Advancing sustainable peace requires enthusiastic collaboration between passionate individuals across disciplines and communities, and catalyzing collaboration for impact is the mission of the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement. The Centre brings together experts, scholars, and students to work across a diverse range of local and global issues to advance peace.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an organizing principle for the Centre’s work. The SDGs offer a roadmap for communities like the Centre to achieve a better and more sustainable future, outlining 17 distinct yet interconnected issue areas that are vital for building peace. At the Centre, peacemakers recognize that their work is just one part of a complex system that is maintained through balanced approaches to peacebuilding.
Gaining an understanding of what peacebuilding looks like in the context of this complex system can be a challenging process. For students at Grebel and the University of Waterloo, co-curricular pitch competitions have become a welcoming space for inquiry and experimentation. For example, in 2021, more than 220 students competed in the Map the System pitch competition at the University of Waterloo, organized by the Centre. Using systems thinking, students from across disciplines tackled global challenges from a holistic perspective. In contrast to traditional analysis where the world is broken down into parts, students learned that the world is deeply interconnected. To help others in sustainable ways, they must lean into complexity and ambiguity.
Map the System does not ask students to solve world problems. Instead, they are asked to understand problems and how they relate to specific SDGs. This prepares students to become changemakers who approach their work with curiosity, compassion, and collaboration in mind.
During the 2021 competition, a team of Grebel students from the Peace and Conflict Studies and Master of Peace and Conflict Studies programs tackled the issue of student food insecurity at the University of Waterloo. These students, who placed second at the Map the System Campus Finals, were supported in their learning during the competition by Centre Director Paul Heidebrecht through his Map the System seminar course.
Creating space for experimentation and learning is one way that the Centre is helping to equip student peacemakers to better address the SDGs. Urgent action is necessary to solve environmental and social problems facing the world today. As the 2022 Map the System competition ramps up, students have the opportunity to join a community of passionate individuals across their campus who are ready to begin their learning journeys.
Top Three teams in the UWaterloo Map the System Campus Finals
The Grebel Peace Incubator
As the home of PeaceTech in Waterloo, the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement supports new ventures using tech to create a more peaceful and just world, in a program for start-ups now known as the “Grebel Peace Incubator.” Playing a vital role in the University of Waterloo’s innovation ecosystem, the Grebel Peace Incubator advances expansive and innovative understandings and practices of peace locally and globally.
