Why do we need peace, and how can it be established? Caritas India Samvaad programme examines the key factors that create conflict and assesses the role of the community, especially the children and youth, in peacebuilding. Peace is an essential prerequisite for development, which needs to be established by creating a cadre of peacebuilders in the community.

In an effort to promote peace and harmony through the Samvaad Programme, Caritas India engaged Premashray Mahila Kalyan Samiti as a knowledge partner to orient and prepare the Peace Club children, youths, and mixed groups to promote peace in the society and maintain social integrity and harmony. The skills and knowledge of the knowledge partners will be used to train the focused groups constituting the programme.

The Samvaad Programme creates an opportunity for children and youth to be ambassadors of peace and take the dialogue process for peace into their areas. These peace clubs, or peace cadres, are the representatives of the Samvaad Programme for creating awareness of the importance of peace for the development of society and the nation. Being the primary focal group under the programme, they play an important role in preventing all kinds of communal and other violence. It is the responsibility of Caritas India to strengthen these groups by enhancing their skills and capacity to promote and create peace and by ensuring preventive measures avert any kind of conflict or communal strife.

Knowledge partner prepared the module on peacebuilding and reconciliation exclusively designed for children, youth, and community. The module was designed to focus on the goal of the programme in line with the category of participants and ease of understanding.

Six workshops along with eighteen street plays were already conducted in six partner locations. Last week, the knowledge partner was in Meerut Seva Samaj and Karuna Social Service Society, conducting four workshops and six street plays with 150 participants on peace promotion methods and refraining from any kind of communal violence. Simultaneously, street plays also disseminated the message of peace promotion with other community issues. More than 300 college youths learn the importance of peace and how youth can be the best medium to promote peace in society.

Post-workshop, facilitators focused on participatory involvement to engage participants and ensure their learning. Games, discussions, visual displays, and brainstorming sessions were incorporated to ensure learning stories. The workshop started with the balloon game, where the participants were given the balloons and, after filling them with air, were told to save their balloons from each other so that others could not burst them. This game became more interesting when some participants started bursting the balloons of other co-participants, and within a few minutes, almost all balloons were busted in retaliation for the act. The group was told the meaning of the story: no one was told to bust the balloons, but then some did it, and eventually, almost all of them were at a loss. This shows that we are very much influenced by the wrong information and do not respond to communication positively, while we react negatively very swiftly. The moral of the story was not to respond negatively to any statement immediately. In the same way, communal strife takes place when someone, without knowing the truth, takes an action that regresses into multiple actions, ending up with a loss.

The workshop uses storytelling to explain disputes, violence, strife, and different perspectives related to peacebuilding and reconciliation. Participants gave positive feedback and enjoyed the takeaway, which surely adds value to promoting peace and harmony.

Reel-making orientation and video documentation helped the staff and youth learn to make reels about peace and share them on social media platforms for mass awareness on a larger horizon.