So why don't we start so that we can also give our panelists enough time to really talk to the huge issues that they already have to talk about. And so we've had a good lead into this discussion in both of the first panels, because many of us, many of the panelists actually raised the challenge of, how do you evaluate? Now, we've said we need a better evidence base. We need to get beyond anecdotal evidence both to persuade donors and supporters to support activities in this field, but also, and I think as we were reminded in the first panel, to learn so that we're not just taking the franchise to different places to be able to figure out what's generalizable and what's best practice. So it's a big challenge, I think, as Brendan mentioned. We're not even very good at it in the peace building field generally. So why are we expecting that we're better at it in sports and peace building? But we do have three panelists here who address this issue. And I'll just say two things around the challenges that I see that I hope at some point will get into a discussion. One is that we've been talking about sports and peace building. And as I've been listening to the presentations so far today, sports has been described as a tool for peace building and a tool for many, many different kinds of goals, ranging from promoting friendships and bridges across conflict lines to a sort of a tool for psychosocial support, for victims of war, to keeping youth out of armed groups. There's a huge range of goals. And that really complicates the evaluation question enormously. Besides the fact that there is a timing question, we have something around immediate impacts that several of the panelists have talked about. But I think, as Brendan also mentioned, it'd be great if in 10 years that we can see some of these impacts. Do we have a 10-year timeline? When do we start evaluating? And when do we know when we're having impacts? And finally, there are two levels that I hope we can address during the panel. One is sort of the impact level. As we achieve some of these outcomes, it is sports. And are these outcomes the appropriate outcomes in this context? In some ways, in my classes, I say it's the so what question. So what if we do well, so what? What difference will it make? And how do we actually measure that and assess that? But we've also been reminded that in some ways, sports, especially at the micro level, is a very kind of value-free activity. And part of it is what you put into it and how it's done. And again, questions around how do we actually measure and assess how it's done well. And so I'll sort of introduce it that way and start. We have three panelists who will be looking at it from a lot of different perspectives. Perspectives of practitioners and program designers struggling with doing it in their programs to panelists who have done a lot of research and have looked at it from a research perspective. So we'll start with Michael Schipler. And Michael, I think we had never met, but he was the director of programs for Search for Common Ground in Nepal before coming back to Washington where he's the senior advisor, senior program advisor for Search for Common Ground. And he's providing support to country offices around the world. I think you have 22, is that right? 22 on program design. And it has a specialty really in sort of youth and children and youth division, which you started at Search for Common Ground. He is currently, he co-leads a 16 country initiative called The Team that uses sports, television drama and community-based activities to build peace. So we'll start, and if there's more that I've missed on introducing you, you can fill it in. Great. Thank you very much, and particularly thank you to USIP for organizing this event. It's been a very interesting day. I was struck earlier as I was listening to the various other presentations by memory of the first time I ever sort of connected that notion of sports and peace-building when I was playing Little League baseball. And my team was playing in 1989. The Berlin Wall had fallen. And my coach had all of us do a little fundraiser and each donate baseball bat, a glove, a batting helmet to a team in East Germany. And it just was a memory that came back very strongly about the sort of notion of commonality, this ball that I held that was gonna be played with by a kid from what had been this sort of the other and the actual physical contact that that created. So this has been a very interesting thing to see now a whole professional universe actually around this. The challenge of talking about evaluation of our work to me actually starts long before figuring out our indicators of change. It starts with the question of what we think causes change. So when I was tasked with this and when Soma's asked me to be part of this, I started asking the question of, well, why sports? Why sports and peace-building? What is it that sports give? So for those who are conflict resolution practitioners and talking about what our theory or theories of change are that guide our initiative, what is it that we think causes change? Why are we doing it? So I've picked a particular element which is metaphor. Sports often provide metaphors for society to understand themselves, right? Even though it might be the same game, basketball or football or soccer or whatever, that's played across different cultures, the metaphors that are imbued in them are different and they're rooted deeply, profoundly in the narratives of a society that exist. And sports, especially professional sports, but not always, provides society with iconic moments that either cause real shifts in consciousness or reflect shifts in consciousness that are emerging in the broader society. So I wanted to share a few. Who knows who that is? That's Jackie Robinson. That moment was a moment my father told me about. The moment Jackie Robinson stole home plate. He was one of the very few who stole, he stole it straight on that play, right? And it was a moment that not only, he of course embodied the breaking of the color barrier in Major League Baseball seven years before Brown versus the Board of Education. But the moment of stealing base was the moment that validated that color barrier being broken. Zenedine Zidane lifts the World Cup trophy in France. I happened to be there. I was a student traveling through. And when I was there during the tournament before the French won. And I remember sitting and I had this series of three conversations with various French citizens complaining about France's loss for the French. And two weeks later, an Algerian Frenchman raises the World Cup trophy and becomes the most famous Frenchman since Napoleon. And he was actually voted once in a contest in France as the most popular Frenchman ever. That team represented in a profound diversity of France. And redefined in an instant what that national identity was. Now, they're obviously still struggling so it's not sort of a transformative event in its totality. But there it was. You can see that every newspaper had Zidane or various other players on the cover. Drew Brees wins the Super Bowl last year. Now what I love about this moment was that Drew Brees gets on television weeping away holding his little boy, kissing him on the cheek. Redefining in an instant what it means to be a man for American society. Nelson Mandela celebrates the Rugby World Cup victory. Rugby Woods was a traditionally white African sport in South Africa. This was a precursor to the World Cup. Somebody asked the question earlier what the legacy of the World Cup in South Africa is. It's much more about this realm of the metaphor I think than almost anything else. Abidjan was burning from ethnic and religious divisions in 2006 and early 2006. The African Cup of Nations begins and what has been referred to as an Olympic truce emerged. The streets of Abidjan quieted down and the youth who were involved said, well, how can we fight on a day when our team is playing? Today we're all a warrior. Okay, so this is an initiative that I'm involved in which is about trying to take advantage of the realm of metaphor that sports provides us. There are, of course, many, many other instances, other spaces where this happens. It happens again and again. Brandi Chastain wins the World Cup of Soccer for Women in 1995, in 1999, here in the United States. And Indian and Pakistani form a doubles team and for the first time in either country they have players who win a major open tournament in the US Open, right? And they are there together on television. These moments are transformative for society. They're either out ahead of where things are as the case of Jackie Robinson who was out ahead of and Major League Baseball was out ahead of the rest of society, right? Or they're reflecting those things. That's the realm that we're operating in. Whether we're operating at the micro level or the macro level. So I think that the use of sport is really as a peace building tool is an exercise in metaphor. It provides, our job as peace builders who use sport as a tool, which I really think of it that way, have chosen that tool because we're trying to provide society with metaphors that they can use to process the conflict dynamics that are at play in their own society to carry particular messages and transformative messages that can cause massive change at a cultural level, a social and cultural level. I think that I've pulled out three objectives that often cut across. They're not, as I listened here today, I realized that these are probably the objectives of how we use sports as a peace building tool in search for common ground rather than how they're used by a lot of other groups because I think one of the things I realized is that the tool manifests very differently and very diversely with all the different tools that people have. UNICEF is looking at it from a children's well-being in a holistic way while others might be looking at it from a relationship level. But I pulled out three objectives, three parts of the design. The first is that it provides form for people to convene across dividing lines towards shared goals. The second is that it transforms people's identities so that they can relate to each other and themselves in multiple ways. Brandon talked about relating to each other as human beings, but I think that the part of identity that this is very profound in is that it enables people to conceive of themselves as multifaceted people and it reduces the ability for people to be easily manipulated around ethnic, political, other lines. And a third is to create metaphors of cooperation and shared identities that go into the cultural realm of society and that's what this initiative is really primarily focused on. I'll tell you two, three very quick anecdotes. How am I doing with the time here? All right, let me tell you three very quick anecdotes and then show you a very quick video and then talk a little bit about how we measure the changes here. The first is an anecdote about Nepal. It's 2006 May, there's a ceasefire and the war is looking like it might come to an end between the Maoists and the government military. Both armies have at least put their weapons to the side for the moment and they're trying to figure out really what to do as there's sort of a stalemate and the negotiation peace process and negotiation is emerging and the Maoists were beginning to come out of the forest, as they would say. And there was a youth group in a province called, in a district called Kailali and this youth group was made up of young people from across all sorts of dividing lines. They were trying to figure out what can we do to support this big peace process that's happening in the capital or in this little village. So they figured out that they could organize volleyball tournament. They brought together a number of teams, a bunch of youth clubs from the area, the political parties that were all at odds with each other, the army and the People's Liberation Army which was the Maoist army, each had a team represented and they played. And the young leader who would convene this stood up and he said in front of the whole community, on this ground where we fought our war, we are now fighting for peace. So it was not just a convening space, he turned it into a symbolic metaphorical space where people could normalize relationships with each other and they played and they just played against each other. The PLA guys came with these blue shirts and they had this PLA on the back with numbers, different uniform from the ones they wore on a daily basis. Second story, anecdote is from Burundi where the leadership of two militias met by happenstance, uh-oh, I'm not doing that well in time. They met by happenstance at search for common ground and decided they were gonna organize football tournaments to reduce the manipulation of youth to violence. And what they decided to do was to actually organize these tournaments with the teams that were mixed so that Hutus would come to the defense of Tutsis and Tutsi would come to the defense of Hutus on the football pitch. The third thing I wanted to share with you, and then I'll say a very quick word, is on the team, just to give you a sense of what it is that we're doing. This is one minute long. Let's get it up! