Technology, Changemaking and Faith-based Organization

"Tolerance is not enough to be taught, it should be experienced."

I grew up in Muslim majority with strong Islamic value. Never had experienced to meet, talk and be friend with non-muslim friends until the age of 15 years old or when I entered biggest school in my hometown. I get used to similarity, even when there was transfer student in my elementary school wearing sunglasses, it looked weird for me, even I never thought she was bad student.

Until experiences from time to time teach me about tolerance and diversity, more beyond the difference of religion, more complex than, "oh you are non-muslimm, you are non-Javanese, you are not wearing hijab, you are different." Until many hatreds, conflict, and war I heard and saw with my bare eyes or in media happened. 

In my current workplace, Ashoka (has been here for 2.5 years), I get used to work with global diverse of culture, language, and religion. In a year, the office celebrates different festives to respect everyone. That's also voluntary, because something like culture and religion is private territory. My coworkers and partners in my workplaces are mostly non-moeslim, but it doesn't hinder us to respect and value each other, of course without compromising our own belief.

Share to you the short panel where I participated to facilitate conversation with three awesome changemakers from three different background. It was an integral part of The Technology and Humanity Forum, a joint program of Ashoka Singapore/Malaysia with Google.org that was held on last November 10th. Watch the full conversation here. Check the Ashoka Indonesia YouTube channel. There is other eight conversations with different topics available. Enjoy!

The Panelist

Helmy Pribadi – Program Director at MA’ARIF Institute. MA’ARIF Institute is a leading NGO and Think Tank for a Pluralism-Tolerance and Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism issue in Indonesia since 2003 through promoting the value of Islam, Indonesia and humanity. He has been conducting a Preventing Violence Extremism (PVE) project especially on how to build a school-based community resilience since 2010 until now. He involved project intervention with teachers, students, principal and school supervisors. 

Aurelia Jessica – a 16 years old changemaker, the founder of Be on In Diversity (BOID) community. At the age of 13, Jessica launched BOID, a movement to foster tolerance, acceptance, and diversity by engaging young people of different backgrounds through casual and fun activities. Starting with her own school in Surabaya, Jessica and her team strive to create a more inclusive and tolerant society where changemaking can flourish for the good of all. 

Irfan Amalee – Co-founder  and Director of Peace Generation Indonesia, organization that works on Peace Education that focus on development training, media development, campaign and activate peace content. Through the use of creative and playful media, PeaceGen has instructed more than 50,000 students in Southeast Asia in the principles of peace. He has more than 15 years of experience in publishing book and creative media including 12 peace modules. Irfan received a lot of recognition and awarded, including Ashoka Fellows since 2017. 

We all know that human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. But in fact, there are still a lot of marginalization, discrimination, hatred, and 

violence practices happened around us, because of different race, ethnicity, religion, belief, sexual orientation, and gender identity. And it happens everywhere, not only in Indonesia, but globally. So our discussion here would be focusing on understanding the issue and how the technology, changemaking, and faith based organization can play a role to address that issue. 

What do you think the exact problem we all are encountering and how bad the consequence is for our society?

Irfan Amalee – If  we are talking about the problem, let’s see from three different layers of problem. The top one is violence/terrorism action, the number of case is not big but the impact is huge to pay. The second layer is radicalism is something to do in mind. It is sometime hard to see and as one step before terrorism action. The number is bigger before it turns to action. The bottom layer is intolerance. It’s in the deeper level of individual, like we don’t want to have friends with different religion. PeaceGen is working in the bottom layer to prevent the violence become bigger, that’s why we use education approach. The treatment will be higher, more complex and require more effort to tackle the higher layers. Intolerance in the form of fanaticism and lack of empathy is not merely about religion. We can feel and see the intolerance in any field of life and very wild issue.

Can you share why did you start BOID or what inspired you to create that movement
Aurelia Jessica – There is one point of experience that pushed me to act. In my childhood, I grew up in environment which didn’t have strong tolerance culture especially in school. That experience was carried on until junior high school and made me feel uncomfortable. Therefore I encouraged myself to not be silent anymore about the issue, start to act without waiting others to act. Sometimes I ask my self, if I choose to be silent and wait for other people to act, how long do I have to wait until the change happens? That question bothered me and with support from my surrounding, I started community to help to fight this issue. From this community, I hope to inspire my friends and other young people in school and spread to larger society. Perspective has important role in this issue, I believe every young people has potential to be changemaker and peace builder in society. 

Who are in this issue? and who are the key stakeholder to interfere in peacebuilding effort?

Helmy Pribady – a lot of actors in this issue but based on the experiences in MA’ARIF, started from 2010 until now, we are focusing on school based community resilience. We interfere every element in school; student, teachers, school supervisor, principal, also parent. We see the school as strategic community to promote tolerance society. We hope that school is not only teach how peace must be built but all stakeholders in school can experience peace and tolerance in the same time. If we interfere the school, we invest on future.

