CollaborationNet

PeaceFirst: Cultural Community Peace Leadership Program - 2026

Cultivating Peace, Awareness, Community Transformation (PACT)

A FourSession Immersive Leadership & Community Peacebuilding Journey

Expression of Interest Application Form

Introduction

P.A.C.T. is both a program model and a personal reflection compass, guiding participants through four living questions that explore inner peace, awareness, community, and becoming. It is not about fixing youth or rushing them into roles, but about forming peace carriers with inner stability, relational maturity, and community responsibility. The program grounds all learning in a shared Peace-First model of positive peace, creating a common language and practice framework. Peace is positioned not as an outcome after conflict, but as the ground from which relationships, leadership, and systems grow, inviting participants to locate themselves within a living ecology of peace before engaging any skills or tools.

This model becomes the organizing lens for the entire program: shaping identity work, values exploration, facilitation training, leadership formation, and community practice.

Peace-First frames peace as something that precedes conflict, not something that reacts to it, positioning peace as an organizing principle that shapes what communities notice, value, and choose to build. The program is grounded in positive peace, the presence of dignity, trust, belonging, voice, relational safety, and the capacity for rupture and repair, shifting investment upstream from control to capacity, enforcement to formation, and reaction to cultivation.

Peace is understood not as an event but as a living ecology, carried across nested domains, rather than produced by institutions alone. It is embodied in individuals, formed in families, and sustained through cultural communities as intergenerational carriers of relational wisdom and collective responsibility.

Designed For

Please consider this free of charge in-person 4 session program for youth aged 18–26 from diverse cultural communities, who are ready to explore leadership, identity, peace, and community responsibility, not as titles or roles, but as ways of being.


Expression of interest online form required for selection purposes.


This program is for young people who are:

Identity & Belonging

Exploring who you are, where you come from, and how difference shapes connection, tension, and belonging.

Community Responsibility

Carrying responsibility within families and communities with care, accountability, and shared purpose.

Purpose & Impact

Asking deeper questions about meaning, direction, and how your actions contribute to a more peaceful community.

Inner Stability & Leadership

Building inner steadiness and practical leadership tools that support calm, clarity, and wise action.

From Reaction to Responsibility

Learning to respond with awareness and intention rather than reacting from stress or habit.

Sessions

Identity, Peace & Compassionate Communication

Theme: From Self to Shared Humanity

The opening session establishes psychological safety, belonging, and relational trust. Participants enter through their story, identity, and meaning, not as theory.

Core Elements:

  • Introduce our PACE lens, exploration and grounding
  • Story of Our Names – grounding identity in history, meaning, and dignity
  • Wheel of Identities – exploring layered identity, belonging, and social location
  • Cultural reflection – how culture shapes lived experience, perception, and conflict
  • Understanding conflict styles and personal responses to tension
  • Peace Canvas – articulating a personal vision of peace and safety, beginning with the self

Communication Foundations:

Participants develop compassionate communication capacities:

  • self-compassion and other-directed compassion

  • needs, feelings, and requests

  • positions vs interests

  • boundary-setting with kindness

Outcome:
Participants gain clarity about who they are, how they show up in conflict, and how their communication either strengthens or weakens peace.

Values, Relationships & Inner Peace

Theme: From Inner Stability to Community Connection

This session deepens reflection and connection by exploring systems, relationships, and values as peacebuilding infrastructure.

Core Elements:

  • Mapping peace-supporting and peace-limiting systems in communities

  • Relationship and influence mapping

  • Values exploration:

    • identifying core values

    • examining how values support or block empathy

    • grounding values in resilience during difficulty

Inner Peace Development:

  • embodied experience of peace

  • awareness of internal vs external conflict

  • stressor identification and regulation strategies

  • building a personal Peace Toolbox

Collective Visioning:

  • shared imagination of healthier communities

  • dialogue-based community meaning-making

Outcome:
Participants develop emotional literacy, value clarity, relational insight, and practical inner peace strategies that stabilize them during conflict.

Facilitation, Dialogue & Collective Process

Theme: From Participant to Peace Facilitator

Participants are introduced to facilitation as a relational leadership practice — not a technical role.