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! I can't even say I'll be... Speed! Speed, Dabas! Work on your speed! Remember that this is a training camp. You've got only one purpose, and that is to win. I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to give up. Uman, I'm going to win. Sabir!      Now, will you play together or would you rather stick to your own height and play separately? Let's go there and... Wee! Go on! If we all focus in different tribes, what makes us carry this? We have 16 under contract now, around the world, which is locally written that takes that metaphor of the central metaphor of the cooperation is what allows you to score goals, but adapts it and roots it in local narratives and local realities. So it's written entirely by production companies on the ground. We don't write the shows ourselves. We work with professional television producers to make the show, but it's a franchise, essentially. Okay, so my last thing I want to say is a measuring change. We have three R's, the sort of architue of organizing it, to understand what it is that we're trying to achieve. The first R is reach, which has to do with who is actually receiving the messages from our Sports and Peace Building Initiative. And there are two elements that the first is how many people are seeing the show, for instance, in this case? How many people are getting that metaphor to reach their ears and their eyes, right? The second element of reach is about who. We call it the strategic who to take CDA's language, which is about who are those people who are most crucial to transforming conflict dynamics on the ground in conflicts and who need to see the show. So if we focus in the program, for instance, on land reform, are we making sure that land owners and landless people are both seeing the show and maybe in a way that actually enable them to work to actually see it together? But that's still at that output level, basically. That's just the first layer. The second is resonance. This is the whole thing about transference. Are people who are viewers or participants in the program able to take the messaging, the skills that they're learning, whatever it is that they're getting from that Peace Building Initiative, and transfer it into their real lives? Can they take that storyline and say, hmm, these guys built or these women built a relationship. We have a number of shows that are about women's teams. And these women have built a relationship across dividing lines. Can we actually do that in other realms of our life? And the third is about response, which is about what do people do? What actions do people take on their own with their own resources to achieve changes in their society in ways that build relationships across those dividing lines? So I'll leave it there, and we can discuss further during the question and answer. Thank you. Thanks, Michael. You raise a couple of very good issues adding to the sort of sports goals and the complications of evaluation that sometimes, as we've said, it's a public activity. And so evaluating, you're evaluating much beyond the participants in your programs. And how do you do that? So that's adding another layer of complication, but also providing a good framework for starting to think about that. And so I will turn to Peter, who is currently the director of the Center for Sport Policy Studies and a professor in the Faculty of Physical Education at Health at the University of Toronto. He's a prolific author, as I can see. Has written a number of, his research interests are, include, sport politics and policy issues. He's written a number of books, some of which my 13-year-old daughter has read because she's been interested in the subject. And is also the former editor of the Sociology of Sport Journal and the International Review for the Sociology of Sport. And he has developed, is co-developing, as one of the first university courses on international development through sport. So has pulled this together for an academic audience in a systematic way. And so we'll be talking, I think, about evaluation methodology. Thank you. It seems that pieces in the air these days, I sent a doctoral student to Belgium last week for a sport and peace conference. And Dalai Lama was in Toronto at the weekend and gave a speech in a huge football stadium called Human Approaches to World Peace. And his message was, peace will not drop from the sky. So this is about peace building and the place of sport in peace building. And we seem to continually find ourselves at log heads in this area between the young idealists who are running programs and who have all kinds of heartwarming stories and the skeptical, hard-nosed academics among which I count myself who look long and hard at this stuff and say, is it too good to be true? And it probably is. So where I come from in this, I don't want anything that I say today to be taken, to take away from the fact that I think this new wave of idealistic young people and altruism around sport and development is a problem. I think we've had a whole generation of selfish and egotistical sports people. And we need a revival of politicized sports people who are prepared to engage in issues and try to change the world. And I see my work or part of my work at the University of Toronto is to figure out how to do this properly. So the critique is intended to be constructive critique. I think what we find here is that people who are good at sports, who are really enthusiastic about sports assume that they are everything that they are because of their participation in sports and they want to pass that on to everybody. And they continually forget that most people's experience of sports is that they got cut from the team, they hated gym, you know. I mean, that most people's experiences are not that. So, you know, their idealism is really important, but they do tend to become sport evangelists. And though that evangelism tends not to see anything negative and tends just to promote the positive. Intuitively, sport is not an ideal vehicle for peace building because of the exclusivity that people have experienced. You know, that people have been cut from sports, people have been told they're not good enough, people have not developed skills, they've been marginalised in their physical education classes. In all kinds of ways, people, you know, in that sense it's not ideal. And in another sense, it's built on combative language. You know, we use war talk all the time in sport and so pitting teams against each other, pitting athletes against each other, again becomes problematic when we're talking about sports and probably what's happened is that people tend to essentialise sport, they tend to talk about sport in general rather than talking about all of the different things that sports can do. So sport has been used to sustain and support communism, socialism, capitalism and fascism. Sport has been used to prepare combat forces and to build peace. So sport in itself, as has been mentioned, is not normalised in any particular direction. It's the particular construction that we make of sport that has possibilities for peace building here. The people who have done sport for peace research and who have run sport for peace projects seem to be completely disconnected from a huge theoretical body of work on peace building and research in other areas on peace building. So for example, Johan Galtung is probably the dean of peace building theorists. He's actually written two articles on sport that I've never seen cited by peace building agencies or even scholars. Lederach's work on building webs and networks and social spaces for peace building is ideal for sport and a number of sport for peace projects, intuitively have done that without recognising that there's a body of theory behind it. And Sheik's work on ritual approaches to identity transformation and peace building is ideal because sport is full of rituals and the possibilities are there for rituals. But again, this has been disconnected from people in the sport and peace building area. One scholar in the field who has actually run two different sport for peace projects, one in Northern Ireland and one in Israel is John Sugden. And he said that if projects are locally grounded, carefully thought out and professionally managed, they can make a modest contribution to wider efforts to promote conflict resolution and peaceful coexistence. So his experience is to make very modest claims about sport that needs particular conditions, but sport itself isn't going to change the world. And he's an idealist in many ways, but also a realist scholar in this sense. So what we've had is a black box model of sport, what I call ad sport and stir. You put sport in at one end and good things come out at the other end and we really don't know how that happens. And what we need is very clear sense of what's going on. We need to understand, we need a logic model. Why will sport make a difference? How will it make a difference? What's our starting point? What do we expect to be our ending point? And can we possibly measure that as an ending point? So I think we do need that kind of a logic model. Um, I think we've probably got a problem where sport has been, NGOs have seen volunteer efforts in this area as a finishing school for our western volunteers and almost all of them come back and say, I got much more out of it than I gave. And I think we need to set that balance a lot more straight. So that we're not using international projects as a finishing school for our students. So what do we know? From the larger peace building literature and the sport literature, we know that gender inclusive programming is important, but it needs to be handled carefully. Sport is dynamite in this area. You know, I talked about sport being exclusive and having combative language, but it really does need to be handled carefully. So I know of some projects that have been gender inclusive where the project leaves town and the girls get beaten up for stepping out of traditional places in their cultures. And I think that's why we need really careful management, understanding cultural