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Thomas Keown, Founder, Many Hopes
He was the President of the United States of America, I was a 17 year-old living on a small farm in a small corner of Northern Ireland, and I resented his “help”. On one hand it was ridiculous. On the other, it made sense.
It was 1995 and peace talks were happening in Belfast to try and end the almost 30 years of violence that had killed and bereaved thousands of us. We were a tiny country of 1.6 million and the most powerful man in the world was trying to help and my attitude was “Don’t you have problems in your own country to be solving? You don’t understand how things are done here so let us take care of our own things ourselves.”
I went on to work – at a pretty insignificant level – for one of the Northern Irish politicians who architected and signed the Belfast Peace Agreement in 1998. Today I lead Many Hopes (link to www.manyhopes.org) and the biggest learning of that time constantly informs what and how we do.
That learning was that real change that lasts and transforms must come from inside. Just like real change in you, the person, that lasts and transforms has to come from inside you, the person, so to real change in communities and countries has to come from inside. External help is often, maybe always, necessary but to be effective it has to come alongside internal hunger for change. And when it does, it is powerful. Unstoppable even.
Nobody wanted the violence back home to end more than those of us who lived through it. Nobody wants famine to end more than those who are hungry, nobody wants corruption to end more than those exploited by it, and nobody wants to go to school more than the child denied an education. The summary might be that “Nobody cares more about justice than those who have suffered injustice.”
Survivors of abuse and exploitation have a unique and tenacious desire to do something about the causes of what they survived. They have a unique insight into it because they are the only people on earth with lived experience-of it.
Yet survivors are usually excluded from conversations about solutions.
Survivors often lack access to the education and support that would unlock the power of the desire they have to prevent others suffering what they had to. That’s massively wasteful and utterly unnecessary.
When I first visited Kenya in 2007 I met dozens of children who had survived horrible abuses. I was able to make real change in my hometown and beyond, because I had access to education and a loving home…. And I knew that kids like them could absolutely do the same, if they had the same.
And that’s why Many Hopes exists. We exist to equip survivors with the education and support they need to be changemakers in their communities.
Survivor driven change believes that children who have survived slavery or trafficking or abandonment are not a problem to be solved but a solution waiting to be unleashed if we join them, and provide access to what they need in order to do the justice they desire.
Survivor-driven change believes that charity is essential, but charity by itself is insufficient.
Survivor-driven change believes that marrying desire inside a community with external influence and resources equals multi-generational transformation.
I believe it because I’ve seen it in 7 countries in 3 continents.
And I’m just getting started.
