What is Systems Change & Peacebuilding?
The most difficult challenges we face today don’t exist in isolation. Rather they are the result of interacting factors, such as poverty, pandemics, injustice, violence, ecological damage, climate change and political polarization.
Shifting these systems toward health, well-being and sustainable peace requires institutions and practitioners that can engage with these complex social-ecological challenges and interacting systems at multiple levels, including at the individual, interpersonal, community and global scales.
The Systems Change Learning Cycle
The UW-Milwaukee Institute for Systems Change and Peacebuilding strives to align university and community interests in equitable partnership to engage with these complex and ever-changing systemic drivers.
Using the Systems Change Learning Cycle, we work alongside partners to co-create community-based initiatives that engage these challenges. The Institute works to bridge theory and research with applied research and practice. This means valuing local, lived and traditional knowledge as essential in research, evaluation and learning.
Community Visioning
View descriptionSystems Inquiry
View descriptionSeek Leverage
View descriptionNews
- Institute for Systems Change and Peacebuilding names new professorshipMarie Sandy, associate professor in the School of Education, has been named the new Wm. Collins …
- Jordanian student brings her passion for peacebuilding to MilwaukeeRawand Yazaw in 2018 with students from Prince Hamza Bin Al Hussein School in Jordan. …
- Westlawn event helps create healthier environment for neighborhoodGet Wheelin’ in Westlawn” is a community bike ride and bike repair event, but it’s …
Community Visioning
Convene UWM and community members to facilitate conversations around shared challenges and shared future visions in order to cultivate collaborative networks and enduring partnerships.
Systems Inquiry
Engage participatory methods and systems tools to develop shared language, explore theories of change and create collective understanding of complex challenges.
Seek Leverage
Develop strategies for change and identify the potential for co-designed initiatives that enhance equity, community resilience and well-being.
Align Interests
Enable coordinated and collective action, and pursue funding for community-driven projects that support interprofessional and transdisciplinary research as well as learning and professional practice.
Monitor & Evaluate
Employ holistic complexity-aware monitoring and evaluation methodologies using qualitative and quantitative methods that inform learning and adaptive changes based on the information gathered.
Learn & Adapt
Accompany UWM and community partners in communicating the information gathered, incorporating feedback, and re-evaluating vision and strategies for continued progress.