Capacity building

Capacity Building in Local Organisations Working for Nonviolent Conflict Resolution

The Danish Centre for Conflict Resolution (DCCR) provides assistance to organisations wanting to establish themselves as local centres for conflict resolution or strengthen their competences in this particular area.

Experience

Our perhaps most important experience in this regard is running our own centre since 1994 largely without governmental support but based partly on public and private clients paying for our services and partly on voluntary work. We have picked up experiences and learned as we were going through the establishing, consolidating, expanding and reorganising phases of organisational development. We have learned from tackling financial challenges, internal professional disagreements and organisational reorganisations, and finally we have learned from implementing several thousand conflict resolution training, mediation and process activities.

Secondly, the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India and DCCR with funding from the Danish Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Danida) established a project on capacity building and training of trainers in the Tibetan exile community, which led to the creation of the Tibetan Centre for Conflict Resolution. The capacity of the centre has been expanded and today it teaches and facilitates conflict resolution in a variety of ways: through public meetings, Buddhism classes, counselling workshops, strengthening civil society, educational activities about peace building and democracy, and further, the Centre is facilitating inclusion of newcomers from Tibet. DCCR’s support took place with different intervals and intensity from1999 through 2005 and again in 2017.

Approach

DCCR believes that our organisational model and our conflict resolution methodologies cannot be copy-pasted successfully to a different context. The local social, economic and cultural context sets a framework for what is possible and desirable. Therefore, DCCR takes a fusion approach to capacity building where dialogue about which organisational model(s) and conflict resolution methodologies best suit the local challenges and opportunities is key. Our external inputs should be seen as inspiration to be moulded to the local context or fusioned with existing local methodologies. Additionally, through dialogue sessions entirely new methodologies (not previously used by the local organisation or by DCCR) can be created, tested, adjusted and rolled out.

Therefore, our capacity building will generally speaking contain the following elements:

Mapping: Mapping the local context together (resources, possibilities, challenges, needs, capacities etc.)
Sharing: Presenting existing local as well as external (DCCR) methodologies, tools, principles
Developing: Together developing conflict resolution tools, didactics and organisational models to fit the local context
Implementing: Testing and implementing the tools and models
Phasing out: Evaluation, follow-up dialogue and sparring

Funding

DCCR does not have ready-made access to the funds required to implement the capacity building process described above. If the local partners do not have the required funds, a joint application process can be initiated. However, it might be possible for DCCR to fully or partly fund an initial meeting between DCCR and the local partner either in Copenhagen or locally.

Staff

Since 1994, DCCR trainers and mediators have worked with thousands of public and private sector managers and employees in and outside Denmark. They all go through an internal training and test process in order to ensure professional quality in our activities.

Interested?

If you are interested please contact Bjørn Nygaard on +45 22259409 and bn@konfliktloesning.dk

Capacity building