Community-led change has the potential to be transformational for our communities and as a country — to come together across differences, to share power, and to collaborate for a better shared future.
But in Australia, this work cannot happen without also attending to the unresolved conflicts, traumas, fractures and injustices that our communities have formed on in recent generations. This is the work of peacebuilding in Australia.
Peacebuilding is not the absence of conflict. Peacebuilding is about leaning into often-unacknowledged conflicts that have shaped our communities today. It is the work of those of us with Settler ancestry, First Nations peoples and for many recently arrived migrants, who can bring their wisdoms and experiences to this work in Australia.
Peacebuilding strengthens the relationships, accountability and social cohesion that allow communities — and the people and institutions working alongside them — to genuinely work together.
This session continues the peacebuilding dialogue convened at ChangeFest25, where people across the movement came together to share what it means, personally and systemically, to truly make peace on these Countries. A clear call came from this dialogue a call for us to each find our role and purpose in peacebuilding as central to the work of community-led change.
This is the next conversation as a movement. Bringing together First Nations and Settler voices to explore further the threads from the CF25 dialogue such as:
- What does peacebuilding mean on this continent and how does it align with community led ways of working?
- How are we having the difficult conversations that are necessary for us to work and lead together in our communities?
How do we shift the conditions individually and systemically - thinking across places and across times for intergenerational healing and ways forward?
Peacebuilding makes something possible that wasn't possible before: the trust and shared accountability for communities and institutions to move together, as true partners, on a common agenda for change.
