The Answers Are There: Building Peace From the Inside Out

by Libby Hoffman

First, the real resources aren’t the money and projects from abroad or the experts with expensive degrees brought into communities from outside. Second, it didn’t take much to catalyze their efforts or honor their agency. If international organizations could hold back from deciding for communities and instead allow them to claim space as experts on what needs to be done, those communities could come together and decide on their own priorities. The third lesson I learned has become a bedrock principle of my work: being trusted acknowledged people’s dignity, allowing them to be seen and to lead as people of powerful capability. Across the world, people lament a loss of trust in institutions, but very little attention is paid to the importance of placing trust in people—entrusting them to identify their own priorities, make their own decisions, and chart their own paths toward realizing their hopes for their communities and for themselves. Communities around the world express and enact these ambitions frequently—and often without wider recognition, let alone direct support, from international actors.

Despite so many examples, contemporary and historical, of how communities successfully nurture and (re)build themselves, the real power of community agency often remains invisible and unsupported in our international system. International actors speak about the principles of “local ownership” frequently, but we have yet to follow our words with our actions, especially when those are expressed through our programming. Creating the spaces for real ownership, whether in a village or across a country, takes longer, but it is the only way real community transformation can take root.

The system labels communities dealing with violence, poverty, or weak governance as those having “needs,” while outsiders are those with the resources and expertise who come to help. This deficit-based lens has a totalizing effect, making it more difficult to see, much less build on, the resources and potential already present within communities “in need.” This way of seeing supports a hierarchy built into the status quo: international experts are at the “top” of a system of knowledge, capacity, and resources, and local communities are at the bottom. The system we were trained to work in envisions aid as a one-directional flow from those with expertise and resources to those with needs, further entrenching the dichotomy.

The system also dichotomizes us as people. No matter where you are in the system, its logic insists that change happens “over there”—externally, often in faraway places, and always outside of oneself.

Rather, we grounded our work in the intention of fulfilling potential. We sought to create space for people and communities—and, ultimately, the country—to identify, claim, and fulfill the potential we believed was always there, even after the devastation of war.

Ultimately, it’s the vision of the larger whole—a healthy, regenerative, integral global community, held together by mutually liberatory relationships—that prompts, inspires, and undergirds my life’s work. The vision of the whole I hold in my imagination is both already and not yet: It is true and present as something to turn to, to learn from, and to lean into, even while we work to bring it into clearer, visible expression around us. This whole is not imposed from the outside. It is not fragmented or fragmenting, not mechanical or mechanistic. It is alive and organic, unfolding and growing from within—if we let it.

The first is the image of the community as a cup: a vessel that, when whole, can contain and support everything within it but, when cracked, can hold neither its own resources nor retain anything poured into it from the outside. This metaphor makes the community container visible and illuminates the necessary work of repairing the cracks, instead of simply pouring in aid and expecting that to “fix” problems.

The second metaphor I introduce is the image of the international system as nested bowls—our vivid and powerful alternative to the linear, hierarchical assumptions of the status quo. This metaphor represents a whole-scale reconceptualization of the field and can inspire fundamental, necessary changes to the international system.

The process that made this resurrection possible was grounded in something both simple and profound: an assumption that the answers are there; that the communities, no matter how devastated, have the capacity to plan and lead a process that meets their own needs, as they see them.

When the community members’ resources—their knowledge and desires and energy and talents—are recognized; when they are invited to lead; when outsiders come not merely as experts but as learners, eager to work in support of and alongside local leadership—when that happens, I have seen people in communities across Sierra Leone step forward with incredible energy and commitment and capacity.

At Catalyst for Peace, we call this an inside-out approach to peacebuilding and development—where the people “inside,” who are closest to the issues being addressed, lead in the work of addressing them, and those “outside” the locality hold the space for that leadership, inviting and accompanying and supporting its growth and development.

The commitment to being human, even after horror; the commitment to invite and allow someone else to be human, even after unspeakable tragedy—these are among the most powerful forces on the planet. We need each other in order to invite and invoke that power. And we need ways of being together that can help us do it.

My vision was a people- and community-centered approach to peace, one that could be mobilized and magnified systemically and strategically—a vision that invoked the same already-not-yet mindset my mom had used in her work. I interpreted this to mean being willing to live into, and to live out from, that vision over time, as I was continuously building it in the world.