sensitivity before we go in and impose Western ways on international projects. So gender inclusion, the importance of professional trained and committed volunteers. Volunteers tend to be there for a short term. They tend to be culturally unsophisticated and they really do need to be trained. They tend to be impatient. They expect to see results in four weeks or six weeks. One example, we interviewed a, this might be stepping on some toes in this room, we interviewed a former volunteer from a Northern Ireland basketball project. And she said that the kids were playing together, but she couldn't understand and she was very frustrated with the fact that all the Catholic teachers and parents stood on one side of the gym and all the Protestant teachers and parents stood on the other side of the gym. And I'm thinking, the real issue here is that the kids were playing together and they were being supported in that by people from separate communities and we shouldn't care that they weren't getting together. They wanted the next generation to get together and they were supporting that. So it needs to be, volunteers need to be really carefully trained in these ways, I think. We need to figure out ways of constructing sport for peace and there are good coaching manuals, good volunteer training manuals that are out there where people have slowly begun to figure out if you do sport this way, it's gonna be a big problem. If you do sport this way, we can actually achieve something and it's gonna vary from place to place. We need to employ a community-based approach. We need programs that are accessible in every possible way. We need to care for participants and Jake Hopefully and I have suggested that sport can have a really powerful impact as well as other things can have a really powerful impact. If the participants feel physically safe, personally valued, socially connected, morally and economically supported, personally and politically empowered and hopeful about the future and if you can create those circumstances in a program, you will see really good things happen. So that sport can only be part of a whole series of endeavors and this makes it really problematic for evaluation. So if you've got a whole series of peace-building initiatives that are going on in a community or in a country, how do you disentangle sport from education from the theater program, from the music exchange, from all of the other things that are going on for peace-building and can you measure that? And nobody's suggesting that we set up a social experiment where one group only gets sport and one group only gets education. I don't think we should do that but then we shouldn't be claiming so much for sport individually when it's usually working in combination with other things. The sports field is a classroom, there are all kinds of teachable moments that come out from sport and we have to be trained enough to be able to use those teachable moments and if we're using external agencies, we really have to be concerned about the short-term parachute in, parachute out volunteers that are very often the heart of these projects and certainly the celebrity athletes who may be quite meaningless celebrities in another country but they're there for as part of the fundraising in the home country. So this is a difficult area, there are some quite good projects out there. Open Fund for All Schools is an interesting one in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It's a Danish run NGO and they really connect with local people, teachers and parents are very much part of the project organizing and the kids join the summer holidays play on mixed teams. It seems to be working okay and it's interesting because it's probable that one of the major triggers for the Yugoslav civil war was Serbian soccer hooligans at a game. So to have Open Fund football schools attempting to rebuild peace, certainly the indications are that that may be working. So just the last word of caution on transference. We see happy faces, we hear all kinds of short-term endorsements but what is the long-term outcome of these projects and the key here is the kids have to go home at the end of the day, they have to go back into their communities, they have to go back into prejudice communities, problematic communities, communities that haven't reconciled anything and so can a short-term sport project really make a difference? Well, possibly if we're patient and I think we're impatient in the West about achieving results. Thank you. More food for thought and challenge. And so let me introduce Sarah Hinder, last but certainly not least. Sarah is going to be, I think starting in January, begin a post-doctoral fellowship at Georgetown in the conflict resolution program. She earned her PhD from the University of Tennessee in Sport and Exercise Science with a concentration in sports psychology and has actually been a practitioner and has done a lot of this work in the past so speaks from both a research and a practitioner perspective.  Let me fix this quickly. And Peter, you left me with quite a challenge to finish this because I am the young, excited, ignorant, crazy, right? The one that he talked about at first like, oh, those young spryes, they're just really jumping into it wanting to make a difference and that is me. Who has somehow managed to retain that but also step my foot into Peter's world, academia. And the way that they came about, actually I feel like we're no longer speaking with you all. I feel like Peter and I are now having a conversation. So because there were lots of things that I would love to respond to but hopefully we can all gain something from it. This idea in my PhD in concentration in sports sociology but this idea that sport in and of itself isn't what fixes things, right? It's what we choose to do with sport and I think that's anything in life. And so my experience is I was one of those children who my parents felt like it was really important to put me in sports because we learned so many great lessons, right? We take that for granted that just because you stick a kid in sports, somehow they're gonna come out as great leaders, great communicators, they're gonna cooperate with people, they're gonna trust all of those things and I tell my students in my sports sociology class, if you stick Jay Leno in a garage, is he going to turn into a car? No, he's not. So the assumption that if we drop our kids off at soccer practice and put them in a soccer league or a basketball league, that somehow they're gonna turn out to be the next president of the United States or the next leader or CEO of a company just because we've planted them in this space isn't true. And this really came to life for me, played sports all through a young age, through high school, and then I went to university on a basketball scholarship. And it was at that point in my life that I was confronted with this idea that sport is really not all that great. In fact, it sucked, right? So as a student athlete, I am now, I became property of a university that had goals that were much beyond what my own goals in sport were, right? So I was socially, physically, educationally exploited as a student athlete.  When I graduated and walked across the stage with a sport management degree, the question was, I now have a degree in sport in which I want nothing to do with the rest of my life. I was so impacted by my experiences that I literally was at this breaking point of, do I ever want to be involved in sport again? Or do I wanna walk away from it forever? But I felt connected because now I have this degree, I have to do something with it. And so I can appreciate your critiques of sport. And I think it was at that moment when I really had to decide, am I walking away from it or will I continue to embrace sport? And my decision was to embrace sport, but I was bound and determined to use sport to do something positive in people's lives. And so it was shortly after that that I created an organization called Sport for Peace. And through those experiences, we worked quite a bit in China doing friendship tours, creating dialogue, all these wonderful things that we've all talked about, dialogue, getting to know each other, building relationships, and sport became the common denominator for us in which to do that and to carry that out. After about 14 projects in China, we began receiving requests from the Middle East, specifically Iran. And Iran was very interested in building up their women's sports programs. And I'll never forget, I was working on a master's degree in sports psychology at the time. I was coaching a softball at a really small university in Kentucky, and I received a phone call and on the other end was broken English with a Persian accent. And it said, are you Sarah Hillier? And I said, yes. Can you please come to the Islamic Republic of Iran? We want to learn softball. So I sat up in my chair and I'm like, what is happening? Like, am I okay? Excuse me, can you repeat that? Yes, we are from the Islamic Federation of Women's Sports. We want you to come to Iran, please, accept our invitation, and teach the women softball. Okay, so, you know, this was really confusing for me. First of all, I knew that softball was on the chopping block as an Olympic sport, so why pursue softball? Secondly, why softball? And thirdly, why softball? Right? Like in Iran, why softball? So I accepted the invitation and traveled to Iran in 1999 for the first time. We have traveled on numerous occasions. We've done nine projects for developing sport, specifically softball, I don't know. In Iran, but really that became the tool as I'll continue to use the language that we've been using. But the tool for creating dialogue between American women and Iranian women, which is almost unheard of, right? It's not like Iranian and American women are gonna get together at the peace talks or in any other diplomatic venue. There's few exchanges between Americans and Iranians, especially on Iranian soil, to begin with.  