WINTER 1999: v4i1 INDEX
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WINTER,
1999: Volume 4 Issue 1
Peace
Team Leadership Roles
from Project: Hearts and Minds Inc.
Nonpartisan
groups are helpful in building bridges for reconciliation: meeting with
various perspectives in a conflict establishes nonpartisanship and builds
connections. This work is important at home as well as abroad. Each
trip and each group meeting can do this to some degree.
Building
community within the team is essential and requires continuing constructive
effort. A facilitated meeting prior to the team leaving extends our
ability to make best use of the team’s potential. Regular meetings on the trip
and attending regional and board meetings back home are all opportunities
for building this community.
All members
of the team provide leadership. No one person has all of the needed
skills, which include the ability to:
- listen
and restate accurately different points of view;
- accurately
articulate of the project’s purpose and policies;
- affirm
each other and be emotionally supportive;
- make
photographs, journals, videotapes, inventories and documentation of visits,
conversations, and decisions where appropriate;
- facilitate
consensus for team decision making;
- minute
group decisions for future clarity;
- mediate
disputes;
- speak
the language and translate;
- have
contacts or prior experience in the culture;
- build
media relationships both before and after the trip;
- have
spokeperson skills with customs, government representatives, clinic personnel;
- offer
educational resources;
- fundraise;
- gather,
store, evaluate and make inventory of medical supplies;
- exercise
financial oversight — budget realistically, document expenses, tactfully
assess the right use of donations;
- evaluate
sites both new and former;
- establish
priorities, be discerning;
- report
back to US constituency and to funding sources in order to be responsible
to contributors and to extend awareness of current needs and issues.
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Preparing Peace Teams for Reconciliation
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