Local Solutions Equal Lasting Change

As aid budgets shrink, donors want to see more than just the immediate impact of their dollars – they want to know an investment will be sustainable, continuing to affect people’s lives for years to come.

Interventions and context can vary wildly between projects, but if the model doesn’t fill an important gap, cash-strapped local governments, institutions and NGOs have little incentive to keep it going. To achieve sustainability, a project has to introduce tools that truly serve local community needs. That’s what I love the most about our Youth Theater for Peace (YTP) programs—they present a flexible methodology, Drama for Conflict Transformation (DCT), which beneficiaries can use to address a range of conflict issues they feel are relevant locally.

Because DCT empowers them to engage their local communities, the teachers and students trained through YTP have become passionate advocates for the methodology. They look at conflict differently now, and have fantastic ideas to share that transformation with others. At the recent YTP Sustainability Workshop I attended in Kyrgyzstan, I met students who want to perform their plays for local juvenile justice officers. They want to train their peers at other schools to run their own Drama Clubs. They want their parents to watch plays about family issues – and act with them together on stage.

“My objective is to make the Drama Clubs sustainable,” says Saltanat Imangazieva, a teacher from Kyrgyzstan who started a DCT group at her school. “There are many problems in life to deal with, and the activities of the Drama Clubs are useful in our schools. They offer tools for teachers to use every day.” My job is to help leaders like Imangazieva and her students strengthen their skills in grant-writing, planning, and facilitation, so they can transform vision into action and continue to serve as agents of peace. “I feel that I can go back to my community and lead drama workshops,” Shahzod, a high school student, says proudly. “I have the confidence.”

“This program opened people’s eyes in the communities we visited,” reflected a YTP teacher in Tajikistan. “People realized that waiting for somebody to solve their problems doesn’t make sense anymore. They should think about and find solutions to their problems on their own.” To me, that paradigm shift represents the lasting change IREX strives for in all of our programming, and in the work I do each day.