A concept doc · May 2026
What if we taught peacemaking the way the LDS Church teaches self-reliance — small cohorts, a workbook anyone can run, weekly action commitments, and a community that keeps showing up? Here's what that could look like, and why it might be the most concentrated possible delivery of what Peacemakers is for.
The reference model
The LDS self-reliance courses work because of a few structural choices that turn out to map almost perfectly onto what peacemaking actually requires. Small peer-facilitated cohorts of eight to twelve people. Weekly action commitments between sessions, with public report-back the following week. A workbook so foolproof that anyone can run a group, anywhere. Twelve sessions of around two hours. Free or near-free. Infinitely replicable.
Peacemaking is a practice, not a body of knowledge. You don't get more peaceful by reading about it. You get more peaceful by repeatedly trying it in real life, reflecting on what happened, and showing up the next week to a group of people doing the same. The commit-act-report-back loop is the engine of the self-reliance model — and it's exactly the engine peacemaking needs. Most peace and conflict education is information-dense and behavior-light. This would invert that.
"Peacemaking doesn't change you when you understand it. It changes you when you try it on a Tuesday and report back on a Thursday."
Where it has to be adapted
The self-reliance courses are rooted in one faith — they open with LDS scripture, prayer, and shared theological assumptions. A Peacemakers course is explicitly for people of all faiths, identities, communities, and circumstances. So the grounding has to come from multiple wisdom traditions in parallel. Each week pulls peacemaking principles from Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Indigenous, and secular humanist sources — and asks participants to bring their own. This is harder to design well, but more honest to who would actually take it.
The self-reliance courses are upbeat and forward-leaning. A peacemaking course can't be — not if it wants to be trusted. The hard truth has to come first: this work will cost you something. It will be tested by people you love. It will rarely produce visible wins. It is lonely without a community. A serious peacemaking curriculum opens by saying so. That honesty is what would distinguish it from the saccharine versions already out there.
The framing the course holds: the hard, the good, and how peace-loving people of all faiths, identities, communities, and circumstances can take action to create more peace.
The arc
Ten weeks instead of twelve to lower the commitment ask. Each week is a principle, a skill, and a practice — never just one of those. A short Prep-Work step sits before Session 01, to orient participants to what they have signed up for before the cohort meets.
Prep-Work · Before the cohort meets
A short self-guided orientation between the interview and the first session. Three questions to sit with, a baseline reflection, and the practical work of setting up for ten weeks.
01
Not peacekeeping. Not avoiding conflict. Not neutrality. The hard truth that this will cost you something.
Read outline →
02
Reactivity, anger, fear. Your own work first — because nothing else holds without it.
Read outline →
03
The discipline of staying curious longer than is comfortable.
Read outline →
04
Crossing political, religious, generational, and identity lines without flattening anyone.
Read outline →
05
Repair, accountability, and the difference between an apology and a change in behavior.
Read outline →
06
Forgiveness without bypassing. Boundaries without revenge.
Read outline →
07
Confronting injustice peacefully — and the line between peacemaking and complicity.
Read outline →
08
What to do when the conflict isn't yours but you're in the room.
Read outline →
09
Partners, kids, parents, siblings — usually the hardest place to practice.
Read outline →
10
The community you build, the habits you keep, and what's next when the course ends.
Read outline →
The weekly rhythm
The repeatability is the point. Once participants know the rhythm, the cohort can run itself.
Open
How did last week's commitment go? Honest, not performative.
Learn
One idea, told through stories from multiple traditions.
Discuss
Guided questions. Deep listening. No debate.
Practice
A role-play or exercise that puts the skill into your body.
Commit
One concrete thing you'll do before next week, shared with a partner.
For the facilitator
One document that holds the whole shape of the work — what to read before your first cohort, the session rhythm, each week at a glance, what to do between sessions, what to do when things go off-script, and the five disciplines of facilitation. Written for the person actually running the room.
Reference · For the cohort and the facilitator
Every term the course introduces — the pause, the four moves, the long pause, the dodges, the traps, the script break — in one place, organized by week. For looking things up between sessions, or for the facilitator prepping a specific week.
Reference · For going deeper
Every source the course cites, gathered in one place with primary-source links where available. Organized by week, with the supplemental research pages indexed separately. For autodidacts, for facilitator prep, and for anyone using the bibliography as a map of the wider terrain.
Reference · For prospective participants
The questions people ask most often when considering signing up — about the course, the commitment, fit, logistics, and what comes after. Where we have firm answers, we give them. Where we don't yet, we say so. Updated as the pilot teaches us what people most want to know.
Internal · Working document
An honest first-pass audit of the curriculum — what holds up, what carries unexamined assumptions (class, family structure, neurotype, position of relative power, cultural specificity, trauma context), and the targeted edits that would broaden the course's reach without rewriting it. Conducted from inside the materials; a second pass by outside readers is the next work stream.
Strategic fit
This is where the model gets interesting strategically. Validation, tools, and community are the three on-ramps Peacemakers offers. A ten-week cohort happens to deliver all three at once — concentrated, sequenced, and reinforced weekly.
