Avila Kilmurray is the migration and peace building executive at the Social Change Initiative. Her work in peace building stretches back to 1975 when she was active in the community center and philanthropy in Northern Ireland. Since then she has worked tirelessly to promote peace in various roles, including as director of the Community Foundation where she managed the EU PEACE Programme for the re-integration of politically motivated ex-prisoners as well as the victims/survivors of violence.

Here she sits down with Alliance digital editor, Charlotte Kilpatrick to discuss the role philanthropy can play in peace building.

Charlotte Kilpatrick: can you tell me a bit about your role at the Social Change Initiative?

Avila Kilmurray

Avila Kilmurray: Yes, so I work with the Social Change Initiative (SCI) which is a small organisation that came out as a legacy of the Atlantic Philanthropies whenever it spent down its endowment.  SCI works to support activism and advocacy on areas of human rights, peace building, and refugee migration issues. My role is particularly focused on work around the peace building priority, as well as work around the refugee and migrant issues.

CK: Could you please tell me a bit about the EU Peace Program that I see you’re a part of?

AK: Yes, the European Union Peace Program was introduced in 1995 in the immediate aftermath of the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994 that were a foundational stone of our peace process in Northern Ireland. It was introduced by Jacques Delors, then European Commission President.  We’re in our fifth peace program currently which is administered in Northern Ireland by the Special EU Programmes Body, with European funding matched by British government funding and money from the Republic of Ireland. The current program is called Peace Plus, and notwithstanding Brexit, it operates from 2021 to 2027, with continuing European Union support.

CK: Here are some of the meatier questions I wanted to get into.  There’s not a lot of philanthropy money going into peacebuilding or human rights. What role do you think philanthropy can play here?

AK: I think philanthropy has an important role across various stages of conflict and peacebuilding. You know, sometimes there is a feeling: oh well peace-building starts once there are ceasefires or once the combatants get around a table, but our experience in Northern Ireland was that philanthropy also played a role during the actual open violence by funding a range of community-based initiatives.

One that comes to mind was the Commission that was held before the ceasefires. It brought together a panel of external people, chaired by Torkel Opsahl who asked local people about their views on the conflict, and what was required to get out of the conflict. And that was funded completely by philanthropy, by a number of UK trusts, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, Barrow Cadbury Trust and a number of others.

But philanthropy during the conflict also funded inter-community dialogue and the early integrated education movement in Northern Ireland.  It recognised that one of our many divisions was reflected in two different educational systems, a situation that still exists to a large extent.  Again, a combination of philanthropic organisations provided funding for parent-led integrated education, such as the Nuffield Foundation, the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and Atlantic Philanthropies. The latter provided some £8.5 million to help fund schools.

‘The reality is that it is political decisions that create systems that often exacerbate division and difference. So yes peacebuilding, conflict transformation is political’

If grant-making is done flexibly and in a timely manner philanthropy can be very important. For example, you know, it allowed us to bring in speakers from South Africa to talk about the transition there and initiatives such as the South African Bill of Rights.  It also supported bringing stakeholders from Northern Ireland to South Africa when the peace process was experiencing difficulties.  It made introductions that enabled us to learn from others.

I had direct experience of this as director of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland for 20 years which received philanthropy money from the Ford Foundation and from Atlantic Philanthropies to support work with political ex-prisoners and ex-combatants in the interests of peacebuilding.

CK: As you are well aware there’s a lot of conflict in the world, how do you think philanthropy can step in now with some of the current conflicts happening?

AK: I think the important thing for philanthropy to do, apart from being prepared to engage, is to listen. There was an older lady in Northern Ireland who once said: you know, you’re born with two ears and one mouth, use them proportionately. And one of the things that I do feel strongly about is that funder talk about the importance of localisation can be a bit rhetorical at times, rather based on practice.

Very often local peace activists, and indeed locally-based philanthropy organisations in conflict situations, are not acknowledged or listened to. It’s important to build up community confidence and resilience and look at what the local community says is needed at a particular point in time.  By developing those relationships, they can be built on and result in more formal peacebuilding initiatives.

‘We believed that it was important to go to the different groups and say, ‘look, you’re the experts in terms of knowing what the needs are here, what are the possibilities. We’re not going to go away and get some academics to draw up a program. We want you to come in and tell us what is needed’.

For example, philanthropy can focus on women and young people to make sure that their views and experiences are reflected in the negotiation of any peace process because otherwise, they will tend to be sidelined. But this type of work requires a longer-term perspective and investment.  There’s no point waiting to engage with local people in conflict situations until you have a ceasefire or until people are on their bicycles going off to Geneva or wherever else. It needs to be a longer-term phased approach.