What is your/your organization strategy to promote peace and more tolerance society, even further to create everyone a peacebuilder?

Irfan Amalee – we try to do differently on addressing this issue because our audience are mostly millennial and Z generation, so we have to use their language. PeaceGen started with basic value of peace, as formula from beginning. We started this formula 13 years ago, started with simple module, along the time it is evolving to adjust with the audiences. We see audience as player generation; they are learning by playing. So we incorporate learning through gamification and game based learning. They don’t like teaching even learning, so we try how to combine learning and playing so in the last 5 years, we always use games as main tools, and it proved can attract more audience, because sometimes when we teach peace, only peace people will come. But with game, more people from outside circle can join. We use board game without requiring classes or school, even when we have one table and board game, we can do it. We did teaching in formal way in school but also now in school, we incorporate learning and gamification together. We keep adjusting how to deliver our value. Unless it will be hard to spread the value of peace and tolerance. We avoid echo chamber effect where we keep echoing our peace value to people who has already peaceful, they are not our target. The challenge is how to reach more people because intolerance and radicalism run very fast, we need to run faster than them.

Helmy Pribadi – the program we have been conducting is mostly in school as what we called school based community resilience. Mostly the project will follow the needs from actors in school, for instance, we have program for student like Jambore (student convening) to gather 100 students all across Indonesia. We usually receive 1000 applicants with high enthusiasm. We believe that tolerance is not enough to be taught, we must experience. Through that gathering, they can know each other, not only from religion diversity but also from very individual background. Not only student but also teacher to accompany them, we provide supplement book to strengthen their skill to educate tolerance to school community.

Aurelia Jessica – our strategy is to uplifting the movement in society and build connection of every individual people especially on younger generation. We do it by cooperation with diverse community around by instilling trust among people to spread love, kind and togetherness. We want everyone realize that we are all human being and social creature. We are wired with connection and we cant live individually. We need to live together peacefully. 

With the massive use of technology, how do you see technology play a role in this issue?

Irfan Amalee – I should thank to COVID-19 that force us to be aware of technology. Previously our coverage is small and limit. For instance when we conducted Peacesantren Ramadhan, we usually conducted offline in 15-20 cities in Indonesia for 3-5 days event to gather diverse communities. The situation this year forced us to think creatively to try different ways. I never imagined we can make it online, even though the experience was exactly the same but there is impact from the activity. We are also forced (by the situation) to make module that fit with the platform. Another thing is, for the first time, we can shift the gathering for all agent of peace all over Indonesia online. We usually have to make it once a year, because it requires a lot of cost, but with online platform we can make it every month. It seems like God want to tell us that technology can serve our mission. We go further beyond we imagined with technology. Now we are also converting the board game into online, also organize module with online access. We also want to try to create office-less. 

Helmy Pribadi – agree that technology help us to serve our mission. In MA’ARIF, we have project to give online training for 1200 lectures in universities in Indonesia, and 3600 teachers across Indonesia to join online course on digital literacy. If this happened before pandemic, we can only reach out very few people and will cost a lot energy and resource. With tech we can reaches the impact faster and efficient. 

What we as the audience here can do to join the effort and together make our society more tolerance and become a peace builder?

Aurelia Jessica - First thing we should know is to trust ourselves, that we are good human, we have potential to contribute in society. We might be thinking we are ordinary people, we don’t have enough power or don’t give contribution to create change. But the fact is, without see the economic or social background, we all have our own power that make us unique. We should develop it to create positive change now and in the future. We can start make any change by doing small thing by spreading love and kindness around us. Start with family, friend, and neighborhood. Treat them like siblings. We can feel the tolerance and togetherness as one social creature. 

How to incorporate faith-based capacity building in organization without having to seem like promoting one religion/faith vs another?

Irfan Amalee – From the beginning, PeaceGen incorporates faith-based and religion to spread the peace and tolerance value. In the first module, we incorporated Islamic module because we want to address Muslim community first. When we started to talk to Christian community, we use different module. We don’t have neutral/universal one because when we deliver content based on audience value/belief, it will be more connected. If we use universal approach to address everyone, we actually will not be related to anyone, but if we use certain religion for different community of belief, your members of organization who embrace the faith will be so much related with audience. We work with the people from different religions, like with Islam, Christian, and now Buddhist. Of course it requires more effort because we need to address the community one by one. But they have ownership when we are talking to them, we recognize their belief. So the key is really work with them, not work for them. No need to address all in one go but we can do it one by one.

Do you see/feel the intolerance issue around you? what do you think we can do to address that issue together? share your thought in comment :)