The weekly opening share — how last week's commitment went — names how hard this work is. Out loud. Every week. That's validation by design, not by accident.
Each session leaves participants with a new skill, frame, or practice. Ten weeks, ten tools — and the practice exercise puts each one into the body before the week ends.
The cohort itself becomes a peacemaking community. By week ten, participants don't just know each other — they've watched each other try, fail, repair, and keep going.
Rollout
Four phases, two distribution paths. Each phase earns the next — we don't pilot until the materials exist, we don't refine until the pilot teaches us something, and we don't distribute until the materials are sturdy enough to hold up in someone else's hands.
Phase 01 · Build
Building the workbook is where we figure out what we actually believe about peace — which wisdom traditions we cite, which we don't, what language fits our voice, which stories belong, and where we land on the hardest questions (forgiveness without bypassing, confronting injustice without losing peace, the line between peacemaking and complicity). We can't outsource this work and we can't compress it. Building the materials is strategy work disguised as content work, and it's load-bearing for everything that follows. The doing is the deciding.
Phase 02 · Pilot
Lindsey facilitates the early pilots — and her job isn't to deliver finished material. It's to find what works, what falls flat, and where the workbook has to be different. The content gets pressure-tested by real people in a real room. Her notes become the next version of the curriculum. Two or three pilots are probably enough to know what to keep, what to cut, and what's missing.
Before joining a pilot cohort, each prospective participant has a one-on-one conversation with Lindsey. The interview is not a filter for any particular kind of person — the course is built for everyone willing to do the work, across faith traditions, identities, communities, and circumstances. It is a readiness check, and a mutual conversation about what the ten weeks will ask. Some people, after the conversation, will decide this isn't the right moment for them. That is welcomed, not treated as failure.
→ Who this course is for — and what the interview covers → Cohort formation protocolPhase 03 · Refine
After enough pilots, we know what the cohort actually needs and what's noise. The workbook gets shorter. The facilitator guide gets clearer. We re-test with someone who has never met us — if they can pick up the materials and run a group from cold, the model is ready. If they can't, we keep editing.
Phase 04 · Distribute
Once the materials hold up in other people's hands, there are two parallel paths into circulation. One funds the org. The other reaches the people who can't form a group on their own.
People buy the workbook and facilitator guide at a modest price and lead conversations in their own communities — churches, mosques, synagogues, workplaces, neighborhoods, dinner tables. The small margin funds Peacemakers and keeps the price low enough that no one is priced out of the work.
For people who can't or don't want to form their own group, Peacemakers runs virtual cohorts. Anyone can join solo or with one friend. Same materials, same rhythm, same ten weeks — facilitated by us or by trained facilitators over video. This is how we reach the person who wants to do the work but doesn't have a community ready to do it with them.
Beyond the curriculum
The ten weekly outlines and the supplemental research pages are one half of what the course needs. The other half is the infrastructure that makes the course safe, accessible, repeatable, and sustainable past the cohort. Each of these is its own work stream — most still to be built.
The product itself. A workbook each participant carries — session pages to write on, the daily small to track, between-sessions prompts, the baseline reflection (from Prep-Work) revisited in Week 10. Without this, the course is currently a facilitator outline, not a course.
Not just the wisdom-style facilitator notes that exist now, but the actual words — opening sentences, transitions, the exact framing for the harder practices. So a first-time facilitator can run a cohort cold and not improvise.
The 166 hours per week the cohort isn't meeting. A daily journal prompt, a single weekly reading, a brief reminder of the practice, something to keep the work in contact with the participant between sessions. This is part of the workbook.
The materials currently assume one mode of engagement — verbal share, handwritten reflection, four-minute listen, physical pause. Adaptations for deaf participants, autistic participants, people with anxiety conditions, people who can't write by hand, people for whom the standard practices won't work as-is.
Week 10 names the community of practice as a habit and asks participants to commit to one — but the course itself doesn't yet offer infrastructure. A monthly alumni call, a platform for cohort reunions, a graduated community that lets the practice keep being practiced.
Weeks 05, 06, 07, and 09 may surface serious material — abuse, severe family conflict, mental health crisis. We need a formal framework: confidentiality agreements, mandatory-reporting situations, when and how to refer a participant out mid-course, what facilitators are and are not trained to handle.
For the pilot phase especially, this is essential. Baseline survey at Prep-Work. Outcome measures at Week 10. Follow-up at 3 months, 6 months, a year. Without this, pilots produce stories but not signal — and the refinement phase has nothing rigorous to refine against.
The materials assume in-person. Phase 04 imagines virtual cohorts for individuals and pairs — but the practices, especially the four-minute listen, the appreciation round, and the three-person mediation triads, will need real redesign for video, not just "do the same thing on Zoom."
None of these block Phase 01 (Build the curriculum). All of them shape Phase 02 (Pilot) and Phase 03 (Refine). Naming them now keeps the work visible — and keeps us honest that the curriculum is the spine, not the whole skeleton.
Next moves
Before building the whole curriculum, pilot small. The facilitator guide is where these models live or die — if a friend can run a cohort without ever having attended one, the model is working.