictating, rather go to where the youth are and meet them where they are at

-          Defining what is the “common enemy” is challenging

o   Moving from common enemy to the common shared vision (productive/healthy)

o   Pollution example – whose responsibility is it? Through community mapping they developed a collaborative space which shone light that working together to find solutions possible

o   Building community’s “muscle”- so when stress or shock comes about, you have that social capital in place to help absorb the shock

§  Humanizing the process

-          Measuring results, how do you tie the results to specific objectives of CVE?

o   Attribution is the hardest to demonstrate

o   Easier to show contribution in these contexts (without counterfactuals)

-          Crossing lines with security, DDR, UN to reach specific groups

o   USA is behind in this regard with reintegration programs

o   More broadly, working with social workers or the juvenile justice system

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Topic 3: What research approaches are effective to ensure that the initiatives/ interventions designed and implemented are relevant and adaptive? 

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Topic 3: What research approaches are effective to ensure that the initiatives/ interventions designed and implemented are relevant and adaptive? 

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Who tells you what and how do you go about researching VE? Whose voice matters?
How to adapt the research agenda to the shifting of VE drivers?

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Collective impact project

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Let's raise the perceived value of education in Spartanburg County. Join The Movement Learn More

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https://www.learnwithsam.org/

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A strategy for community problem-solving does an extraordinary job at restoring our social fabric.

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Kenesha Hardy, a third-grade teacher at Mary H. Wright Elementary School, working with students in Spartanburg, S.C. Credit Credit Tim Kimzey/Spartanburg Herald-Journal

Not long ago, in Spartanburg, S.C., I visited the offices of something called the Spartanburg Academic Movement (SAM). The walls were lined with charts measuring things like kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading scores and postsecondary enrollment.

Around the table was just about anybody in town who might touch a child's life. There were school superintendents and principals, but there were also the heads of the Chamber of Commerce and the local United Way, the police chief, a former mayor and the newspaper editor.

The people at SAM track everything they can measure about Spartanburg's young people from cradle to career. They gather everybody who might have any influence upon this data - parents, religious leaders, doctors, nutrition experts, etc.

And then together, as a communitywide system, they ask questions: Where are children falling off track? Why? What assets do we have in our system that can be applied to this problem? How can we work together to apply those assets?

There are a lot of things I love about this approach.

First, it understands that life is longitudinal. Sometimes social policies are distorted by the tyranny of randomized controlled experiments. Everybody is looking for the one magic intervention that will have a measurable effect.

But life isn't like that. Our actual lives are influenced by millions of events that interact in mysterious ways. And when life is going well it's because dozens of influences are flowing together and reinforcing one another. SAM tries to harness those dozens of influences.

Second, SAM treats the whole person. "The disease of modern character is specialization," Wendell Berry once wrote. Sometimes schools treat students as brains on a stick who come to be filled with skills and information.

But children don't leave behind their emotions, their diet, their traumas, their safety fears, their dental problems and so on when they get to school. If you're going to help kids, you have to help the whole kid all at once.

Third, and maybe most important, SAM embodies a new civic architecture, which has become known as the "collective impact" approach. Americans feel alienated from and distrustful toward most structures of authority these days, but this is one they can have faith in.

SAM organizes the community of Spartanburg around a common project. Then it creates an informal authority structure that transcends public-sector/private-sector lines, that rallies cops and churches, the grass roots and the grass tops. Members put data in the center and use it as a tool not for competition but for collaboration. Like the best social service organizations, it is high on empathy and high on engineering. It is local, participatory and comprehensive.

SAM is not a lone case. Spartanburg is one of 70 communities around the country that use what is called the StriveTogether method. StriveTogether began in Cincinnati just over a decade ago. A few leaders were trying to improve education in the city and thinking of starting another program. But a Procter & Gamble executive observed, "We're program-rich, but system-poor." In other words, Cincinnati had plenty of programs. What it lacked was an effective system to coordinate them.

A methodology was born: organize around the data, focus on the assets of the community, not the deficits; realize there is no one silver-bullet solution; create a "backbone organization" (like SAM) that can bring all the players together; coordinate decision-making and action; share accountability.

At one point the folks in Cincinnati noticed that their students were not coming prepared for kindergarten. The data suggested that the private pre-K programs were performing better than the public ones. So the public school system allocated some of its money to support other, private programs, making Cincinnati one of the first American cities to offer near-universal preschool. That's a community working as one.

Collective impact structures got their name in 2011, when John Kania and Mark Kramer wrote an influential essay for the Stanford Social Innovation Review in which they cited StriveTogether and provided the philosophical and theoretical basis for this kind of approach.

Such structures are now being used to address homelessness, hunger, river cleanup and many other social ills. Collective impact approaches have had their critics over the years, in part for putting too much emphasis on local elites and not enough on regular parents (which is fair).

But a recent study of 25 collective impact initiatives by Sarah Stachowiak and Lauren Gase found that these approaches do work, at least most of the time. StriveTogether, which is now led by Jennifer Blatz, is thriving. It's just received a significant financial infusion from Connie and Steve Ballmer, of the Balmer Group.

Frankly, I don't need studies about outcomes to believe that these collective impact approaches are exciting and potentially revolutionary. Trust is built and the social fabric is repaired when people form local relationships around shared tasks.

