About the organisation: Peace Direct is an innovative British NGO supporting conflict resolution in war zones around the world. We were voted Best New Charity in 2005 and were chosen by the Independent for their Christmas charity appeal in 2009. We fund local people who are building peace in their own war-torn communities, inspiring individuals with extraordinary stories – and you will help us to tell our supporters about them.

Purpose of the role: To support the Individual Fundraising Manager to develop relationships with supporters through written communications to increase long term support to Peace Direct.

Responsibilities

• Assist the Individual Fundraising Manager to research and write copy materials to engage supporters and build loyalty.
• Liaise with the International Programmes Team to get updates from the field to be included in supporter communications.
• Lead on all aspects of a monthly e-newsletter including creating content and analysing results (open rates, click through rate, etc).
• Update and maintain supporter records on a database.
• Contribute to the wider work of the Fundraising Team as necessary, especially Community Fundraising.

You will need:

Essential

• To be available 3 days a week for 6 months and to start immediately.
• Excellent writing skills.
• Strong organisational skills with a proven ability to meet deadlines.
• To be meticulous and have good attention to detail.
• Ability to use own initiative and get things done.
• Good interpersonal and teamwork skills.

Desirable

• Experience or understanding of marketing or fundraising.
• Experience of voluntary work.
• A commitment to fundraising and international development.
• Enthusiasm for Peace Direct’s work.

You will get:

• Professional references on completion of the internship.
• Travel & lunch expenses up to £10 a day.
• Exposure to a range of fundraising activities and the principles behind direct marketing and supporter development.
• To be part of a lively team who will facilitate your development with support and external training courses at the FSI.
• Experience of the Raiser’s Edge, a widely used fundraising database.
• The opportunity to be involved with other projects as they come up and plenty of scope for contributing your own ideas.
• The chance to make a real contribution to Peace Direct’s peacebuilding work.

How to apply: Please send a CV, covering letter and a sample of your writing on any subject by 12 noon on Tuesday 31st January to Rhiain O’Sullivan at rhiain@peacedirect.org.

Gulalai Ismail started this work aged just 16, after meeting a woman whose son had become a terrorist martyr. The mother had taken delivery of her boy’s dead body. The boy was only 12 years old.

In Gulalai’s province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, religious extremism is an everyday event and the Taliban a lurking presence. More than 4,000 people have been killed in over 250 suicide attacks, and many thousands more live in fear of the next attack. Women live under traditional law, and children – especially young girls – are discouraged by the extremists from going to school.

Gulalai began to recruit and train people of her own age as volunteers to go out into schools, universities and villages. Their mission is to counter the appeal of militancy and show there are alternatives. They aim to save the next generation.

We identify young people in the community who might be vulnerable to militants, and we discuss the causes and consequences of conflict, and the history of Talibanisation. We talk about tolerance for people of other faiths - Gulalai

Their power to pursuade can be seen in the case of Muhammad, a young father from the region who believed in holy war. His belief was so strong that he enrolled his two young sons in a radical religious school sympathetic to Taliban views – which include a belief in suicide for the cause.

One of Gulalai’s volunteers noticed this choice and challenged Muhammad. After a series of discussions, Muhammad began to question the legitimacy of violence and the choice he had made for his sons. He looked elsewhere. Muhammad’s two sons, aged 9 and 11, are now enrolled in a moderate school. For these two boys, this local action has had a real impact – and possibly saved their lives.

Make a gift today, and you could help Gulalai spread her message of peace and turn young people away from religious extremism and violence.

The book is written by filmmaker Liz Gray after a serious accident left her with the inability to speak, read or write for long periods at a time.  Realising how precious words truly were, she turned to the 99 people whom she admired the most – writers, artists, musicians and political figures – for their words of wisdom.

