Washington, DC (PRWEB) August 15, 2011
The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP), the leading membership organization for peacebuilding around the world, is proud to announce that Melanie Greenberg will become President and CEO as of September 6, 2011. Ms. Greenberg, a lawyer and conflict resolution expert, has dedicated her career to strengthening the field of peacebuilding and broadening the range of actors working to remediate the root causes of conflict. Ms. Greenberg succeeds Charles “Chic” Dambach, who left AfP to become Chief of Staff for Congressman John Garamendi (D-CA).
"The AfP Board of Directors feels Melanie is the ideal person to expand how AfP serves its members through fostering innovative practices and collaborations on the ground, and amplifying the field’s impact on policy debates in our nation's capital," said Board Chair Robert Ricigliano. “With her broad experience in the peacebuilding field, and her deep intellectual understanding of the issues central to peace and security, she is ideally poised to bring AfP’s work to a new level.”
“I am thrilled to have the opportunity to lead AfP during this critical time for peacebuilding, and the world,” said Ms. Greenberg. “I have been actively involved with AfP from its inception, and I feel that its members have opportunities now to create change, work with new partners in the public and private sectors, and develop new ways of conceptualizing conflict and peace that never would have been possible before.”
Stephen Del Rosso, Program Director of the International Peace & Security Program at the Carnegie Corporation, supports the move as well, saying "Given Melanie's relevant experience, and deep knowledge and understanding of the challenges and opportunities of peacebuilding, she is ideally qualified to lead the AfP. At this crucial moment in this still developing field, Melanie is the right person at the right time to take on this important task."
As director of the Conflict Resolution Program at the Hewlett Foundation, Ms. Greenberg more than doubled the foundation’s funding for international conflict resolution, and expanded the definition of peacebuilding to include concepts of democracy, civil society building, and transitional justice. She continued this mission later as Founder and President of the Cypress Fund for Peace and Security. In her academic work, Ms. Greenberg helped lead two research centers at Stanford University during a time of great change in post-Cold War conceptions of peace and security, and later served as a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, focusing on issues of post-conflict justice and reconciliation. Ms. Greenberg teaches, trains and writes in a broad range of areas related to international security, international law and peacebuilding, and she has facilitated peacebuilding initiatives in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and the Caucasus. She holds an AB from Harvard University and a JD from Stanford Law School, and lives in Washington, DC with her husband and two teenage children.
About the Alliance for Peacebuilding
The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) is the institutional home of the peacebuilding community. As a connector of people and institutions, AfP is a platform for advocacy, innovation and collaboration. AfP promotes peacebuilding at the grassroots level and works with Congress, the Department of State and the US Agency for International Development to incorporate peacebuilding concepts and strategies into U.S. foreign policy. Through the innovative Peacebuilding Systems Project, a more comprehensive method of analyzing conflict that involves looking at the “whole of community,” and the BEFORE Project, an incubator for preventing the outbreak of war, AfP and its partners are reducing the frequency and severity of violent conflict around the world. To foster a collective impact that far surpasses individual efforts, AfP brings together actors involved in specific conflicts via Collaboration Connections and creates a platform with the US Institute of Peace for funders and implementers to address the challenges of evaluation in the Peacebuilding Evaluation Project.
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