TIER ONE: INDIVIDUAL
Trainings
Tier One programs begin with three months of intensive training, during which participants gain an understanding of conflict dynamics, its root causes, and the best way to address it at community level. The training modules cover peaceful cohabitation, Nonviolent Direct Action Organizing (NVDA), and financial literacy.
As participants learn about types of violence and conflict dynamics, they become better equipped to identify opportunities to promote peace. Participants also learn and practice the skills necessary to mobilize around unmet community needs and implement solutions.
Over the course of the trainings, participants become comfortable leading participatory forums, enhancing their capacity to engage with and shape their society.
Dialogue
Throughout the trainings and workshops, Resolve staff facilitates dialogue on difficult and divisive topics. Beneficiaries have the opportunity to talk about their own experiences of the conflict in a safe and supported environment; as beneficiaries begin to hear multiple perspective of the same lived history, they begin to collectively develop a comprehensive and inclusive narrative of the conflict. From this position of mutual understanding, beneficiaries begin to address difficult problems facing their community, such as the integration and re-integration of vulnerable and disparate groups, and how to strengthen social cohesion within their communities.
Financial Literacy and Socio-Economic Recovery
The three months of training concludes with a module on financial literacy. Participants learn best money-managing practices for earning, saving, spending, borrowing, and investing. Resolve implementers also teach participants how to conduct a market assessment, draft business plans, and other skills necessary to start up and run successful small businesses.
Participants who successfully complete the three months of training and pass evaluations have the opportunity to receive a microloan to launch a small business. Participants work closely with Resolve staff to develop realistic and sustainable business plans, and to identify personal goals in their climb out of Extreme Global Poverty. Together, we track the growth of the businesses, strategize to manage obstacles and grow successes, help set and meet goals, and measure progress toward participants’ rise out of poverty and toward their peacebuilding and stabilization goals.
As part of our microfinance program, prior to receiving their loan, participants self-organize into diverse groups of five or six to form their "microfinance co-op." The people in these cooperatives bond together for the year as they each launch their own small enterprises. What begins as a mechanism for accountability and economic growth becomes a strong social network of support. Through joint action and mutual support, participants diversify their income and achieve financial security – for the first time in their lives. Together, they break the monopoly by militias over economic channels, instead creating and perpetuating autonomous communal networks that thrive on peace and cooperation
Resolve participants have started a wide range of business: everything from bakeries to brick-manufacturing factories, mills to restaurants, tailoring shops to tool stores, and more. Within a month of starting their businesses, participants begin repaying their loans in small weekly amounts spread out over a year, roughly 2% of the loan each time. All the microfinance reimbursements are pooled into a fund for community-led peacebuilding projects in Tier Two of Resolve’s process.
