Interview with Ruairi Nolan from Peace Direct (September 2014)
- What exactly is it what you are doing?
Peace Direct is a peacebuilding organisation. We support the work of local peace groups around the world, by fundraising for their projects and partnering long term to help them grow. We currently work with partners in 10 countries across Africa and Asia. More information on Peace Direct can be found here: www.peacedirect.org
- How long have you been working for Peace Direct and what do you like most about your work there?
I’ve been at Peace Direct for 5 years. The most enjoyable thing for me is definitely the opportunity to work with some amazing peacebuilders around the world. The work they do in Sri Lanka, DRC, Pakistan and beyond is remarkably brave and incredibly important. It’s certainly an honour to get to work with them.
- What do you think to what extend impacts your individual work and the work of Peace Direct in general the society?
At Peace Direct we have a strong focus on the impact of our work. With each partner, we work with them to help them try and measure what they achieve. Of course it is very difficult to measure precisely a concept such as peace. However, our partners have all achieved remarkable things in preventing violence or building long-term peace. You can read about what each partner has done on our website.
- How have you heard about PerMondo?
We were trying to think of a solution for how we could get some translations done. A colleague did some online research, and we had the good fortune that he found PerMondo!
- For what did you need the translation(s)?
Peace Direct also publishes a website called Insight on Conflict: www.insightonconflict.org . The purpose of the site is to showcase interesting peacebuilding organisations around the world, and provide useful resources on local peacebuilding. We have profiled over 850 organisations so far in 26 different conflict regions.
The site is published in English but we do include some information in French and Spanish, including monthly newsletters to help the local peacebuilding organisations find funding and other opportunities.
Also: each year we run a funding competition called Tomorrow’s Peacebuilders (http://www.insightonconflict.org/tomorrows-peacebuilders/ ) that is open to groups anywhere in the world. PerMondo volunteers have helped translate forms from French and Spanish language organisations.
- What would you tell the voluntary translators?
Our sincere thanks! We are a small organisation but we’re producing an ambitious website with a huge amount of information. In fact, we’ve just two part time people working on the site, but we’ve been able to put a huge amount of information online thanks to the help of various volunteers who research and write a lot of what we publish. The volunteer translators are a key part of the team of people who help allow us to publish all this information; without their help we would be limited to publishing only in English, which would be a real shame, but we simply don’t have the budget to pay for translations.
I know how much time doing good translations take, so we’re very grateful for the people around the world who have chosen to give their time to help our project. Merci, gracias, thank you!
Thank you Ruairi!
