How to Plan a Conference (Round Two)

The peace conference 2013 was sort of my pet project (much as I enjoyed round-one). It wasn’t my project (these sorts of things are always done in committee, it’s the Mennonite way), but I grew quite attached to this project. 

This year we introduced “Do No Harm.” This tool based on Mary Anderson’s book (of the same title) to help practitioners examine how aid in conflict areas can cause more harm than good. It’s since been expanded and renamed “local capacities for peace.” We wanted to help our local partners identify resources that either connect people or divide people in areas where they work. After all, we want to leave people better than when we started to work with them. It’s much easier said than done.

Developing this material started months in advance. We boiled down ideas into simple lessons so that everyone could take away something. The process also involved finding a facilitator willing to teach the material in Khmer. We finally settled on the executive director of one of our partner organizations with a background in this material. Also, we were proud to have a female facilitator to demonstrate our support for female leaders in Cambodia (Cambodia doesn't have many women leaders). Together with her, we adapted the content further and translated parts of it.

Late August 2013, we finally pulled off the conference. We had all 14 local partners send two people with a total of 28 people across all our sectors from education to agriculture. Many had attended last year’s conference and I felt immense satisfaction as people shrieked happily upon seeing friends they had made last year. This familiarity set a comfortable relaxed tone which would have been impossible last year.

This year the conference was hosted in Sihanoukville, a location which has featured repeatedly during my Cambodian story. It’s the most popular conference destination. Cambodians like to feel they went somewhere and did something on a conference or workshop, and so we complied with this expectation.

Like last year, the workshop was held in Khmer. Our partners love this aspect of the program. It means that I cannot help with much, but you see how much more comfortable participants feel when they are speaking in their own language. Overall, they responded well to the content. Many of the urban participants working in peacebuilding seemed to grasp the ideas easily as it wasn’t too far outside concepts they were already familiar with. Some of the rural participants working in agriculture or education struggled with a theoretical framework that didn’t seem immediately applicable to their daily work. For this reason, we may need to do a follow-up, or break the content down even further (the challenge of working with so many partners with such varied backgrounds!).

However, people loved the fellowship of the conference. We spent time at the beach together and friendships were forged or furthered over seafood and fried rice. One afternoon we played group games on the beach which entertained the conference participants and others watching on the beach. 

Overall, it was a fantastic learning experience. The continuing political instability plaguing us since the July elections didn’t dissuade attendance, as feared. Conferences take a lot of work to organize and to further complicate things, Cambodians have a lot of expectations. Balancing preferences with a small budget and logistical realities is an art which I prefer to avoid entirely. But when it comes to reflecting on impact and strategies for doing-no-harm, it always makes for a good time.