Core Elements:

  • meta-skills: empathy, acceptance, flexibility, self-regulation, presence

  • facilitation roles: informing, consulting, discussing, debating, dialogue

  • communication practices: paraphrasing, reframing, redirecting, open questioning

  • group dynamics, decision-making, and collective sense-making

Practice:
Participants engage in structured role-play, learning how to choose the appropriate facilitation posture for different contexts.

Outcome:
Participants develop confidence and competence in guiding conversations, holding complexity, and supporting collective understanding.

Group Dynamics, Conflict & Collective Decision-Making

Theme: From Facilitation to Leadership in Complexity

This final session builds advanced capacity for navigating tension, conflict, and complexity in real-world group settings.

Core Elements:

  • managing group conflict

  • difficult conversations

  • feedback as a peace practice

  • moving conversations forward under pressure

Collective Tools:

  • consensus-building (open–narrow–close model)

  • N/3 prioritization framework

  • structured group decision-making

Practice:
Realistic role-play scenarios from low-stakes to high-stakes contexts.

Outcome:

Participants develop the ability to guide groups through disagreement, complexity, and decision-making without fragmentation.

Closing Integration & Reflection Process

The program concludes not with certification, but with reflection, integration, and meaning-making. Participants are guided through a structured reflection process that invites them to name how their understanding of peace has shifted, identify personal changes in awareness, regulation, and presence, reflect on relational growth and community responsibility, and articulate how they will carry P.A.C.T. into daily life, leadership, and community spaces.

This closing process emphasizes that peace leadership is not an achievement, but a continuing practice. Participants leave not with a sense of completion, but with a sense of stewardship — carrying peace as a responsibility, a discipline, and a way of being. The program therefore ends where it began: not with technique, but with conscious presence, purpose, and commitment to cultivation.

The PeaceFirst: Cultural Community Peace Leadership Program develops community leaders who:

  • carry peace as a practice, not a concept

  • stabilize systems through presence

  • transform conflict into learning

  • build trust across difference

  • create psychologically safe spaces

  • strengthen community resilience

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Purpose

The Purpose of These Peace-First: CollaborationNet Pages These pages exist to share what we have learned. Over the past year, Peace-First: CollaborationNet has operated as a time-limited demonstration initiative, which is a space to test ideas, host conversations, and discover what might grow when peace is placed at the center. Conversations took root in informal Peace-First Hubs across Winnipeg, Thompson, Brandon, and Portage la Prairie, with related gatherings in Vancouver and Toronto. Toronto now helps convene national roundtable conversations, linking local dialogue with a broader Canadian exchange. What began as small, local discussions has become more connected — not through expansion or centralization, but through coherence. Across regions, shared themes, tensions, and hopes are emerging. This webpage documents that journey. It gathers reflections, materials, and learning from Hub conversations so others can understand what has been explored and carry it forward. From the beginning, Peace-First was designed as a seed-planting initiative, formally concluding March 31, 2026. Its focus has been to explore how individuals and cultural communities understand inner peace, collective vision, community cohesion, and cultural dignity and visibility. The Hubs are volunteer-led spaces where community connectors and members gather to listen, reflect, and imagine what a peaceful geographic and cultural community might look like in practice. Along the way, we developed background papers, reflection documents, and practical toolkits shaped by lived experience in Manitoba and beyond. This page now serves as a living repository within the Peace-First Library, offering capacity-building tools, framing papers, hub guidance, and shared learning that communities can adapt to their own realities. The purpose is not to centralize authority, but to make learning accessible. Peace-First Hubs are community-led and partner-supported — grounded in relationship, not hierarchy. Supported by ACOMI, ECCM, Palaver Hut, MIA, cultural community members across the country, and allies such as MANSO, Mediation Services, CanU Canada, and PCHS, this work moves through partnership rather than control. This initiative has been made possible through the principal financial support of the Department of Canadian Heritage, with a supportive role played by The Winnipeg Foundation. Their investment has allowed these conversations, materials, and connections to take shape. These materials are not instructions to replicate. They are tools to adapt. This page is more than documentation. It is an invitation. Peace-First is not about imposing a uniform model. It is about strengthening conditions for dialogue, cohesion, and shared responsibility before a crisis. If this resonates, we invite you to explore further, join a national roundtable call, or consider what it would mean to host or support a conversation in your own community. Join a national roundtable call. Complete the survey. The seeds have been planted. What grows next depends on all of us.

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