The first of these ideas we rest under is that the answers are there—the assumption and conviction that people and communities, even after war and violence or in the midst of poverty or plague, have within them resources for, and answers to, the problems they are facing.

A second idea we lean into is that we are in service of something much larger than ourselves—and that we can trust this larger wisdom to guide us and our work.

The third core idea we inhabit is that real power is in lived goodness—in the capacity to build, not destroy; the capacity to create and co-create, to imagine and to do, that which is good for the whole.

Requiring more than just a listening ear, hearing to speech points to a relational approach to transformation, engaged over time. It is engaged not only with what a person might be saying at the moment but also with a broader knowledge of and commitment to who they are and how they want to go forward in the world.

Our storytelling commitment held the space of the work’s global significance from the beginning and embodied the core assumption that how you see something impacts what you see. Looking for something creates space for it to come forward and be seen, recognized, and valued. A storytelling lens that looks for and recognizes the resources that are already there in a culture and community is powerful, in a parallel way to the program lens that does the same thing. Stories crafted using this lens become positive mirrors back to the culture and communities themselves, helping people see things about themselves that they might not have otherwise recognized or valued.

Weaving storytelling into our work became a channel for supporting and strengthening the organic emergence of the work, for growing it in contextually grounded ways—for building it from the inside out. We recognized the cyclical amplifying power of human-centered story, like an echo that multiplies and builds, connected to human-centered transformational programming, and we built a home for the two to play together in mutual, ongoing relationship.

All of this illuminates a broader dynamic we have found in our work: that when an outsider goes in as a learner, it can call forward all the good that people, communities, or cultures have to teach. When we commit to learning alongside the people we are working to help, we are actively creating space for them to learn and grow as well, and for the work we do with them to be mutually enriching. If what we appreciate, appreciates, then what we are willing to learn comes forward to teach us. That has implications for both programming and storytelling, both of which can be practiced through the lens of an invitation to be taught. Especially in settings where people are used to being ignored or dismissed, bringing this approach opens a generous and generative space that can by itself open new identity formation for those whose stories are being documented.

international efforts were disconnected from and ignoring local experience and expertise, especially from the communities themselves.

The word “infrastructure” is misleading, as the essence of the work is not mechanical but personal and human. It is relationships that enliven and empower each part of that infrastructure—invitational relationships rooted in care and connection.

In this framing, the flow of resources and support, whether it comes from the chiefdom, district, national, or international level, is inherently one-way. It moves from the outside in, from the bottle to the cup. By dichotomizing resources and needs, an outside-in system de facto keeps them from coming together, creating cycles of codependency and depletion. The sectors in this system are all fragmented, and largely acting upon each other. The phrase “top-down” is often used to describe this system, which illuminates the hierarchy embedded in the framework.

The implication of the language of “top-down” is that if you don’t like it or if you want to change it, the alternative is “bottom-up.” But that language also perpetuates the assumption of hierarchy, and it doesn’t challenge the original assumption of separation and fragmentation.

In our work, we have envisioned the international aid system as nested circles, with local communities in the center. In this configuration, roles are distinct, but there is no hierarchy. Rather, the role of each sector, of each ring in the circle, is to hold and invite and support the purpose and potential of those within it, and to share ideas and learning with the circles outside it. This allows for a two-way flow of resources—including from the inside out. Each level has distinct roles, resources, and needs, but all work together as part of a larger whole.

From this perspective, justice is something that happens in informal spaces, spaces that are accessible to all. It happens in relationship and through conversation, together with your community. The authority undergirding this kind of justice comes from the community itself and from trust in a larger communal wisdom, rooted in lived experience, ancestral guidance, and common humanity.

I want to invite you, and everyone interested in leading positive social change, to imagine what you want to make space for. To listen for your own markers of a whole and healthy system, and then choose to do everything you can to inhabit that system now. That’s how to build peace from the inside out. To act as if the system were whole and healthy, and to work—to design programs, allocate budgets, hire and promote, partner and create—from there. How can you do your own work fully from within that system, the system you believe should be, right now, right where you are? How can you ask for, build, and inhabit circles of support for that system, beginning at the most local, immediate, personal level—right where you are? What would it mean to live in a system of wholeness right now? What stirred in your soul as you read this book? Let that guide you toward your answer now.