March 20, 2025
This email series highlights voices of peace from around the world, to help you find yours.
This month’s Voice of Peace is Anaïs Caput, Search’s strategy and design senior specialist.
If you were to ask what impresses me most about Search, my answer today would be the same as in 2011 when I first visited our programs in the Great Lakes of Africa: Search’s frontline peacebuilders. I have witnessed the meaningful relationships our team has built with so many diverse people over the years. From our drivers to our country directors, they never hesitate using their power to bring people together, find solutions, alleviate suffering, protect freedoms, or call out corruption. They do this time and time again—all while carrying the trauma of past conflicts that have affected them personally, and navigating the impact of violence on their own families, friends, and colleagues. Why? Because they are from the countries they work in. Because they have dedicated their lives to ensuring violent conflict never erupts again. And because they do this alongside colleagues, partners, and communities that span all sides of whatever conflict is at hand.
Recently I watched as a conference room in our Mombasa, Kenya office became the theater of Search’s Common Ground Approach in action—powerfully directed by our Kenya country director. A lawyer, young paralegals, religious leaders from different denominations, and a Search journalist mentoring young girls all sat at a table together. What did they have in common? A set of shared issues they were committed to addressing through dialogue. We offered them a safe space to meet, facilitation to work through their issues constructively, and new allies to find creative solutions. Why did this matter? It contributed to immediate assistance for people in need: a plan was set in motion to provide legal support for a pregnant woman wrongly imprisoned and to care for her child left alone at home. It also unlocked long-term engagement to address the root causes of conflict: religious leaders and lawyers, who were meeting for the first time, agreed on a joint strategy to contribute to protecting religious freedoms for all communities across Kenya.
In my work at Search, I help mobilize the institutional funding that makes this work possible. Witnessing funding-freezes and reductions across the world, I hear a lot of big numbers: billions of dollars cut, thousands of grants and contracts canceled, etc. These figures are daunting. And behind them, there are so many individual stories of peacebuilders whose work is being interrupted, and so many communities they have served for decades left more vulnerable:
- Young women victims of cyberviolence in Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan, where unchecked online violence is likely to lead them to withdraw from public life and miss out on opportunities to become the powerful youth leaders our world needs
- Farmers and herders competing for vital resources in Niger as they face the consequences of climate change, who—while support for local mediation is interrupted—might now see violence as the preferred pathway to address this shared issue
- Palestinian and Israeli community leaders, ready to translate the ceasefire into meaningful change in the everyday lives of Israelis and Palestinians, who will now lack the resources to mobilize their energy through new, innovative online tools that could have helped them scale up their impact
No matter what, I know that our frontline peacebuilders will continue to build peace in their communities and make the world a safer place for all of us. They are committed to this mission—regardless of any organization or donor—and I have witnessed their resilience time and time again. But I also know that without your support, and as our programs are interrupted, years of progress will be halted or even reversed. It takes long-term commitments and continued support to build the kind of trust, relationships, and alliances that have enabled our frontline peacebuilders to amplify their impact, transform millions of lives, and build the safe, healthy, and just societies we all aspire to live in. Let’s invest in this work, all together.