But as far as women engaging women, sport became a tremendous tool. And it was during that time that we really began to explore this idea of sport and peace building from that perspective. So here's the problem. The organization that I founded that I told you about, Sport for Peace. Yeah, there's three of us who are involved in that organization. That's me, myself, and I, right? So I'm the only one. I'm not even full-time. I've done any number of other things because funding organizations is very difficult. I had other pursuits. So this has always sort of been like my side job that's really a full-time job, but I've never been financed or compensated through that. So our organization uses volunteers solely. And so I can echo your earlier panelists and Peter, the importance of training great volunteers because you don't wanna just plant them into something. So eventually, as we look at donors and continuing to support our work in Iran, money becomes a necessity, unfortunately, for all of us. And of course, what do donors want? They want statistics, right? They want measurement. They want evaluation. So me, myself, and I had a conversation as a staff and we decided that we can't afford to bring in an expert. First of all, I couldn't get a visa for an expert researcher to come with me to Iran because visas are very hard to come by. So as the Iranians would invite us, I couldn't get extra visas for researchers or media or any other person. So I was confronted with, okay, if measurement and evaluation is important at this stage of our organization and our outreach to the Middle East, something has to be done. So I did what any athlete would do. I just did it. If research is important, I have to go back and get my PhD. So I did it. So that way I could remain a practitioner. I could bring with me the expertise of research. Now that also creates several complications, right? I'm biased. It's my program. I think it works, right? Oh yeah, it's great. Look at our evaluations, right? Yeah, we're gonna change the world. Me, myself, and I, we got this. So these challenges exist. And even as far as my research in Iran and doing that for my dissertation, there were also a lot of issues. The issue of other and Westerner and the colonialization and all of those things that we think about in certain political and cultural contexts as researchers coming in to research things within certain contexts also poses a lot of other problems. And so my research, as far as the dissertation then, moved to an auto ethnography because then it wasn't me writing about other, it was me writing about how those experiences and seeing the relationships through sport and the peaceful and the pursuit of dialogue and those types of things, how those have impacted me. Now that's very limiting for a donor to say, oh that's great Sarah, that that changed you, but why should I support this? And so definitely as we continue to move forward in measurement evaluation, there are tremendous challenges that lie in front of us. And I'm so excited and want to thank the US Institute of Peace. I wanna thank Georgetown University. I wanna thank the Generations for Peace, Sport and Peace-Building Postdoctoral Fellowship because I think we're reaching a moment, right? We've been doing this for a number of years. Peace players, you've been doing this for 10 years. I've been doing this for 15 years. We've got our hands in it for 10 or 15 years, but it's like we're the spunky people going out and doing the thing and now we're realizing, oh my gosh, look at where we are. Now we have to provide evidence-based proof that this works and how are we gonna do that? So I'm very appreciative for this opportunity and in my role at Georgetown, my goal will be to bring all of the grassroots organizations, all of the experts, academics, even the critical ones, to the table to explore this idea of in when it comes to designing our programs, what are excellent practices, not best practices, but what are great practices as we design our programs and draw upon one another's expertise in implementing those programs, how do we do that? What are the best practices in implementing those programs? And then obviously this panel is about measurement and evaluation. So not only getting the brains together of those people who've been on the field carrying this out and finding out what's working for you in measurement and evaluation, but also bringing in other conversations of people in development and other areas who have sort of gone ahead of us in the idea of measurement and evaluation. And so really at the end of the day, really at the end of the year, literally, of this postdoctoral fellowship, the idea is to create a toolkit, a resource, something that can be shared because this is what dawned on me. I think this is fascinating. We are about peace, right? We use sport to promote, to encourage, to bring about peace. But the irony in the paradox is as peace organizations, we don't wanna share, right? Because we are quote unquote, we say this all the time, fighting for resources, right? But we're about peace. I will so take you down if you're gonna get my money, right? No, because our program, so it's this idea of how are we going to come together as practitioners, as experts in this field, and see beyond our own needs and to see the field as a larger whole. And how can we team up with each other, right? Because we ask our kids who come from situations that are much more difficult than the situations we come from in funding, right? I mean, we're talking about child soldiers. We're talking about post-conflict, conflict. And we're asking those kids to come together on a field and cooperate, communicate, trust, share, right? We're asking them to do those things. But how willing are we as practitioners and academics and policymakers to cooperate, communicate, share and be a part of a team? And so I think that that'll be the challenge for me over the next year, is to try to rally the troops, get the team together, the team and figure out how we can do this to make what everybody is doing in their own cultural context, political context, gender context and make that relevant to the whole field. And again, I think that we are at that point where we really can make a difference if we're very intentional about what we're doing and if we actually take what we're talking about to kids and apply it ourselves. So thank you very much. Thank you. Very inspiring. And you sort of put the mountain of challenges in front of us in the field of evaluation. Including thinking about, and both Peter and you sort of brought up this issue. I mean, all of you brought up this issue of sports being a part of a larger peace building whole and how do we then think about it, both in terms of attribution and evaluation but think about it in terms of how we implement our programs and design them in order to really have those synergies because we are in some sense working towards the same goals. And so eventually I'd like you to really talk about that. How can we actually think about that and think about evaluation in a way that doesn't fragment the sport but that allows the kinds of synergies and cooperation that you were just talking about. I'm gonna actually start and then with one question just the moderators prerogative and then invite everybody to whatever questions you have because both of you and as a former dialogue practitioner we sort of suffered from the same add dialogue and stir phenomenon. I think we still do. And so I wonder, and since both of you Michael and Peter mentioned it and you sort of implied it we come with a lot of enthusiasm. Is the issue really that we haven't fully figured out or we haven't been clear about our goals and how we're going to get there and really articulate that? Is that, would that sort of solve the evaluation problem in some ways or at least be a good start? It would if the goals were really clear if we could make the goals really clear if your goal is to reduce the incidents of HIV AIDS you know that's very clearly measurable. Community relations are much more difficult to measure and I think we need to probably think in terms of short steps rather than long steps and smaller goals rather than larger goals and see if we can do them but I think what I was trying to say before is that we really do know a lot of stuff but the projects start without anybody pulling together this stuff, reading this stuff, attempting to understand what we already know and they continue to make the same mistakes I think because they don't learn from each other. And across the different fields. Can you hear me off this? Okay, I'll take a stab at this. I think that our problems with evaluation and peace building, sports and peace building is just one of the thousand and one areas of peace building programming that we don't really know how to evaluate very effectively yet in. I don't think that the solution is just in design and figuring out and articulating very clear objectives. I think that part of the problem is is that conflict dynamics are extraordinarily complex with literally millions of factors that influence what happens in terms of people's relationships and their behaviors vis-a-vis one another and vis-a-vis conflict. And with $500,000 or a million dollars, we become, I'm working on a project that we have to think around a million dollars now in Pakistan, we become, in Pakistan, 180 million person society. We become one voice in the very vast choir of voices that are having an influence on people and on young people, for instance, in urban areas which is where we're targeting. And how can we possibly begin to, even if we have the most clear goal, youth decide that they will not pick up weapons anymore to resolve conflicts? That's pretty clear. That's a nice end impact. Okay, if a young person or a group of young person or the cohort of youth decide not to do it, how can we possibly draw the linkage back to ourselves? It would be absurd. Yesterday I was at a presentation about police reform and there was a gentleman there who was responsible for the training of the Afghan military and police for NATO forces. His budget is $11 billion, $11 billion. The scale at which he's working is massive. And you know what he said? He said they're having a hard time figuring out how to actually track the outcomes of their work. Okay, so we're not alone in that. I wanted to just comment on a couple of assumptions that I heard particularly in your presentation, Dr. Donnelly, that I just wanted to challenge. One is that none of us who are working in this area learn from each other or study. And I think that all professional worlds have the problem of reinventing the wheeler. As somebody said in that workshop I was in yesterday, reinventing the flat tire. And sure, that's there. But it's not blank and it's not across, almost everybody who works at a high professional level was red and sat with and you know, John Paul Lederack and looked at that particular matrix, the framework that you described around the social relationships and how those things work. CDA has spent a huge amount of effort pushing all of us to reflect. So I just wanted to tell you that I think that we have a long ways to go to learn from ourselves. But I think more important than learning from ourselves in our own little world we need to learn from a much broader cross section of people and not to ghettoize the peace building world. We should be learning from dramatists. We should be learning from insurgents and counterinsurgency. We should be learning from all sorts of different kinds of work that's being done to transform societies. The other thing I wanted to challenge is the assumption of sports being an external thing. Because I lived in Argentina briefly when I was 16. And you know, the guys we used to play soccer every all the time. And when there was no ball, people took what we could, wrapped up some newspaper and tape and played soccer. It was self-organized, something that we've lost that skill in America to a certain extent in a lot of places. It was self-organized, highly regulated, with a lot of values profound and imbued in it. It's not something that in most of the places where we're doing the work, we're looking at where the current existing, the currents of the use of sport and how can we tap that, reinforce and elevate it so that it can become a force for building people. So why don't we take a couple of questions and answer and then keep going that way? Hello again, I'm Dodge Fielding and I manage a program called Score for Peace for the Institute for Multitrack Diplomacy. And I have a comment followed by the question. We've heard a lot of wonderful things today in all three panels. And we've heard a lot about output and outcomes. But I see that there is a blind spot when it comes to the funnel at the front end in terms of metrics and in terms of what goes into the, who goes into the programs and how do you measure the starting point? Who gets into the programs? First of all, somebody else asked that question at the last panel about the exclusion of who gets to participate and who does not. That seems to me a huge challenge and there are ways of handling it, but the bottom line is it's very difficult to generate metrics and measure differences and impact and transformation if you don't have the data at the front end. So my question to the panel is in your experience, what has been done on the ground so far in that? What's the shape of the front funnel? My name's Evan Schmidt. I work for AED or the Academy for Education Low Development. I actually help design sports programs. I have worked with the ECA and the Sports United program along with the lovely Ms. Kelly Davis and the audience who does a really fantastic job over there that whole office does. I've also worked directly with embassies. One of our biggest water that really is, it's M&E. It's one of the most difficult things that we have to do. One of the problems is there's usually very little money for it in the budget. So that's always a constant challenge.  