Building working relationships across a community is an intrinsically good thing. You do enough intrinsically good things and lives will be improved in ways you can never plan or predict. This is where our national renewal will come from.

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Opinion | A Really Good Thing Happening in America

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A strategy for community problem-solving does an extraordinary job at restoring our social fabric. Not long ago, in Spartanburg, S.C., I visited the offices of something called the Spartanburg Academic Movement (SAM). The walls were lined with charts measuring things like kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading scores and postsecondary enrollment.

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Topic 1: Strengthening youth resilience to violent extremism: What kind of approaches have worked with youth? In what context? 

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Topic 1: Strengthening youth resilience to violent extremism: What kind of approaches have worked with youth? In what context? 

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Young people, often the most vulnerable to recruitment by violent extremist groups, play a crucial role in countering and preventing violent extremism. But how can we more effectively focus on youth to reduce violent extremism? To answer this question, we convened a forum on the latest thinking in this rapidly evolving field. The forum, held earlier this year in Washington, DC, was webcast for a global audience.

Kyle Dietrich of Equal Access International, Lauren Van Metre of George Washington University, Dean Piedmont of the Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism Initiative and Joseph Sany of FHI 360 shared new research on and approaches to youth engagement. They covered topics including reorienting radicalization, youth-led approaches to preventing violent extremism, the role of social media and extremist messaging, and the reintegration of foreign terrorist fighters. The participants identified prevention as the most promising opportunity to mitigate violent extremism.

After the panel discussion, participants formed small groups to focus on six themes. The key takeaways from these discussions, which are summarized below, are explored in a follow-up report.

1. Reframing and reorienting radicalization
As with many terms used in discussions of violent extremism, there is little agreement on the definition of radicalization. What is clear is the need to move away from security-oriented interpretations of the term. For interventions and research, we should look at how extremist groups use a holistic approach to radicalizing youth and then develop alternative ecosystems that mirror their approaches.

2. Youth resilience
Definitions are also important when considering youth resilience. Resilience is not just how one copes with or responds to a threat. It can also be one's contribution to a positive social outcome. Recommendations for encouraging youth to be resilient include conducting research to better understand individual versus community resilience as well as developing protective factors for confronting adversity, such as activities that create stronger links between youth and their families.

3. Youth-led initiatives
Youth-led approaches to preventing violent extremism can be effective if they are based on research and mainstreamed throughout the intervention. Building an evidence base for this work is critical, as is broadening our understanding of positive youth development from youth-led to youth-empowered programming.

4. Social media and alternative messaging
To develop effective alternative or counter messaging, we need research that provides a contextual analysis of the language we will be countering. Lessons from public health behavior change communications and marketing approaches can be integrated into our campaigns. The sequence of an effective alternative messaging intervention can start with research, followed by the messaging campaign and then on-the-ground programming to reinforce the messaging.

5. Engaging parents and other influencers
Several successful approaches for engaging parents have emerged, such as training mothers to look for risk factors in their children and assigning social workers to families to decrease risk factors. More research is needed, however, including analyzing the scale, cost-effectiveness and impact of rehabilitation and reintegration programs and exploring trauma-informed approaches for youth and their families.

6. Reintegration and rehabilitation of foreign terrorist fighters
Differentiating between foreign terrorist fighters and ex-combatants, and understanding individual and community contexts, are important for developing approaches for the reintegration and rehabilitation of foreign terrorist fighters. Recommendations include engaging family members in the process of reintegration and creating community mechanisms for support.

FHI 360's civil society and peacebuilding team engages young people and their communities - including civil society organizations, local officials and religious leaders - to identify and create their own constructive measures to mitigate local violent extremism drivers and strengthen their resilience. We are committed to building a stronger evidence base and sharing knowledge on the most effective approaches to addressing violent extremism among youth.

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Discovering new ways to engage youth to prevent violent extremism | Degrees

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Young people, often the most vulnerable to recruitment by violent extremist groups, play a crucial role in countering and preventing violent extremism. But how can we more effectively focus on youth to reduce violent extremism? To answer this question, we convened a forum on the latest thinking in this rapidly evolving field.

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System based approach

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 Topic 2: Do you believe that radicalization and empowerment are similar processes of self-actualization? If so, what are the implications of this for CVE research, policies, and programming? 

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 Topic 2: Do you believe that radicalization and empowerment are similar processes of self-actualization? If so, what are the implications of this for CVE research, policies, and programming? 

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How can we reorient P/CVE narratives from "prevention" and "countering" to engaging, channeling, and transforming radicalization?  What are the implications...?

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In addition to listening to reflections from the panel, participants will be encouraged to share feedback and reflect on their own experiences in small group sessions. Panelists will present the cases of Building Youth Resilience in Tunisia (FHI 360); CVE Alternative Messaging Hubs in Northern Nigeria and Southern Philippines (Equal Access International); and Collaborative, Community-led Security Approaches to PVE in Coastal Kenya (Search for Common Ground).

Panelists:

Joseph Sany, Technical Advisor, Peacebuilding and Conflict Mitigation, FHI360 •

Kyle Dietrich, Director, Peacebuilding and Transforming Extremism, Equal Access International

Anne Salinas, Director, Peacebuilding and Conflict Mitigation Practice, FHI360

Anais Caput, Africa Program Development Manager Search for Common Ground