Kroc IPJ Awarded $500,000 Grant to Study Collaborating for Peace in a Post-COVID Era

The Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice (Kroc IPJ) at USD’s Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies was awarded a $500,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. As part of the grant, Kroc IPJ will lead a two-year project focused on understanding the future of convening in a post-pandemic world and collaboration in the peace and security space. 

“Our goal is to build peace around the world. To build peace you have to bring people together, to connect and to build trust. What COVID has done, is really challenge the way we do that. So this program is designed to think deeply about how we gather in the future, how we bring people together, to build peace,” said Andrew Blum, Executive Director of Kroc IPJ. 

The project will establish a Peace Design Hub which will generate, test, and disseminate a core set of learnings regarding when activities focused on building peace should be in-person, hybrid, or virtual and how to maximize impact in each of these modalities. 

“It’s going to be a grant that people pay attention to. Everyone in every field is thinking about what they are going to do as we come out of the pandemic, in regards to coming together and gathering,” said Blum. “If we get this right, we will be able to include people in peacebuilding that have never been able to be included before. We know to build peace, it requires inclusion. So we can transform the peacebuilding field by figuring out how to include all the people that want to be included.”

Kroc IPJ will be working with and learning with four partners on this project: IREX, G7+, Mediators Beyond Border and The Wilson Center.