What are some of the things out there that you think have potential, hopefully inexpensive tools that are out there that have potential? What would that toolbox look like? And qualitative and also particularly quantitative, which is the big, big thing, because as you mentioned yourself, the number one thing that funders and that people wanna know is hard core numbers. If you're going into El Salvador doing a gang prevention program, are there less gang members now after that program? They want actual matrix that show that. So that would be my question to the panel or really anyone in the room who also has this challenge and who knows of good resources. Sure. As far as the toolkit, we're hoping that that will emerge as people input their ideas and what is working in certain cultural contexts. I would say something that is really in the conversation now is, and I think you ask about this also, this baseline, how do we measure what's happening before and versus outcome post? And that is the value of involving locals to do the pre-testing, right? So and the value of that is you can train those locals to come in and take part in a one week, two week, one year program. But if they're also involved on the front end as far as the measurement, the baseline, they become even more invested, right? And they're also the ones that are developing those relationships with their local community by getting that front end and then it removes the outsider coming in asking us these questions. So that takes care of a lot of cultural kind of considerations. The other thing about that is, is that it is giving the locals an additional set of skills that they can then transfer into other things, other areas of their life, skills as far as collecting data and those types of things. So as they move on into leadership or as a physical education teacher or whatever, it's helping them develop their skills. And so I think that was what came to my mind to answer both of you briefly. And what was it? What else did you want to know as far as? Well, are there any tools out there that currently exist? Anything that you found either has promise that can kind of be built upon, things that you've used? Yeah. There's actually an organization that was really helpful to learn about. It's Edgework Consulting. Are you familiar with them? Somewhat. Okay. So some of the ideas that they use as far as quantitative, they say when you go into your programming, you need to be thinking in terms of getting this information early and often and to use whatever you can, right? So even if your organization is small and if all you can do is start tracking numbers, right? So these are the participants that come. Here's their gender, basic demographic information. Start tracking that, just basics because that will generate information. Then they talked about more creative uses. So things that the kids can do. One example was to use, instead of having the kids fill out a survey, incorporate those surveys into the physical activity. So maybe you have relay races and then you have a yes, no box, the kid gets a ball, you do a relay race, you ask the kids a question about the program, right? Do you feel like you've gotten to know the other, whoever that other is better as a result of this? Ready, go. So the teams go, they put their ball in a box or a bucket and then you add those up. So it engages the kids in answering those questions. It incorporates physical activity and then you have some quantitative data that's very inexpensive. How hard is it to count the balls and tally it up? And then depending upon how large your program is then obviously that would evolve. Some of the other methods are also very creative and I think would be interesting and correlate a lot with what you're doing and that is the idea of kids creating their own newspapers or their own news kind of reports. So they're interviewing one another, they're counterparts that are also taking part in the sport crump programings and then you hang these up on the wall, right? So that's qualitative, but then what happens as we know as researchers, you have qualitative data so you need to thematize that.  Well now that becomes quantitative data that's very valuable, but the kids input it and it's not the formal, you set up the video camera in front of the kid's face and asking questions or her questions. So Edgework has some great tools and they are very interested in this conversation of specifically they deal a lot with sport for development but also sport for peace. So that may be a great resource just for all of us to tap into. Here Michael, the one either in the first or second question. I just wanted to respond to the first one. I think that the design phase, there's a couple of really key things. One is what are you trying to achieve? So that's in fact to Diana's question at the beginning. And I think that one of the keys to any kind of peace building initiative whether it's a peace building initiative, I mean sports or other form, is to making a decision about what strategic intervention we're trying to achieve. What is that specific change? Recognizing we're not gonna change the whole world with a game or with a television show or with whatever it is that you're doing. And recognizing you can carry one to specific changes. The challenge that I find is that the creation of indicators, we like the word metrics these days, the challenge of creating indicators that are really indicative. We have this smart, right? Specific, measurable, achievable, blah, blah, blah. But what it misses, the indicative, right? The challenge of creating indicative indicators that really are rooted in the shifts that are going on and people's own perceptions of things, it takes a lot of experience on the ground to do it. And the example that I like to give is, I lived in Phnom Penh for a little bit and there was a violent incident with a small sort of rag tag arm group attacked Phnom Penh, a bunch of people got killed and the city went under curfew and people were nervous and I was young and just starting, I was nervous and this friend of mine said, oh, no, no, no. Things are fine. I said, well, how do you know? He said, the gold cellars opened in the next morning. So the gold cellars open is an indication of security. Now, the problem with that is that that's hard then to sell to an indicator like that that's profoundly rooted, it's hard to sell, right? To your donor. It's hard to tell that story of your initiative around security that resulted in X number of days that the gold cellars were actually open versus closed and a change in that. So I think that there's this balance that we have to develop in our work of sort of engaging and trying and doing some things and seeing what happens and allowing some openness to the unexpected and trust in listening to people to find out what is it that's changing and how does it that they know that those things are changing and then over time with any given initiative you can start to generate indicators. You can start to then turn them from qualitative ones into quantitative ones. So you start hearing, hey, people watch this show or people participate in this sports project and then they started creating their own sports projects in their communities and you start hearing that and we never thought they would do their own sports project. So maybe that turns into an indicator. So it's cyclical, you know? And if you're good, then you can turn that cycle into a scalable thing, right? And start to look at it broader and broader and use the information you're getting to garner more resources to do it the next level. The complexity of this is enormous and I think we've had some really good ideas about evaluation here, but I keep being reminded of a quote from a friend of mine, Gary Armstrong, who did some piece building reintegration work in Liberia. And he said, you know, that you can have all of these things, you know, those indicators and building local capacity and those kinds of things. But he said, if you leave the structural situation in the country the same as you found it in terms of disadvantage and disaffection and that situation hasn't improved, then it's gonna revert quite quickly without making those structural changes. And that's where I think that the sport and piece projects need to work quite closely with governments and other projects to change the structural circumstances in the countries. My name is David Santafonte. My question is if you've come across research or use research based on projects that focus on inner cities that often experience the same kind of conflict that you would experience abroad. So if we've taken a look inwardly, and that's more at a micro level and also at the macro level where large communities come together based on sports teams, you mentioned the New Orleans Saints and that was big after Katrina. Virginia Tech is another example and as is Marshall. And I was wondering if you looked at those kinds of comparisons. As far as inner city work, that is definitely a place that we're beginning to look and I don't know why it took us so long to look there but they are also struggling with the same questions. How do we measure and evaluate what's taking place in our inner city sports programs as far as reducing gang violence and all of that. So they have somewhat a handle on program specific quantitative type surveys but in all of the conferences that I'm attending and the conversations that are taking place, they are asking us for our expertise and think somehow we have it together and we're saying, wait a minute, you all are doing this, we want your expertise. And so it's great that those conversations have started while none of us really have a great, great handle and have perfected this yet. So. Yeah, certainly in North America, my students are beginning to be interested in two particular things. One is work on native reservations and the other is inner city work and there really isn't very much. I mean, there are good critiques of midnight basketball and that kind of program, you know, as being kind of social controlling, social order type programs. But I haven't seen any good research yet. Harvard, Harvard, and the next research that I did is that in Boston, in Australia, how is Boston, because it doesn't mean that it's in fact to be with access and to be in the heritage of the program and so on. Are you a student? Okay. In terms of the... Just throwing it out there. No. I just want to comment. In terms of the issue of sort of the major events, you know, I think this has come up again and again today and I think it's one that will warrant, would warrant quite a lot more study. What does, you know, a team, you know, the Saints marching to the Super Bowl where people talked about the Yankees in 2001 after 9-11 or, you know, what does the World Cup mean in South Africa?  