Three clues led learner to life-changing decision

Rosemary Cairns graduated from RRU’s Master’s program in Human Security and Peacebuilding. Now a certified professional facilitator working in Uzice, Serbia, she created her Hopebuilding wiki  to share stories of achievement by ordinary people doing extraordinary things to make their world a better place. The focus of Hopebuilding is to feature – in particular – stories not as widely known as they should be. Below, Rosemary shares details about her own path and what brought her to the point where today she is playing a role in helping make international development an exchange among equals.

by Rosemary Cairns

“Two years of research while attending RRU meant that I collected many stories of how people are building hope and new futures for themselves - becoming islands of achievement in their communities and states,” says Cairns, graduate from RRU’s Master’s program in Human Security and Peacebuilding.

Having lived in many different places – Ireland, New Zealand, Bosnia, Serbia, Ukraine and Canada’s north – I realized one day that I had spent a great deal of my time in places that had suffered conflict between peoples and cultures.

This offered the first clue as to how I might live the second half of my life.

During an appreciative inquiry workshop in sunny Vancouver in 2002, I realized that my patchwork life and 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 RRU’s Master’s program in the emerging new field of Human Security and Peacebuilding (MAHSP).
 
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 in Canada 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 equals.