By Óscar Cejudo Corbalán
When I was a teenager, I used to go for long walks with my grandmother. She needed to walk almost daily to stimulate her blood circulation, and these were moments of profound bonding between the two of us. I learnt a lot from her, and what it is more impactful, I keep learning today a lot from those conversations.
As we walked along the coastline in my town, we used to cross paths with a lot of people, most (if not all) of whom did not say hello or any other type of greeting. My grandmother always commented on that, she said that when she was younger everyone would say buenos días [good morning] to each other, and how sad was to see how neighbors became strangers and how society was falling apart.
It never abandoned me. I have always tried to say buenos días to strangers in the contexts I considered it was not too weird to try (even with that I have had people staring back trying to recognize me or as if I had a problem.) But those megatrends that Richard Matthew identified in his session (specifically in this case the world population growth and the game-changing technologies) make the task very difficult. However, the sessions and field exposures that we have had during this last week have made me stay optimistic.
We are always talking about changing mindsets in order to change the world. The field itself of conflict resolution has evolved from managing or “resolving” the conflict to transforming the relationships among the parties to ensure that the conflict does not arise anymore. Transformation and relationships; these two concepts have been a constant along all this week and that gives me a lot of hope that it seems we are moving in the “right direction” (I say this very carefully and I will question it later.)
As José Arreola said, Community Alliance for Safety and Peace (CASP) is based on the principle “relationships improve safety in the community.” The traditional (many centuries old) retributive justice is evolving towards restorative justice, which focuses in working with the relationship between offender and victims and the community (some of the people pushing for this are calling this new approach transformative justice.) Law enforcement is embracing the idea of community policing, as a way to establish and strengthen relationships with the people they serve to ultimately better serve them.
There have even been conversations that pointed to a need in changing donors approach. Richard Matthew pushes for a more sensitive and practical way to provide funding, with a much more long term strategy than nowadays (if we actually want a participative consultation to design and implement programs we would need 2-3 years only for that) and shifting the mindset from a benefit oriented to a results oriented approach. Also, Jose Arriola and Susie Brusa both coincided in the role that donors could have in fostering partnership (relationships) between NGOs.
There have been many examples in just one week. It feels good to say that the desired change in mindset seems to be happening (and in the case of the donors approach transformation, it is a conversation that at least seems to have started, first step.) This does not mean that we can let our guard down, there are many issues that can go wrong: who and how is leading this change in mindset? Is it actually applicable everywhere? In other words, can we say this is the “right” change in every context? (I do not think so.) How do we sustain these paradigm shifts? Do we even want to sustain them? And a long etcetera of questions that we have to keep in mind to be healthily skeptical.
Neither it means that we have to get desperate because the change is too slow. This is a process; it takes a lot of time to dismantle structures that have configured our society for so long. They are strong and well designed to be self protective, so the change needs to happen necessarily in an incremental way. But it seems that different disciplines or professions are converging in the idea of being transformative through enhancing relationships.
What my grandmother deeply understood because of her humble wisdom (simply because she lived a life) is directly connected with this. Every time she told me how sad it was that people will not greet each other anymore on the streets take on a new meaning today. She knew that relationships are a key component for a healthy and peaceful society (at least where she grew up, and apparently also here in the US.) I can only be grateful that after so long she keeps teaching me.