I happened to go to South Africa, I was very lucky. And I stood the day before the quarterfinal in Cape Town between Argentina and Germany, I went to Robin Island. And one of the little less known stories about Robin Island is about a football association called the Mekani Football Association, which was where a group of prisoners, political prisoners, not the elite ones, not Mandela and his cell block, but the lower level in the political ranks, lobbied for years to get permission to form a football association. And football was perceived there in South Africa, a black sport, it was popular mostly among blacks. And it was, it finally got the right to organize this there's a wonderful book about it called much more than a game. One of the cool things is how they had a copy of the FIFA rules and they used it to teach themselves, the prisoners rule of law, democratic processes, elections, all sorts of processes that then played out. One of the people involved in it became the basically the deputy Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. To stand there on that ground and then the next day to be on a train into Cape Town where blacks and whites and coloreds rode together wearing uniforms of soccer teams, including Bafana Bafana, to celebrate en masse the world's tournament in their continent and in their country was a triumph, it was a moment of triumph. And I think that it would be a very worthwhile study because I think that for me, that's why we use sports is because of its symbolic power. That's why I think that it warrants a conference like this and other things. What is it that a moment like the New Orleans Saints gives to a city or a world cup in South Africa gives to a country or Iraq winning the Asian Cup where Kurds and Shia and Sunni play together? What does it do for a place? What does it do to people's consciousness? How do we actually then take our work whether we're working with a few thousand dollars and 20 kids or millions of dollars and more kids, how do we turn our small micro event, our key people's thing into something that becomes part of national mythology? Hi, my name is Amy Watts and I'm here because I work with Pax Christi USA. And my question, I wanted to follow up on something that you mentioned, Peter, kind of a discourse analysis question when you raised the issue of oftentimes in sports, we use language that we would all characterize as violent language or war-making language. And so I wanted to follow up on that if anyone has a comment about how that's been addressed in programs or if you think that is being addressed in sports and peace building programs. And then also ideas about masculinity in sports and if you think that that's also being addressed in programs like this. Thanks. I'm not masculine. Yeah. Slowly, it's being addressed slowly. And that's where we're developing good practices and we see the kind of experimentation that is going on in the different projects. And certainly there are a couple of projects that I know about who've tried to change some of the terminology of sports and gender inclusion has been very much a part of some other projects. The significance of women in peace building has been recognized, but as I mentioned, I think it has to be done carefully and with local consultation. But I think those things are slowly beginning to happen. I'll take it. When we started this project, the team, one of the major criticisms that was actually generated internally from CERT and I'm sure externally too, but was soccer's popular with men, really. And so you're making a television drama and so forth, that's gonna be watched by men. So this was a great challenge to us. And so one of the things that started, we realized very quickly is that there's no need at all if we're gonna make a show that has to be about a men's team, not at all. And so we made in Kenya, the show is about a co-ed team. And the woman is the woman who's the captain. And the dynamics and the challenges that emerge around that particular relationship of a woman leader in a co-ed group, is it creates a space for us to grapple with all sorts of issues of women as peace builders. In the DRC, the show is entirely about a women's show. It's entirely, somebody was talking about 1325. It's entirely about women's place at the table in the peace process there. And in building peace. And we deal with all sorts of issues around women in the conflict, including gender-based violence and the rule of law and access to justice, which are all things that we're hearing a lot about in the news recently, but are longstanding challenges in the Congo. So one of the things we found is that by using the paradigm of sports, which is traditionally, especially soccer is traditionally perceived in most of the world as being a men's world, you can penetrate that very deeply and really break stereotypes and create iconic images, actually that crack open stereotypes and create space. Actually, I just wanted to follow up on something I think I heard in the last panels, but Peter, you're sort of starting to enumerate some of the lessons that you've been collecting about how are good programs run around training of volunteers, around local context and local consultation. And I just, and we heard that in the last panel as well. And I just wonder, I mean, we seem to be still struggling with issues around how do you deal with attribution and how do you deal with enlarger context? How do you deal with measuring the whole transference issues? How do you deal with a lot of these? But I wonder if we're ready, are we ready to establish, is there enough knowledge out there to say, here's some criteria against which sports for peace, you know, peace building programs can be measured just even around how they're organized and conducted. You know, we know that if they're more consistent, they'll have better impact. We know if they're more locally rooted, they'll have better impact. If the volunteers are well trained and you can start developing some criteria, even now to start saying, okay, we can at least start there even if we can't deal with some of these larger issues. Yeah, I think we are. We are there. We need to start disseminating these kinds of ideas and to continue learning from the programs that are in place. And I think the rest of the world tends to have a much broader definition of sport than in the United States. And they would include very often folk games and dance and physical activities of various kinds within a sport for peace project. And I think that that needs to be understood as well. It's not just competitive sports. And sometimes those other activities work much better than sport to help with the project. Great. I just want to make a couple of quick questions. One of the best practices could also be when is sports not appropriate? It goes back to, you know, in sports is just a tool. So we don't want to assume that it's always the right tool for the context. And then just one other comment and question. So one also a potential research agenda is also looking at kind of conflict prevention, early warning, which I've never seen, but how can you measure what's happening in the sports arena as a tool for showing how conflict is increasing in terms of, you know, that this course that people are using in stadiums, levels of violence, you know, the antagonism between teams would be interesting. The other question is in terms of donors, which donors get it? So I mean, there's a lot of donors who are finding something related to peace-building, the intersection of sports and peace-building narrow, but are there donors that you would say are really buying into this, understanding it, and have a vision for the long-term and are going to be around for 10 or 20 years doing this? And I'm surprised there's really, I mean, there's some kind of partial donors here. I mean, obviously, USIP is one, but it seems like we keep talking about donors so that seems to be something that's needed more to be present in these things. I'm going to start off on the first one, when is sport not appropriate? Andrea Selyos from Norway has probably done the most comprehensive look at this and he suggests that you need political stability, post-conflict in order for, to even hope to have a chance of having some success with the programs. I think probably the projects in Israel have, as far as I know, have generally been unsuccessful and in fact, one of the better projects was just about to start its fifth year, the volunteers were all ready to go for the summer and the last conflict with Lebanon broke out and everything got shut down. So when things are still that politically tense and violence still has the potential to break out, it's not a good time to bring sport into the situation, I think, and political stability really is needed. I'll take a shot at a couple of these things. One is that, I'm trying to remember where this was, I think it must have been in the economists, either in the economists or time around the World Cup, about the link between economic growth and performance of national football associations and the exception, the glaring exception they pulled out, they said if you pull Brazil out, because Brazil is good no matter what happens, there that you can actually see a direct correlation between numbers of times you qualify, countries qualify, and Argentina actually as well, but qualification for the World Cup and economic growth. So I think that it usually is about the whole institutional structure that's behind sport and the organizational structures that are at place and the politics in it. In terms of the selection of the tool, again, one of the things that keeps striking me in this conversation is how many of these things are cut across, including our practices, our good and bad practices, which cut across the tool. So if you're using, whether you're using track two to pull on the C efforts at the highest level or you're using youth leadership development for peace building or television or whatever it is, it strikes me that some of our same questions are at play. I think that that is something that has to be measured very locally. I don't think in that particular thing, what tool do we use at what time? It's gonna be pretty different from Yemen to Zimbabwe, isn't it? What's gonna be appropriate? What's gonna fit? What's gonna work? It has to do with what existing cultural trends there are, what kind of organizations there are on the ground who thought of different things, what kind of exposure people have had, you know? And I think that part of what's really important for us to pull out is actually the practice of getting at that question, the answer to that, which is about being locally rooted and being as grounded as possible and listening as deeply as possible to people from all sides of conflict, from all stratas of society, to what's needed and what would work and what wouldn't work. People's wisdom often, you know, often is very helpful, obviously, in guiding us and making good decisions about what we can do and what we can't. Well, thank you for lots of great food for thought. I'd just like to just bring out three things that hopefully as we go into TED summarizing and getting some input on what an agenda for USIP, going forward, an agenda for the field going forward, it seems out of this conversation, first thing we know a lot, and it's worth actually cataloging that and turning that from an evaluation perspective into some criteria that could actually be useful to people and that, and you're starting to do that. Peter's doing that and really kind of doing that seems helpful, oh, give me a hand. Now you need to spread it to areas that aren't doing sport, too. And that the challenges are challenges that are being faced in other areas of peace building and so in this sense, evaluation of sport and peace building is not very different than all the other areas of peace building around. How do you measure attitude