These included Nelson Mandela, Yoko Ono, Diana Athill, Camila Batmanghelidjh, William Dalrymple, Wendy Cope, Ariel Dorfman, Maureen Freely, Maggie Gee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Steve Jones, Fergal Keane, Salif Keita, Ursula Le Guin, Richard Long, Ben Okri, John Tavener, Desmond Tutu, Jeanette Winterson, Robert Wyatt and Peace Direct’s very own Scilla Elworthy.

99 Words is on sale at £10.99 and 99 pence from the sale of each book goes to Peace Direct.

To hear more on the 99 Words project, tune into BBC Radio 4′s programme ‘Something Understood ’.

To find out more visit www.99words.co.uk.

Mama Kabibi is 78 years old. She has watched her children die one by one, either in combat or through disease. Alone, she could not defend her land and was powerless when a former combatant forced her from her home and her one source of food – her cassava field. She approached the authorities for help, but heard nothing more.

Justice in this region is hard to come by. Legal processes are expensive and slow. Peacebuilder Flory Kazingufu was told by a local lawyer that out of 2,000 cases that went to the official courts last year, only 8 were resolved. And desperately poor villagers often cannot afford to even launch a case.

Now Flory is creating a quick and affordable system of village courts, staffed by volunteers and based on traditional ways.

His organisation, Chirezi, has trained a team of impartial observers to manage the cases. The result is that local people have somewhere to go to resolve their disputes, free of cost.

These courts give people fast, effective access to justice, which they can’t get otherwise. – Flory Kazingufu

Mama Kabibi came to see the court volunteers in February. They began work on her case straight away. After just two hearings, the former combatant agreed to give her land back. Now she can grow her own food again and face the future safely.

For a project that has only just begun, this shows the immediate impact these courts can have on the lives of the vulnerable. Flory’s three community courts span 32 villages, serving almost a quarter of a million people. And because they use traditional structures and are run by local people, they will be sustainable for the long-term future. Make a donation to help give people access to justice in DR Congo.

Photo credit: Center for Global Development (CGD)

Peace Direct offers heartfelt congratulations to all three new winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia, and Tawakul Karman of Yemen. The decision of the Nobel Prize Committee recognizes both the contribution that women are making to build peace and also the role that local people are playing in transforming their own societies.

“This year the Nobel Peace Prize has recognised the vital contribution of local peacebuilders to resolving today’s conflicts in the most direct and effective way,” said Peace Direct Chief Executive Carolyn Hayman. “Local peacebuilders like these Nobel winners can be found in every conflict zone, offering positive leadership and creating a better future for their own communities. Their heroic efforts are too often ignored, and we hope that this award will lead the international community to recognise and support the powerful impact of local peacebuilders around the world.”

The Nobel committee said they awarded the prize to the three winners “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work”. The new winners join an illustrious line of local peacebuilders who have won the Nobel Peace Prize. In each case, the local peacebuilders have been characterised by their combination of profound knowledge of their own societies and the moral authority that comes from their bravery and activism.

The work done by the winners also demonstrates the importance that can be made to peacebuilding by local people working at different levels of society. Johnson Sirleaf, the best known of the winners before today, has shown the role that determined political leadership can play in moving Liberia forward from the horrors of civil war and in starting the process of reconciliation. But by awarding the prize also to Leymah Gbowee, the Nobel Prize Committee has recognised that such progress has only been possible because of the bravery and resourcefulness of grassroots peacebuilders, in this case by protesting and opening the space for dialogue whilst the fighting was still on-going. As Sirleaf Johnson herself has said, the prize truly is “for all Liberian people”.

This kind of locally led peacebuilding is what Peace Direct was founded to support. In every society the work of local people is playing a vital role in resolving conflicts, and with more support their impact can be increased even further. The 2011 award is acknowledgment not only of the three brave and outstanding women who will receive the prize, but of local peacebuilders everyone. Our congratulations to them all.

