I grew up in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a region affected by decades of conflict. During my undergraduate studies in Kenya I had the chance to get to know young people from other African countries similarly recovering from or undergoing violent conflicts. Students hailed from Burundi, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Uganda, among others.

I was inspired to learn about their experiences and contexts. I wondered why so much of my curriculum was written by academics from the global north: there was so much richness in the knowledge of my peers, knowledge that felt so alive! I dreamed of creating opportunities to connect global south youth organisations of peacemakers so they could start interacting more sustainably, learn from each other and work together.

This dream matured when I was granted a scholarship to study peacebuilding in the USA. As part of my master’s programme, I built a beautiful friendship with a young migrant from Colombia named Isaias. Isaias and I exchanged stories about the history of our countries and spent long hours composing music together, creating lyrics inspired by our work and studies. With Isaias I started experiencing the power of storytelling – of evoking emotions to build empathy and create cultural bridges.

As I researched young activists working on peacebuilding for my master’s thesis, I realised that the stories and insights of young peacebuilders were invisible in the media. I launched Peacemaker 360 to tell and give visibility to those stories.

Early on I got really disillusioned with donor-led funding models.

In the DRC, I was working with a small CSO promoting youth leadership. We were pretty successful in obtaining funding – we had four funding partnerships and we were growing, under the paradigm that assumes that more financial resources equals organisational growth.

But I got tired of it. I felt all I was doing was answering to the donors. We were caught in the bureaucracy of making deadlines.

This was a big dilemma for me. I kept asking myself: how much am I willing to offer in terms of my own vision and my own passion in order to accommodate the donors’ requirements?

After that experience, it has been harder for me to resource my work. I have become more critical of traditional funding models, more interested in doing things not bound to funders’ structures.

Right now, Peacemakers 360 does not have a financial sustainability strategy. We manage individual donations and have received small grants for specific projects. This being said, I set up the project so that it would not need funding for its sustainability.

We are building a network of peacebuilder organisations so that we can all support each other and help raise our profile and visibility. I hope that in the future we will be able to work more closely with our partners so that they can help us sustain our work.

When starting Peacemaker 360 I simply followed my impulse to create a community to exchange knowledge. I was tired of the top-down logic that many youth-led organisations fall into that we cannot do anything without money.

I think there is a value in asking ourselves: what can we do without funding?

To do things without funding is empowering; it reduces the risk of dependency from the donors’ funding model.

Of course, alone we can’t do it all. I do believe that by taking on a more independent mindset we can get more creative and develop our unique experience. This can give us an edge so that other institutions can recognise our work, respect it and treat us as equals. Or this at least is my hope.

The problem is that donors are less likely to give you funding if you don’t already have other grants because they fear you don’t have the capacity to manage finances: it’s a chicken-and-egg dilemma. I think this is a faulty argument though. Donors should support organisations based on their impact, and if we achieve impact with little or no funding, they should help us develop the capacity to manage more.

I believe that impact and indicators should be defined by the communities themselves. In the case of the DRC, when we tell a big donor that we are making an impact working with youth leadership, what they are looking to see are the numbers. They ask: how many? How many? How many?

But the value of this work is not about ‘how many’. It is about the quality of relationships that these young people are able to have with themselves and with their community as a result of our work. The quality of the relationship is so much more important for youth organisations, at least in our case, than just the numbers or ticking the box to please the donor. This is a very different worldview that is important to talk about when we talk about impact and indicators.

I am working as a consultant, and often get contracted as an individual. It’s not ideal, but at this moment, it is helpful for me to keep Peacemaker 360 and my own livelihood separate

I am so grateful to the Pollination Project. They provide small seed funding of around US$1,000 but are able to give a boost to organisations that normally would not qualify. I reached out to them in 2017 explaining that we wanted to publish a book with 25 stories of young peacebuilders. They were very responsive. They replied promptly, with an informal tone, and had very basic application requirements.

I would suggest they focus on the social impact that youth-led groups and movements are already making and develop flexible funding mechanisms that enhance that impact – and understand that impact is not all about numbers. This includes reducing reporting bureaucracy and having quick response basket funds that are accessible to address issues like the protection and evacuation of youth leaders from life-threatening situations. All this is possible if the relationship between youth-led groups is neither transactional nor top-down, but one of equals who choose to work together to transform social injustices around the world.