change? How do you measure some of these outcomes? How do you deal with the attribution question when there are lots of other influences? Is the attribution quite, I mean, all those questions are questions that are being asked by everybody. So I guess you're saying we should really be learning from other areas and bringing some of that learning in and not reinventing the flat tire, I love that expression, is a great question. But I think ending on that is the importance of actually connecting to the larger context and several of you mentioned that both connecting to the larger context and also make sure that it's grounded and local. Connecting to the larger context, both in terms of what happens to the transference when you go back to an environment in which there are challenges and where there's some hostility and people mention the political challenges of doing that and also the fact that sport isn't going to do everything so it needs to be part of a larger strategy and can we then think about how to incorporate that into how we assess it? So not overload it, but also sort of hold people accountable to sort of putting themselves into a larger context and strategizing a little beyond their own projects in that sense. But also at the same time thinking and evaluation, local people, they know what the indicators of when things are, what some of the indicators are. They know better than anybody. And so really including local participants in development of the processes, development of the indicators measurement may give, come back into the indicative part of the indicators and the evaluation can give you some much more accurate information. And those things seem to have come out in ways that didn't come out before. So thank you. I will turn it over to Ted. Thank you. If you'd like to stay there, it'd be fine with me since I'd like to put you to work as well. So please go ahead. We have a half hour left and I'd like to do two things. First, I'd like to provide an additional summary to what Diana gave you and what she thought were very useful ideas for further work, things for all of us to think about. And then I'd like to turn it over to you and to get your input in what you think we should be thinking about. We, people in the field, and we here at USIP. Now, as I listened and I speak as a outsider in this world, the first thing I heard this morning is thinking about bridging the gaps between the macro and the micro. Is there any relationship to mega events that happen if you want a moment in time, a moment in history, which very often seems to evaporate, but sometimes doesn't, and what happens at the micro level that people do? Diana talked about thinking about a strategy including lots of discrete pieces. Maybe there is something to think about in the area between the macro and the micro. Someone referred to it as, I think it's something in between. If there is something between, however, it's worth thinking about. A number of people talked about the support frameworks for whatever you do. Is it the parents? Is it the community? Can any sport and peace building program at a local level really get much traction if it runs without factoring in bringing in parents or whatever is the broader community? Unless it affects them and they're brought into it, can it have any longer-term impact? And as I was thinking about that, I was thinking about the arrows where the sports effort was going, who it was actually trying to achieve, was it trying to achieve the children, the youth, in order to influence the parents in the wider community or both at the same time or the whole community with the pinpoint being the youth, the children. And once I started thinking it through, it got very murky to me. And I was trying to think, what actually are you trying to do because if you're only working with the children, how far are you going to get? Three, the whole issue of sustainability. What I was just saying takes you to sustainability. Where is this going to get you? Where is it taking you? Short, mid, longer term. How do you do it? Brendan Tui talked about long-term tracking. What can his research, his data, tell us about sustainability? Is it real or is it an illusion? Is it the Holy Grail we're all talking about, but never seems to happen? Some people also talked about the next generation. What is the research that needs to be done now to service the building blocks for the next stage? What is the preparation that needs to be made in having another generation ready to take on this work? Interesting questions. Is that a role for the academic world? For others to add? All very interesting. Some people talked about the target. Now, target is all in the eye of the beholder. If you want to work on the elite, if you want to work on the youth, if you want to work on the child soldier, if you want to work on the grassroots, well, the conventional wisdom and the good wisdom is, well, the target depends upon your goal. But already we have so many goals, so many targets. What's the right one? Is there a right one? Dr. Donnelly talked about linking sport closer to theory. I think this is something that came out more and more as everyone talked. A lot of these questions are not new. There are basic theoretical and practical issues that should come into play whenever you're talking about any aspect of peace building. And I think that's a good point for all of us to remember, that in fact we're not only talking about sport and peace building. We're talking about peace building using a particular type of tool. A particular vehicle to take us and the people we're working with somewhere. Training for those who are going to work in this field. Fascinating question. How much training, what sort of training? How much is enough? I'll leave it to those who work in the field. All very, very good questions. There are some prescriptive ideas. Bring all who are involved in this field. Practitioners, academics, people who hope to use the product of these efforts together to think about measurement and evaluation. Practition despite the competition for resources. See if people actually can work together to build this field. And then we got into the question that maybe it's not just design, maybe it's complexity. Maybe this is too complex and we seem to bounce back and forth about whether this is something we could get a handle on with theory or maybe it was too complex and not so easy. I'll leave that out there. That's a question for others to think about. And in the final analysis, we think about sport as a tool. How far you can go with it and what are its limitations? How far can you go if the key variables remain unchanged? Can you really have much change in the society if the key variables are not changing? That you're just picking away at this piece? Or is there some way you can pick away at the key variables which seem to be unchanging? Now I want to leave it up to you. I said a lot of things which seem to make sense to me based upon my very limited knowledge of the field. But to those of you who follow it, what do you think about it? What do you feel about the day? What does it make you think about? Please? Ross Qualp on the panelists. Thanks for asking a whole bunch of unanswerable questions. No, I think you just raised some key points for consideration. You and our session chair have both raised some really important issues and it's certainly a good message for academics to take back into recognition. There's so little research in this area and it's a relatively new area so we certainly need to go back and encourage our grad students to continue working on this and do it ourselves. I would agree. I'm an adjunct professor right now at the University of Tennessee and I've designed a course. I just called it this because it sounded good but service learning, sport and development, doesn't that sound good? So it's in our kinesiology, recreation and sports studies department and we're actually working with our undergraduate students using sport as a tool to reach out to the local Iraqi refugee population. Surprisingly Noxville is home to 120 plus and rapidly growing Iraqi families who are coming to the states with refugee status. One of the things that we talked about in the kinesiology department is and especially among our sport management majors for undergrads and grad students is their frustration with the field of sport management not as much kinesiology but especially in sport management that the things we talk about are big business it's just big sport it's the mega events and so their educational experiences are really rooted in and geared towards this big for profit and what students are frustrated with is a lot of them see and want more information and academic training and research and exposure to sport for advocacy positive social change and those types of things and so as a response to those students needs I designed this course and so they are using recreation social activities conflict resolution inclusion kind of stuff to welcome these families these Iraqi families into the Noxville community which is a real transition from Baghdad to Noxville, Tennessee I mean I would probably have to take you all through some therapy as well if you came but I say all that to say that among students there is a real desire for information and academic training for this non-profit sport for positive social change world and I think that that's a resource that is practitioners were not tapping into right so I can imagine a service learning course where students go out and do local community building peace building through sport right so they get the local context they get a handle on it and then they go for an international experience but we're sending them out and then as grad students we send them out to sort of help us as practitioners in the field to carry out some of this research that we don't have the money for we don't have the time for students are a group of people that we're not really utilizing and there's a real interest in this area and I'm sure several of you could attest to that like maybe you three yeah the only thing I put it with my academic hat on and I come back to your pulling the different people together I teach negotiation and conflict resolution there's a humanitarian set of studies there's sports and nutrition public health and we're all dealing with these subjects and rarely actually come together and pull our knowledge I think there's some opportunity in this field and then coming back to Peter's question around can we connect the sport practice the theory around peace building that we're not both in the academic institutions but we can do it in some of the practitioner institutions really bringing some of these folks together so my hat is totally different it's a pure practitioner I found myself today reflecting on one of the 101 ways that we can use sport that have been invented and one of the 101 ways that haven't been invented yet and I think that one of the coolest things about sport is that it's one of the few tools that we do have in peace building that crosses the layers of society you can do sports in peace building that engages the absolute most elite powerful decision makers of the society and you can do peace building initiatives in the most remote communities that have no electricity or whatever and there's not very many other tools that we have that quite give us that multi-layer element to peace building which at least in my organization we've identified as crucial to success we're looking at good practices none of us have invented those yet we're looking at good practices and that's one of them work at multiple layers simultaneously sports is one of those few spaces I think