Peacebuilding Starts at Home
Chip Hauss – Alliance for Peacebuilding
Peacebuilding Starts at Home is an invitation masquerading as a book.
Now, I would like to thank the Peace, Harmony, and Joy team for giving me the opportunity to personally extend that invitation to each and every one of its supporters. In the book, I guide readers through what we at the Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) call the Peacebuilding Starts at Home loop which amounts a generic road map that anyone could follow. Our paths are the same:
The values and beliefs underlying the Peace, Harmony, and Joy Way are an integral part of what we are trying to accomplish
Working together will help take what both organizations are trying to accomplish to scale
A Starting Point:
I have to admit that I did not have the kinds of people I have met through the Peace, Harmony, and Joy community in mind when I first planned Peacebuilding begins at Home. When I read Scott and Yossi’s original book, I realized that what they were building went beyond what most Peace organizations focus on as far as scaling up individual peace of mind is concerned.
Then, when I was in Atlanta in early 2025 for the New Pluralists gathering I had a chance to sit down with Scott Frank at which point I realized that leaving out networks like this PHJ meant that the book would have a huge hole as a result.
As the structure of my book was pretty much set in stone at the time, I haven’t included what I was learning from Scott and the rest of you in its pages.
But the more we got into the work, the more we realized that we had to make the second meaning of the word home an equally important part of our efforts. Few of us can have much of an impact at the national level at this point. However, all of us can make a difference if we concentrate on life in our personal ecosystems—in our literal homes, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, houses of worship, and other places where we humans gather.
Therein lies the contribution that the PHJ community can make. To see why, just consider these words that are featured on your own web site,
“We offer practical tools and experiences that support personal growth, stronger relationships, and a more connected world.
At its core, PHJ Way is a philosophy. It becomes real through practice and is amplified in community—transforming how we live, together.”
Now for the Invitation
I wanted to put our work in context because most of the people I’ve met in the PHJ community have not been part of the traditional peacebuilding world to which I’ve dedicated the last sixty years of my life.
We ask you, first, to build on what you are already doing and become part of what we are calling the Ten Get Ten campaign. Now, instead of “just” talking with your friends and neighbors and relatives and coworkers about the PHJ Way, you can help us build a much larger community of Americans who think of themselves as peacebuilders and will make the values of the PJH Way and AfP a central part of their lives.
Second, we will ask the PHJ team to join the Peacebuilding Starts at Home hub which will have two main goals that go beyond efforts to take our words to scale inwardly (which you all do as well as anyone I’ve met), but also help take our work to scale “outwardly” by spreading the message in new ways and in new communities around the country.
Think you can change the world?
We do.
Making up for Lost Time
That didn’t bother me all that much, because writing the book was never our main goal. Rather, I wrote it in order to issue an invitation. Our real goal is to use it as one of many tools for building a community and a true peace.
That effort can be summed up in the two meanings of the word “home” that are implicit in the logo that we are currently using.
As the map suggests, AfP’s first instinct was to think in terms of our home country. That makes sense since almost all of our nearly 300 member organizations do almost all of their work abroad. However, the events of the last decade or so have convinced us that we have to build peace on our home turf as well.
