ICfC Fellows and staff, not out in the field at this time of summer, joined by our Board member, Dinah PoKempner who was vacationing in the area with her family, have just returned from a retreat on Cape Cod at the home of ICfC friends, Dr. Annalisse Goldberg and Dr. Aaron Roland.  The camaraderie and natural beauty which we have too few opportunities to share, supported our serious ongoing discussion of what we do as an organization and how do we assess its efficacy, and how can we do it on a scale that will make a significant difference in terms of the lives transformed. 

The number of people whom we have trained, community workers and municipal officials, teachers and students, police and politicians, scientists and laborers in such different geographic areas, from such diverse backgrounds, who work in such different social settings is growing. Our partners and trainees are learning to recognize the vehemence that identity issues can spark in the most ordinary social conflicts and how this must be dealt with in a world of large migrations bringing people together who never expected to be neighbors, a world of increasingly globalized economies that must fit with tribalized consciousnesses and polities; they are learning to appreciate the complexities of our personal and collective pasts, and what we can retrieve from it, and to be suspicious of those who would tell us, “history teaches that…;” they are learning how to use the pained memories and distorted histories, the hefty accumulation of hatred of those in sustained and deep conflict to open new channels of communication, to encourage acknowledgement and plant the seeds of empathy rather than to seek cathartic violence.

These questions are very much on our minds as we begin another year of activity and seek the human and financial resources with which to accomplish this. At each stage in the development of our work we have evaluated our activities in accordance with the tools available to us. We use well trained observers as well as professional evaluators in our trainings, helping our facilitators and our staff receive rapid feed-back that can be incorporated into the ongoing intervention. We use questionnaires and interviews to assess short and long term benefits. We are using more statistical analyses to help us probe the fuller meaning of our discoveries including instrument developed by our Senior Fellow, Dr. David Steele who is spending this year in Iraq running workshops on behalf of the US Institute of Peace for religious leaders who are on different sides of conflicts. We will strengthen these efforts. Still, the case study method for evaluating human transformations remains so very informative of what we must learn. We maintain ongoing contact with so many of those who worked with and participated in our trainings and consultations. We observe where they go and what they do, how they use methods that we shared with them and what they accomplish. At times the results leave us with a sense of impatience at the slow processes of change. More often, we pride ourselves on the effective leaders who we have helped to be all the more effective and influential. 

Assets that we have learned to use with particular effectiveness are networks. We have been able to accomplish far more by working through existing networks such as other NGOs, governmental agencies, schools, universities, professional associations and the like than we could have in setting up organizations of our own.  But there are networks and there are networks. In that regard I must report a bitter-sweet development in the relocation of our longest standing Senior Fellow and Program Director, Dasha Kusa, who must be closer to her home in Slovakia for personal reasons but who, at the same time, will activate one of the best and most vast network for the application of our work from The Hague. Euro-Clio is a superb organization of 40,000 historians, teachers and professors of history with local chapters in 46 countries and affiliates throughout the world. Dasha, as a member of the senior staff will utilize our methods and materials over a vast region that will touch upon the lives of millions of younger and older citizens, refugees, and migrants. Our anticipation of these new opportunities to utilize and evaluate our approaches almost, but not quite, compensates us for missing the hard work, brilliant insights, inspiration and good humor that this great teacher of unfailing dignity brought to our daily lives and our efforts to help so many people overcome humiliation and hatred. Dasha will not only extend our influence but will continue as Senior Fellow to participate in the ICfC’s governance and growth, will join us when she can for our work abroad and will make frequently scheduled visits to Boston to work with us on projects. Please join me in wishing her the best in her new position and in being with us lots. We are very fortunate to have Monica Sanders as our new Program Director (see interview). You will most certainly be hearing a lot more about and from Monica. 

A pleasurable and beautiful Fall to all of us, 

Hillel