that's really cool and I think that one of the other things though that has been going through my mind in here is that with the exception of the US Olympic Committee we don't have any of the major leagues of sports in this room and they're the ones who shape this more profoundly with all the respect to all of us peace builders we're still in a little tiny field you know compared to the vast world out there whereas the Commissioner and David Stern to the world are massively influential people whose actions on a daily basis transform people's narratives and so I wonder how we engage them how do we actually help people who are influencing truly the fabric of our society globally and nationally how do we have them how do we help them to draw on what we know and what we want to achieve that is the somebody at the very beginning talked about scale you know how we achieve changes at scale that's I think maybe where in the sports world we can get so from the bottom to the top top between and that scale that's what I've been going through in my mind Thank you would someone else please Hi Anna Raguse a graduate student at George Mason University following up on a previous question and as well as something that Mr. Shippler said earlier on the symbolism that sports has and in the presentation that you were showing in the literature that I've read there's been a lot of criticism with sports being seen as purely symbolic and not producing enough changes in society or in the culture which could potentially be one of the reasons why there's lack of literature in the field so how how do we move away from that I know sports we've talked about it as being part of a larger peace building project but is there something lacking in sports that needs to be changed for example when South Africa won the Rugby World Cup in 1995 there's a huge momentum that the country was going to transform and that didn't really happen so how do we keep that momentum in those types of events going so that it's not purely a symbolic event that's just going to be stuck in the past and not produce any concrete and sustainable changes in society I think that's a terrific question next the micro and the macro in important ways I think the symbolic importance of sport has been probably overstated it's a short term feel good moment it doesn't change if you host an Olympics or a World Cup it doesn't change your country's position on the United Nations Human Development Index one iota and it might even reduce it if you spend too much money on it but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a connection and there can't be a connection and I think that if major multi sport or single sport organizations were to act more responsibly they would work with hosts of major events to ensure that there was widespread changes along the lines determined by the country involved as a result of the build up to and the legacy from hosting those major events and I think that needs a lot of planning I think countries get caught up in just the business of hosting they make all kinds of promises in order to get the event and then those promises get forgotten really quickly and I think that needs to be engaged with on a continuing basis and just I think that the thing about sports and society is that they're like a theater for us to deal with our problems but you know if you think about it what is it about it's about abandoning yourself emotionally totally to something that actually doesn't matter at all really I mean I'll watch the Redskins game and curse the television usually and you know but then the game ends and I'm back with you in my regular life there's this national conversation going on in the NFL about these hits to the head there's nothing new about this people have been getting concussions that hits the head for a long time in football why is that happening now what is that actually reflecting about our society that's manifesting in this kind of conversation what is it like what are they doing for us and I think that for me the answer to that question is how we then the rest of us use it to have a conversation about violence for instance about hurt about pain about competition about what you know all those things the other one is the baseball steroids thing if you notice the baseball steroids bust happened just about a year before the housing bust we were in an economy on steroids with a lot of false wealth and baseball was with a lot of false muscles and that thing that you could see baseball has always sort of been just ahead of the curve in our society from Jackie Robinson to the housing bust I went to visit Hiroshima and you know in Hiroshima the community there rebuilt very quickly after the dropping of the atomic bomb and almost about 150 yards from where the bomb actually exploded the community built a baseball stadium and they worked it was like a communal event something that everybody put in all different local businesses and such did to put to build this baseball stadium and it was built in 1954 nine years later, right there, at that spot then their team was a perennial loser so they found an American manager and they bought an American manager to coach to manage the team and they won the championship the symbolic power of that and that story was told to me when I went to Hiroshima and I went to that stadium the power of that for a community is quite important so you have one speaker who is very patient can I just follow up on that for one second I gave a lecture the other day on masculinity, violence and injury and sports and I showed students a clip of a video where the news clip said that concussion was the sport injury of the 1990s so we've been conscious of that for quite some time and I'm pleased that it's on the agenda again but I hope it doesn't go away this time as well please in some ways that's one of the call to action that I would have is to really look at peace building within the sport and we've talked about through sport and sport is a tool for peace building but I'd also encourage us to really think about peace and dignity within the culture of sport because we have to think about the status quo and the way that we're really talking about a transformative effort within sport, particularly when it comes to discrimination and exclusion within the context of sport whether it's gender or disability or race or religion so I think all the forms of discrimination that does take place are a form of non peace building if you will and so I think that's an important, I know we've spent a lot of today's discussion talking about peace through sport but I still think there's an essential role of all of us to really think about peace within sport thank you last comment please I seem to be the bad penny here, keep turning up this has been really very very exciting and very productive I'm going home with a huge smile on my face and a frown on my forehead, I mean fur on my forehead because there's so much to think about thank you all very very much and thank you for hosting this fantastic wonderful workshop this has been great my comment is I believe that we're at the 100th monkey stage with professional sports on the global scale I was thinking earlier there was a representative from UNESCO here and FC Barcelona which is one of the richest soccer clubs in the world for the last three years has essentially put aside a loss, excuse me they've absorbed a loss of $40 million a year just to put the word UNESCO on their shirts and other soccer clubs have actually followed through with that the 100th monkey syndrome is I think there are more and more professional clubs many of which have more money than God Real Madrid's annual budgets pushing $600 million a year $600 million that's one club I think what's happening is that more and more there's a social responsibility to the country and to the fans and we are, I believe this community at the stage of helping that 100th monkey to get it because if the top 25 clubs in Europe for instance or the world were to put together a fund and they put in 3% of their annual budget I think we would have a lot of programs that would be sustainable for 10 or 15 years or 20 and it would be a branding boon for those clubs and I personally am devoted to making that happen with Score for Peace I'm personally we are my organization is approaching AC Milan and other clubs like that to make that happen and there is in fact a group in Lichtenstein of all places that is devoted to being the traffic cop for funds from clubs for the better of humanity so that's my comment, thank you thank you very much again and I think we should all give you a huge hand Mine is a question from within the framework of Peace Building and its partnership with development as an industry around for what about 60 years or so and Peace Building as an industry so much younger as a field and so much we're in partnership with development and I don't think there's a place that I've seen this more evident than in the world of sport and what we're doing with sport and so many people talk about sport and Peace Building and I think it the whole world of Peace Building is kind of confusing it for me so it seems natural that there's a lot of there's some questions and some lack of clarity so my question is do we see in the next decade coming the ability of the fields of development and Peace Building able to find ways to be mutually supportive but we're able to distinguish what we're doing are we doing some development are we doing Peace Building are they commingled are we able to really be able to distinguish what we're about and is actually the world of sport in engaging with the rest of the world a place where this could we could see some leadership and some beginnings in that just a question anybody want to touch it I'll touch that one only a little bit I see a commingling over the years having come from Peace Building and gone into development sitting in the middle in general confusion as you are and I think it comes back to having some clarity about what we're doing and why we're doing it and my experience particularly around evaluation in Peace Building but also in development we make these huge leaps of faith we do something and then we say we're going to bring tolerance we're going to bring reconciliation and so much more rigorous thinking will at least help us and think about both how do we sort of how do we work the two and integrate the two but how do we also differentiate at the same time so that we know what we're doing so I think a little bit of clarity around that is helpful I guess it's time first of all I'd like to thank our panelists for very nice I'd also like to thank the woman who helped us organize this Mr. Ahmadi and please feel free if when you think about the event you have additional ideas additional thoughts you can always reach us here at USIP you can reach FIFER we'd be interested in your thoughts and any additional ideas you have for follow-up work thank you very much


Indonesia's Marapi volcano erupted on December 13, spewing volcanic ash as high as 500-600 meters into the air. According to the country's Volcanology Agency, footage filmed by an eyewitness showed a thick cloud of gray ash above the volcano in West Sumatra. Local residents living in one of the village's closest to Marapi were still seen engaging in daily activities. The head of Indonesia's Volcanology Agency Hendra Ganawan said Wednesday's spewing of ash was relatively minor, with his comments coming after another eruption last week that killed 23 people. The 2,891-meter-high Marapi is one of Sumatra's most active volcanoes in Indonesia and straddles the Pacific's so-called Ring of Fire, which is home to more than 100 active volcanoes.