PO Box 10372
San Antonio TX 78210-0372
Telephone: 877 814 6972
E-mail: [email protected]

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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