News

As students and working professionals struggle to find employment in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Conrad Grebel University College and the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement (the Centre) have increased their opportunities for meaningful work. Past and present participants can attest that the benefits of working at the Centre extend beyond the workplace.

In response to Kindred Credit Union's call to generosity this holiday season, the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement got creative about how to give back to its local community.

For the past three years, for twelve consecutive days in December, the Centre has joined eleven other local organizations in participating in “acts of good” during #12Days4Good, a social media campaign led by Kindred Credit Union. The Centre kicked off the 2020 campaign on December 7 with the release of an online Peacebuilders’ Inspiration Toolkit.

Originally published in the Fall 2020 issue of Grebel Now.

The theme of the 2020 United Nations International Day of Peace, “Shaping Peace Together,” resonated with the mission of the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement. Essential to the spirit of the Centre is a shared understanding of collaborative peacebuilding, which has laid the groundwork for our community’s resiliency throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement, alongside six passionate University of Waterloo faculty members, are championing systems thinking on campus.

A unifying approach between the myriad of peacebuilding professionals who are advancing peace in the Centre is the use of systems thinking, a holistic way to analyse a problem that considers the impacts of interrelated, interdependent parts of a whole. This is the heartbeat of Map the System—an annual, global competition brought to the university by the Centre for Peace Advancement.

The heartbeat of the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement’s work is mobilizing impactful, collaborative social innovation efforts to advance peace. Participants in the Centre’s Epp Peace Incubator program pair their expertise with the Incubator’s support to catapult their ventures to new heights.

Three of the Centre’s current Incubator start-ups, Lunaria Solutions, GeoMate, and Panic, Anxiety, + Stress Support (PASS) have a history of consistently leveraging the program’s resources and connections to grow their businesses. Over the past couple of months, each of these start-ups has received external affirmation for their progress and promise. Here is an update on the recent successes of these Incubator ventures.

When Research Fellow and Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) professor Lowell Ewert retired in June, the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement had a faculty spot in the community to fill. In response, the Centre invited PACS Visiting Assistant Professor Dr. Eric Lepp to join its diverse community of peacebuilding researchers, activists, entrepreneurs for the duration of his time at Grebel.

The University of Waterloo recently put a spotlight on former Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement Communications Assistant Kirsten Mosey. Mosey was selected earlier this year, out of over 6,500 applicants, to be one of ten UN Youth Champions for Disarmament.

For the past five years, the Epp Peace Incubator at Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement has helped more than a dozen ventures leverage supports available in the Waterloo Region innovation ecosystem. With a unique focus on peace entrepreneurship, the Centre’s Incubator program provides support and mentorship to ventures seeking to advance peace locally and globally.

The Centre welcomed three new ventures to its Incubator program this September, all of whom are dedicated to applying creative solutions to real, complex social problems.

Student engagement is an important part of the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement’s mission to advance expansive and innovative understandings and practices of peace. Even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, youth have continued to be a resilient, driving force in community change. With an increased willingness to challenge the status quo and keenness to consider fresh perspectives, students have a distinct and important role to play in social innovation.

At the University of Waterloo, innovation and entrepreneurship opportunities are around every corner. Yet in the Spring semester an opportunity arose to rethink how students can be involved in changemaking. What if UWaterloo could provide a space for students to apply their innovative and systems-change mindsets to a real-life, ever-changing problem: the COVID-19 pandemic?