CK: All right, if we could talk about the role of dialogue in peacebuilding. You brought together loyalists, paramilitaries, and republican dissidents into dialogue. How important was that to the peace-building process?

AL: Well it was very important. As I said I was director of the community foundation which acted as one of a number of managing agents for some of those early European Union funding measures. We worked with local communities, but also with victims/survivor groups and on the re-integration of political ex-prisoners.  We believed that it was important to go to the different groups and say, ‘look, you’re the experts in terms of knowing what the needs are here, what are the possibilities. We’re not going to go away and get some academics to draw up a program. We want you to come in and tell us what is needed’.

We formed a number of grant advisory committees that brought people with different perspectives together.  In the case of the political ex-prisoners we had a grant advisory committee made up of two representatives of five paramilitary organisations, plus a couple of people from the Quakers who had worked on prison issues, and some people from related NGOs. Despite very different backgrounds this grouping met around the community foundation table every second month for over, probably well over 10 years, even during the breakdown of the IRA ceasefire in the mid-1990s. So, the availability of philanthropic funding, and indeed the European Union funding, enabled people to come together to discuss funding priorities, but it also allowed the cover and space for people to have quiet back-channel discussions themselves over the tea and coffee.

We also brought in speakers from other conflict societies, such as Naomi Chazan, who was then the deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset, who has had a long background as a peace activist in Israel.

CK: There is criticism that funding peacebuilding is overly political. What would you say about this? Is funding peace overly political?

AK: Well my baseline on this is that life is political.

CK: Okay, very good. 

AK: And as I say, you know, we’ve just been talking about education, education particularly in a contested society.  The reality is that it is political decisions that create systems that often exacerbate division and difference. So yes peacebuilding, conflict transformation is political. We used to talk about politics with a small p and then Politics with a big P. The Politics with a big P was electoral politics, and philanthropy would not intervene there. But I think one of the things that is important is that philanthropy contributes to activities that can be termed political with a small p – creating the space for those voices that will not necessarily get to a negotiation table and supporting R&D (research and development) initiatives for peacebuilding.

We saw that here in Northern Ireland on a number of occasions, but one that comes to mind was the emergence of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition that came out of civil society social movements. But we’ve seen it in places like Colombia as well, and it was largely I think some of the women that were involved, who said: ‘No, we need to bring broader voices to the table in Havana.’ And when that happens, these broader voices are often funded by philanthropy.

When we get that wider participation other issues are considered in peace settlements other than the ones that the established diplomats, governments, and combatant groups will necessarily put on the table. I was a member of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition’s negotiation team for the Good Friday agreement, and what we found was that the established negotiators tended to focus on the allocation of power in decision-making, and what happened to the guns.

What we were bringing beyond that were issues like human rights, and equality. We won the need for an advisory second chamber as a civic forum because politics can become very narrow in conflict societies.  Our idea was to bring in community and women’s groups, the trade union movement, employers’ bodies, farmers, so that you’re trying to have a participative seeding of the peace process, rather than just an elite settlement.

The Coalition also raised the priority of recognizing the needs of victims and survivors of violence. They would not have been in the Northern Ireland Agreement if civil society hadn’t raised the issue. Prisoners were, but not victims and survivors. Again, philanthropy played an important role in helping us achieve this because at that stage there was no statutory funding for either political ex-prisoners or self-help victims’ groups.  The sustainability of the peace process needed initiatives to articulate needs that had been virtually hidden.

CK: You have a conference coming up in early February, what do you hope to accomplish at the conference?

AK: The conference is called ‘countering violent conflict and polarisation, how can donors help?’, and we want to do a couple of things. First of all, we want to draw on the experience of a range of donors that have funded work at different stages of conflict. There are many good examples where donors have made a difference and we hope that this will encourage others.

And then secondly, we want to bring together philanthropic donors, as well as some state funders, together with peace-building practitioners, for an exchange of views.  It is also important to ensure that voices from the global South are heard and from regions currently experiencing violent conflict.  We’re using the backdrop of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement which, for all its rather fragmented edges, still holds.

And then lastly there was a survey of philanthropy for a safe, healthy and just world carried out by Candid (USA) and CENTRIS (UK) in 2018. We are re-running that survey to see what has changed in terms of philanthropic interest and perspectives with regard to funding for peacebuilding.  Barry Knight from CENTRIS is currently re-running and analyzing the survey which is being funded by Peace Nexus and the Robert Bosch Stiftung.  Interim results will be available to be reported on at the February 2024 conference in Belfast.