In DR Congo radio is one of the few reliable forms of mass communication

Many of those fighting in the bush joined militia to protect their communities as civil war ripped through eastern Congo. Yet as the war continued and the scale of atrocity grew, many became more and more embroiled in the fighting. Today, they tell the CRC they wish to return home, to wage peace not war.

Fear stops many fighters coming home. Fear of harassment from the army. Fear of community retribution for their past crimes. Fear of not having the means to support themselves outside of the armed groups. Radio club broadcasts challenge these fears directly. Often those speaking are the former fighters themselves. They want to tell their comrades it’s safe. Encourage them to come home too. They show that there is an alternative to life in the bush.

I can say I am Kidicho, I have been there with you, you know me, you have lived and fought with me on the mountain. Now I am here, you hear my voice, I am good here and I am asking you to join me. – Kidicho, former militia fighter

The radio clubs not only encourage fighters home, but lay the foundations for them to build a new life. The broadcasts talk of behavioural change – how to resolve conflict not react to it – so that  when outside of the militia,their communities will not fear them.. Radio clubs also speak to communities which may, naturally, fear the return of those that may have committed terrible crimes. The radio clubs can show how accepting former fighters can benefit, not burden, communities. This focus on both fighters and communities make cases of people returning to the bush rare.

When we listened to our colleagues and found they were welcomed by the community without problems, so we decided also to go that way and leave the bush. – Kasareka, former Mai Mai militia fighter

The radio clubs go from strength to strength but need your support if they are to continue to make a difference. Make a gift today and you could help the CRC speak to those hardest to reach, and call on them to put down their guns and bring peace to DR Congo.

The day is the perfect occasion to celebrate the work of local peacebuilders everywhere who are devoting their lives to building peace in their communities. Peacebuilders like:

• Collaborative for Peace: the only local peace network working on both sides of the new border between North and South Sudan. The Collaborative is building peace at the grassroots to prevent local conflicts from spiralling out of control.
• YAPE in Nepal: after 15 years of civil war, political violence in Nepal is still common. YAPE run a rapid response hotline to stop conflicts early before violence escalates.
• Aware Girls in Pakistan: in the fragile border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where terrorism and extremism is a daily occurrence, Aware Girls are building a network of young peace activists to create a movement for peace in the new generation.

With your help Peace Direct supports these and many more all over the world.

On this International Day of Peace, you can make a difference to peace. It is an opportunity to not only celebrate, but take action.

Send a PeaceCard

Wherever you are in the world, you can join the peacebuilders in their celebrations by sending a peacecard to the people in your life today. Our PeaceCards are free to send, but if you choose to make a donation you will be supporting local action against conflict across the world.

Sign up to Practical Peace

Practical Peace is our monthly email newsletter. Packed full of practical advice and actions that you can take to make a positive difference in the world and your own life. Stand up for peace and sign up today.

Make a gift

Peacebuilders all over the world are counting on your support. Your gift can make a genuine and lasting contribution to building peace in some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts. Here are just a few examples of the difference your donation could make:

• £16 could train one Kashmiri teacher to help their students move away from anger.
• £35 could support one former rebel soldier in a workers’ co-operative in Congo.
• £500 could cover travel costs in Sudan, so that when tensions rise, peacebuilders can intervene and stop violence.

However you choose to celebrate, Peace Direct and all of the peacebuilders are wishing you all the best on this International Day of Peace.

More than 400 visitors attended the exibition at Treberydd House in the Brecon Beacons, South Wales.

It is for anyone who wants to be fully present in both the world and themselves and who recognises that the way we are and how we behave springs directly from the way we see ourselves and the world.

Scilla Elworthy, speaker at the first SKGR Symposium two years ago said of the event:

I have experienced a loving intelligence from the way the food is prepared right through to the way people are with each other, incredible evidence of walking the talk and talking the walk.

Friends of Peace Direct are invited to participate in this event, which includes talks, conversation, Qi gong, music and walks interspersed with periods of meditation, wonderful food and evening entertainment.

For more information or to book please see the SKGR website