This will probably be my final post in 2025. Events may move me to write something else, but my plan is to take the rest of the year off from writing to plan the projects we will roll out early in the new year.
That will include making systematic plans for marketing my book Peacebuilding Starts at Home and updating its website, not surprisingly called www.peacebuildingstartsathome.us. I could—and perhaps should—have done more of that in the two weeks since the book was published. However, because I wrote the book to support the growth of the Peacebuilding Starts at Home community and movement that the Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) will help lead, I will be promoting them in tandem in the new year.
That larger initiative will have five goals:
- Building a community of millions of Americans who see the need for a paradigm shift in the way we solve our problems and then take key steps toward making that happen.
- Providing on ramps for the subset of them who want to actively take part in those efforts. We know it won’t be all of them. That’s OK because we are at least as interested in building support for new cultural norms.
- Incubating new projects in communities around the country.
- Advocating for the adoption of policies that further the first three goals.
- Creating a network of individuals and organizations who will coordinate all of this.
For reasons that will become clear in my posts in the first few weeks of 2026, my colleagues and I will spend the first half of the new year focusing on the first and last of these goals. To be sure, we will not ignore the other three. However, our highest priority is obvious given the state of the country today.
We have to begin building a network of Americans that lays that groundwork for turning the United States into a in which most of us solve most of our problems most of the time by working together with each other.
A Public Campaign
I’m far from the only person to realize that the the peacebuilding community is at a crossroads.
Actually two of them.that are so inextricably intertwined that we will have to address them together.
To begin with, building peace can’t just be limited to reducing polarization or the threat of violence. Lasting peace requires making a major dent in all of the interconnected problems that have divided our country and kept us in political gridlock for decades. To complicate matters further, it is hard to imagine how we can pull our country out of its rut unless and until the vast majority of Americans realize that nothing less than the adoption of sweeping new cultural norms and public policies will get us there.
While I had been thinking along these lines for years, my desire to actually take both of those challenges on came to a head a couple of years ago when the political scientist Robert Putnam ended a talk to Georgetown students and community members with this statement:
The future of our country is in your hands.
Almost every head in the room nodded in agreement. But as the audience filed out of the auditorium, I asked some of them if they really planned to take him up on his offer. Most sheepishly said that they probably wouldn’t because they couldn’t see a path forward in which they could make a difference.
On the spot, I decided to revise the book so that it focused on how its readers could “make it happen” as I put it in its subtitle. And, I started discussions with the individuals I profiled in the book and others about how we could help Americans overcome the resignation I saw in so many faces that evening.
To that end, we will begin what I am tentatively calling the Ten-Get-Ten campaign in January. We are inviting about 100 of those people to host in depth discussions about peacebuilding and related topics with people who do not think of themselves as peacebuilders. Over the next six months, those discussions will unfold however the people involved want them to (although we will provide some guidance) as long as they deal with some or all of have these topics.
- We want to find people from all walks of life who are open to seeing the need for a paradigm shift in the ways Americans deal with each other and their problems.
- And then help them understand that building peace involves tackling all of the tough problems that our country faces as part of a, for now, loosely defined Peacebuilding Starts at Home community.
- So that they can identify things that they can do to move the clichéd needle in the course of their everyday lives, if not the life of our country as a whole.
- While showing them how their impact can ripple out beyond their family or community or workplace until it does shape the way most Americans solve most of their problems most of the time.
- In the process, developing projects that bring these ideas to new communities until they are deeply embedded in all aspects of American life.
- So that we eventually get to the point that the Peacebuilding Starts at Home community becomes an irresistible force that policy makers can no longer ignore.
We will also ask our volunteers to keep hosting those discussions until they each recruit ten more people who, themselves, will commit to hosting discussions of their own in the second half of next year.
Once that happens, the 100 volunteers that we start with will have identified another 1,000 people who think in terms of peacebuilding starts at home. Those 1,100 people will have found over 10,000 by next New Year’s Eve. Following the logic of exponential equations, that number could easily top ten million long before the end of the decade. And if only a tiny fraction of those people donate a modest sum–say $20 a year–we would also raise tens of millions of dollars for the broader Peacebuilding Starts at Home initiative.
We also know that this initiative will not unfold as smoothly as I just suggested.
We know that we will have a lot to learn.
We also know that we will have to develop tools that less experienced facilitators could use sooner rather than later.
That’s why we are starting small and relying on veteran activists and facilitators to host the first round of discussions.
But that’s only how we plan to start. And also why I will be spending this working vacation planning videos and other tools to use as we grow.
And, I will end this post with how I plan to do my version of ten-get-ten which you can start with today if you are as eager to get started as I am.
Field Building and Scaffolding
I will also spend a good bit of my time over the holidays getting ready to set up the network that will manage the Peacebuilding Starts at Home initiative.
Although few of my readers will ever need to work with this network, it is worth mentioning here because we are setting it up in a way that reflects the same values we plan to instill in the country as a whole.
AfP adopted what it called a field building strategy three years ago. In it, we laid out our strategic priorities for expanding what our member organizations and others did, the places where they worked, and the like.
It was ambitious and will be even more so after we update it early next year.
However, as we add Peacebuilding Starts at Home to the mix, we have realized that we have to dramatically expand what we mean by “the field.”
It isn’t just peacebuilders. We also have to work with people who care about climate change, racism, cultural norms, gender, economic inequality, crime, and more.
In short, while we have begun pivoting toward working with organizations that focus on those other issues, some of them are realizing that they have to pivot and find ways of work with us, too.
In short, we have to build a far more all-inclusive community and movement than I’ve ever seen in the sixty years I’ve spent as both an activist and student of social change worldwide.
It will also have be one in which no single organization—especially a small one based in Washington DC like AfP—can do it all.
In short, Peacebuilding Starts at Home will have to be a coalition—and a broad one at that.
We will start with the organizations I met in writing the book and work with them to help our organizational community grow. With them, we will also have to develop strategies for starting new projects, reaching out to new communities, and all of the other longer term initiatives I alluded to at the beginning of this post. We will also have to figure out how to allocate the money raised through the Ten-Get-Ten campaign and use those contributions to leverage even more funding. Add to that our need to reach out to mainstream media outlets, influence policy makers, and the like.
When all is said and done, we will have to create an agile, nimble organization of leaders who are good at both coordinating the work of a diverse set of activists and who know how to leave their personal and organizational egos at the door—at least most of the time.
Well—We Could Use Your Help Now, Too
In ending this post, let me start by repeating the first sentence in my book.
Peacebuilding Starts at Home is an invitation masquerading as a book.
That’s the case here as well.
Some of the people that I have my Ten-Get-Ten discussions with will come from my newsletter readers.
So, if you are really interested, why wait until January?
I’m willing to start having those discussions with you right now. Just click here to send me an email.
Oh, and I’ll also be spending some time getting better at having my AI generate images. As you can see from this post, I have a lot to learn….
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.
