At the end of September I joined 200 other mediators from over 50 countries at the Mediators Beyond Borders International (MBB) Congress in Istanbul, Turkey. I had been involved in helping to organise the congress in the months leading up to the event and I had been looking forward to finally put some faces to the names of the people at the other end of the countless conference calls and emails.
View from the Congress venue the Legacy Ottoman Hotel
After becoming the representative for MBB at the Rotary International (RI) Convention in Thailand in 2012 (after taking a Skype call at 4:30am one early morning in Bangkok), I worked to connect MBB and TIDES Training in a formal partnership. TIDES later became one of the strategic partners for the MBB Congress. Four members of the TIDES team flew out to Istanbul as we had been successful in our application to deliver a workshop titled “The Roles of the Mediator and the Different Forms of Mediation Used in Intercommunity: Peace building in Northern Ireland” (which was recorded and is still available here). We ended up with one of the largest number of participants with over 50 people attending which made for some excellent dialogue and discussions.
Alan Ruddock & I facilitating from TIDES
In the age of social media, I was tweeting the congress for @MediatorsMBB, the MBB Kenya Initiative @MBBKenya (which I’m also a member), as well as from @tidestraining and my own person twitter account @endayoung which caused me to go through 4 fully charged phone batteries each day!
As one of the co-chairs of the MBB/Rotary International working action group, along with Vikram Kapoor, over the last year we had been invited to run a workshop at the Congress to further strengthen the links between these two organisations. Vikram organised the workshop and I facilitated the Q&A panel which consisted of other Rotary Peace Fellows, MBB Members and Rotarians; Steve Goldsmith, Marios Antoniou, Gail Ervin and Sait Feyzioglu.
The MBB/Rotary workshop panellists
Facilitating the discussion
You can watch a live recording of the workshop below and download the notes here: MBB Rotary Workshop Notes:
Video is the 5th one down and begins 9:08 into the Live Stream
As a Peace Fellow and a member of both Rotary and MBB I believe that there is a natural connection between both organisations and it was great to move on this discussion to additional practical actions points. Following this workshop we have had further conference calls and we hope to continue to develop our relationship by bringing our suggestions to the RI Convention in Sydney in June 2014.
If any Rotary Peace Fellows and/or Rotarians involved in mediation are interested in becoming members of MBB or vice versa please feel free to contact me for more information.
Practical Peace 