Why I created Hopebuilding Wiki

 

I have lived in many different places: Ireland, different parts of Canada, New Zealand, Bosnia, Serbia, Ukraine. For much of my adult life, I lived in northern Canada. Eventually, I realized that I had spent a great deal of time in places that had suffered conflict between peoples and cultures, and that this offered my first clue to how I could live the second half of my life.

 

During an appreciative inquiry workshop in sunny Vancouver in 2002, I realized that my patchwork life career had a purpose and meaning I hadn’t seen before. I had spent my life learning how people could work together, and then sharing and teaching those ways, in all kinds of endeavours – running elections and land claim votes, organizing skating clubs and other community groups, working in community development and with women’s organizations in Canada and internationally. That gave me my second clue.

 

Two years of focused community development work in western Serbia made me aware of how international development thinking was influenced by academic ideas. So in 2004, I enrolled in a Master’s program in the emerging new field of Human Security and Peacebuilding. My studies introduced me to academic thinking about “failed and fragile” states – places where things didn’t work, where governments focused on things other than human development, where it seemed the outside world would always be intervening to “fix” things.

 

Living and working in small northern communities for a quarter-century, however, had taught me a lot about peoples’ capacities and abilities to solve their own problems. I knew about “asset-based community development” – building on what people already knew, and had, and did, to make things better for themselves and others, rather than focusing on what people didn’t have and what didn’t work. That was the basis of my community development work in Serbia. So I began to wonder about the people and “islands of achievement” in those states labelled fragile and failing, and why world news seemed so focused on the failures and not the achievements. This gave me my third clue.

 

Eventually, my studies focused on two islands of achievement – Somaliland, and the Brčko District in Bosnia, and the lessons they offered for new international approaches to development in the so-called failed states. In these islands, people were solving their problems, building their own capacities, building hope. Why then, I wondered, were others not using these ideas in the rest of those states, or in other places where there was conflict? I concluded that part of the problem is that the successes are not well known. We hear more about the places where things don’t work, than the places where things do work.

 

Two years of research during MAHSP meant that I collected many stories of how people are building hope, new futures for themselves, islands of achievement in their communities and states. I was surprised that few people seemed to know about these stories. Habitat Jam showed me the energy that comes from people across the world sharing their achievements. Wiki technology showed me a participatory way of sharing these stories of islands of achievement, and the people who are building hope, more widely. I believe such sharing among people can help make international development an exchange among peers and equals.

 

April 2008: I am thrilled that Royal Roads University, where I received my Master's degree in Human Security and Peacebuilding, has featured me and Hopebuilding wiki in the RRU magazine, In Roads.

 

Rosemary Cairns

 

Contact me directly at http://www.contactify.com/d1e4e

 

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