Sustaining CSOs Through Capacity Building and Pilot Projects
At the heart of GIJTR impact is the building of new capacities in civil society and beyond to advance truth and justice. Over the course of its ten-year history, GIJTR has led approximately 700 workshops and training sessions designed for civil society organizations in a range of subjects, including:
Policy Papers Religious and Faith-Based
Accountability Advocacy
Digital Archiving Documentation Economic, Cultural and Social Rights Forensics Fundraising Memorialization Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Participatory Methodologies
Engagement Reparations Security (Digital and Traditional) Social Media Strategic Planning Transitional Justice Truth-Telling
Atrocity Prevention Awareness-Raising Body Mapping Community Dialogue Facilitation Conflict-Related Sexual Violence Curriculum Reform
While GIJTR pays special attention to community-level transitional justice work, its ability to maintain long-term relationships within a context allows it to support grassroots groups and victims’ organizations as they grow to become important actors at national and international levels. Almost all GIJTR programming leverages pilot projects as a way to meet specific community needs, enhance local learning and support practical skills building. Whether within a country-based project or a GIJTR Academy, grants are often provided to participating individuals or CSOs to concretize and deepen their understanding of project implementation in their local context. These projects may be relatively small in financial terms, with budgets often less than $1,000 USD, but they are supplemented with programmatic support from GIJTR and its local partners. They have been highly effective in creating grassroots activities that truly impact the targeted communities,
including, to reference just a few: • assisting families with access to death certificates of the missing and disappeared in The Gambia; • designing workshops that quell far-right extremism among Serbian youth; and • training journalists in the Philippines to create more empathetic and trauma- informed coverage of human rights issues. Other “doing as learning” projects include community dialogues, psychosocial support interventions and advocacy campaigns, among many others. For the African Youth Transitional Justice Academy, participants were asked to evaluate their projects in terms of local impact. While the projects were all modest in implementation costs, they demonstrated an impressive “ripple effect,” directly reaching more than 1,300 community members across the Academy’s 10 projects.
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Transforming Transitional Justice: A Decade of Change, Growth & Sustained Impact—A Summary Report
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