Strategic Priorities
01 – Contribute to developing a lasting Peace in Sri Lanka through Non Violence
- To continue to work with communities at grass roots level, to change people’s attitudes and behaviour towards each other, reducing the likelihood of violence, and helping them come together in community base forums to solve seemingly intractable community problem
- To work with people who work with and for communities (government officers, NGO people and others) to integrate non violence into their mainstream activities.
- To build a skilled multi-ethnic team to deliver training and support to participants, demonstrating non violent behaviour to the participants we work with and helping to break down mistrust and stereotypes.
Peace work is not about us trying to find quick answers. We help people to build long- term relationships with others and encourage trust and consistency. We always seek to use participatory methods.
We work by understanding what people’s needs are and building on their existing capabilities. Each community identifies the problems and issues that need to be addressed in their particular place, and PCA field staff support and them and work with them to help them find solutions to their own problems. We don’t impose our own ideas, participants will tell us what they want to do. We plan for as long as possible.
Most projects receive funding for 12 months. We believe, however, that peace is a process that takes much longer than this. We therefore make long term plans for our short term funding.
02 – Contribute to developing a lasting Peace in Sri Lanka through increasing community cohesion and the integration of ex combatants into their communities.
- Supporting communities and individuals to understand their rights and the rights of others and responsibilities to one another
- Helping communities and individuals to resolve the problems they fasce by using assertive non violent approaches
03 – Contribute to developing a lasting Peace in Sri Lanka through Empowerment.
- Support communities to learn skills and practice working together so they can plan together and represent themselves and resolve the issues that affect their communities
- Encourage communities to work together with government offices to secure the services and support they need
04 – Contribute to developing a lasting Peace in Sri Lanka through being Conflict Sensitive.
PCA strives to understand the context in which we work so that we design, implement, and evaluate all our programmes in a way that is conflict sensitive and thus does not create conflict where it did not exist before, or make existing conflicts worse.