Time:
3:00pm Central Europe & Central Africa (2:00pm UK & Western Africa, 4:00pm East Africa and Eastern Europe, 9:00am USA Eastern, 6:30pm India Time)
Meeting Theme:
Many of us come to peacebuilding because we care deeply about reconciliation, justice, and healing. Yet religious systems have often done an excellent job of suppressing conflict while underpreparing people for it. We are taught that harmony means silence, that disagreement is disloyalty, and that conflict is a failure of faith or character. When conflict inevitably arises, we can find ourselves collapsing into avoidance, dishonesty, guilt, or shame—what looks like peace on the surface, but is often deferred rupture.
In this session, Mueni Mutinda and Sobia Ali-Faisal of Seed Room Consulting invite us to explore what they call “the work before conflict.” Drawing on their experience in equity and social justice work, they will help us examine the internal groundwork that makes authentic peacebuilding possible: understanding our own relationship to conflict, recognizing the ways trauma and insecurity shape our reactions, and learning to navigate difference with greater honesty and compassion. Rather than beginning with conflict resolution, this conversation asks a more foundational question: What foundations must be laid so that peacebuilding is not a Band-Aid on unexamined wounds, but a genuine practice rooted in honesty, compassion, and relational accountability?
About Our Guests
Seed Room Consulting is an equity and social justice practice founded by Mueni Mutinda and Dr. Sobia Ali-Faisal—a Christian woman and a Muslim woman, both on active journeys of engaging, questioning, and deconstructing the toxic dynamics embedded in the religious traditions they were raised in, love, and maintain complicated relationships with. Their work helps organizations, institutions, and communities navigate the messy, tender, and often avoided terrain of difference. Drawing on liberation theology, intersectionality, systems thinking, and somatic practice, they believe that genuine transformation requires both the head and the heart—that conscientization is not merely intellectual awakening, but something embodied, felt, and practiced.
Questions to help prepare you for the meeting:
What messages about conflict, disagreement, and harmony did you inherit from your faith tradition?
Where have guilt, shame, or avoidance masqueraded as peace in your own life or community?
What internal work might be necessary before authentic peacebuilding can take place?
How might understanding our own insecurities, wounds, and relationship to difference change the way we engage conflict?
What does it look like to cultivate communities rooted in honesty, compassion, and relational accountability?
Facilitators:
