Municipal leaders building peace project is funded by New York University (NYU) and lead by the Peace Research and Education Program (PREP), is to understand locally lead impact in conflict- affected countries, this program is a collaboration between NYU, Resurpaz (Colombia) and Moomken (Libya).

Objective One: Undertake applied research exploring ways in which community-based organizations can utilize participatory action research methodologies to generate grassroots understandings of how municipal leaders and communities themselves define “impact” and bring this learning to the related communities of practice globally.

Objective Two: Bolster the evaluation skills of local partners, improving their capacity to generate their own inductive research questions and produce local knowledge related to the promotion of peace and human rights.

Moomken and New York University team were able for the first time to meet the communication committee (A committee that was formed by both municipality Nalut and Batin Al-Jabal as part of a project conducted by Moomken funded by USIP, in order to promote communication between the two municipalities after long-standing conflicts). The training was fruitful in terms of strengthening the relations between the teams. The communication committee members had the opportunity to highlight the wonderful work they are doing, that they are the pioneers of change within their municipalities and are truly heroes in their heroic mission to build peace within the region. The team gained a better understanding of the grand image of what we are doing on this research and the reason behind asking the survey questions to the municipal leaders.

The project implementation started at the end of May 2021, when the interviews were conducted by our local researchers in both Nalut and Batin Al Jabal. Also, we have conducted a focus group in each municipality and another focus group was implemented in Nalut by Moomken team of researchers with active women from Nalut.