Copy this CollectionIn the summer of 2015, I was completing my graduate fieldwork in Meru, Kenya. There, I met a man named Dickson Ntwiga – the then President of Meru’s Rotary Club – who said something that would radically shift how I thought about peacebuilding, sustainable development, and all response-driven approaches. He said, “we need to be given the opportunity to define what peace means to us.” It was then that I realized the power of local knowledge and action in creating and sustaining positive change.
This collection is born out of that realization. It is born out of the appreciation of and engagement with the decision-making capacities of local actors across the United States. All too often, responses to social issues come from a top-down approach, with little consideration of the localized context and the power that neighbors hold within their communities. This collection seeks to shift that approach.
Across the country, hyper-local responses to neighborhood crime are being developed. This collection highlights programs that operate at the local level and employ positive peer pressure as a strategic intervention. In each story, actors from a neighborhood act as conveners, mediators, or mentors in an effort to break the cycles of violence and trauma. They are individuals that live in the neighborhoods being served, have been given the agency to define how issues are being solved, and use that agency to direct their peers into making positive changes.
