International Partners / Middle East & North Africa

Syria

In 2015, Cure Violence began a partnership with Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) and a coalition of Syrian civil society organizations that has as goals to promote a peaceful Syria, to provide training and related support to individuals and organizations from Syria in civilian protection and to train Syrian community leaders using the Cure Violence interruption methodologies.

In 2013, Cure Violence trained over 100 participants in conflict mediation, behavior change, and norm change.  Over 70% of the participants reported using the Cure Violence methodology to interrupt violence in their hometowns within three months of the trainings.  New trainings and programming are being planned for 2018.

Iraq

Ambassadors for Peace (A4P) was the Cure Violence partnership program with the American Islamic Congress (AIC) in Iraq from 2008 to 2013. It was implemented in five sites – three in Basrah and two sites in Sadr City-Baghdad.  The program resulted in close to 1,000 interruptions and over 14,000 people reached through outreach activities.

The A4P partnership utilized AIC’s personal relationships, presence in Iraq and cultural familiarity and Cure Violence’s innovative methods of reducing urban violence – specifically our approach of using credible messengers who are not representatives of the authorities but are respected in their neighborhoods and have clout with potentially violent elements. In Iraq, these credible messengers are people with the right connections in the religious, tribal and ethnic communities as the violence facing Iraqi communities is largely inter-tribal, inter-militia, sectarian or domestic.

Israel/West Bank

25 volunteer workers have undergone extensive training with Cure Violence and have begun to implement projects and spread the methods in four areas: Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus/Jenin, and E. Jerusalem.  New trainings and programming are currently being planned.