Social Impact Authors: How & Why Author Libby Hoffman Is Helping To Change Our World
The best leaders are those who make more leaders. The best social change organizations are those whose work is actually about the cultivation of new change leaders
As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Libby Hoffman.
Libby Hoffman, author of The Answers Are There: Building Peace From the Inside Out, is the founder and president of Catalyst for Peace (CFP), a private foundation helping empower local communities impacted by violence to lead their own path to peace and development. For 15 years her initiatives have focused on Sierra Leone, where, alongside local leaders and citizens, she helped the West African nation’s communities heal and repair following 11 years of brutal civil war. Several of CFP’s programs were instrumental in facilitating Sierra Leone’s post-Ebola response; all have become a major presence in Sierra Leone and a model for better approaches to international peacebuilding and aid work around the world.
Hoffman produced the award-winning documentary film Fambul Tok and co-authored a companion book by the same title. A former academic, she was the first female political science professor at Principia College and holds degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Williams College. The mother of three grown children, she divides her time between southern Maine and Washington, DC.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I grew up in a very loving home with parents deeply committed to serving the community and the world, committed to life-long learning and continuous self-improvement, and committed to faith. I grew up in and around a great deal of wealth, yet inside a family culture that taught me that wealth was for the purpose of serving the above commitments, accompanied by a demonstration of extravagant hospitality that meant ‘home’ was the place you extended grace and joy and comfort to as many people as possible. So when I came into $20 million dollars in my late 30s, it felt natural to use that windfall not for my own indulgence, but for building out into the world a platform to express and honor my deepest values and commitments — my faith-grounded vision for how the world was meant to work. Spirited dinner table conversations about political issues growing up cemented my activist orientation, and having an ideological ally in my sister helped cultivate my comfort with and ability to challenge my dad’s more traditional worldview. Growing up as a student of Christian Science, I became quite comfortable being the only one in a group to think a certain way, and this cultivated a comfort with intellectual independence that shaped and strengthened my activism. In many ways it feels like the perfect background to prepare me to be able to create, live out, and write about a new, inside-out architecture for international peace and development.
When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?
I went to college knowing I was called to work internationally, but having a very limited understanding of what that meant — limited by the norms and notions I was immersed in growing up. As a high schooler, I dreamt of becoming Secretary of State, or Vice President of an international bank (one had visited my house, and I thought he seemed exceedingly glamorous). At Williams College, where I was majoring in political science, I decided to minor in Russian studies, not so much because I liked Russian or wanted to learn about the country or the culture, but because — at the height of the Cold War, I thought that knowing Russian would give me access to the most important issues of the day. An express train to the top of the political power pyramid — which is where I thought I wanted to go.
And yet, my most pivotal college learning experience was nowhere on that pyramid. A class on nonviolence in theory and practice offered me new insights into power through its content and pedagogy. In the opening pages of The Politics of Nonviolent Action, the seminal work in the field and primary textbook of our class, Gene Sharp describes how nonviolent theory flips conventional thinking about power. “The exercise of power depends on the consent of the ruled who, by withdrawing that consent, can control and even destroy the power of their opponent,” Sharp wrote. (Sharp, p. 4) The power is actually in our consent — which only we control. For the first time, I was reading political theory that seemed totally in line with one of my core convictions, rooted in my faith: that nothing outside us inherently has power over us, and that we have not only the right but also the obligation to challenge the legitimacy of anything that tries to say otherwise. By reconceptualizing power, Sharp
defined the public arena in a way that recognized ordinary people as primary actors. I saw how that meant there was a space for me, as a person, and specifically a space for my thinking and consciousness, my inner self.
The structure and process of the class taught me about power in an embodied way. The course was student-run — we took turns leading the course discussions. There were no letter grades, but we got peer evaluations at the end of the course. With none of the traditional extrinsic rewards — I never worked harder or felt like I learned more. The lesson wasn’t lost on me.
My father couldn’t understand how a class could be valuable if it wasn’t taught by an esteemed professor. What exactly was he paying all this money for anyway, if we were left to “teach ourselves?” He called the course my “non-sense” class instead of my nonviolence class.
Learning spaces are political spaces. Gene Sharp’s work brought home for me how that applies around dining, reconceptualizing power and making space for ordinary people in the public arena — which has since shaped and grounded my life’s work.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting writing your book? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Well, when I took a 3-month sabbatical to focus full-time on writing my book, I naively thought I could finish the draft in 3 months. Hah — it was a full year later before I completed my first full draft. The Answers Are There: Building Peace From the Inside Out is being published on October 25th of this year (2022) — more than 3 years after I started that sabbatical. Everything about this process has taken longer than I thought it would — which has cultivated a lot more patience (not the kind of quality one learns willingly, most of the time) and persistence — much like the peacebuilding work itself that I’m writing about.
And before I could even commit to writing my own book in this way, I had another major lesson and redirection. The decision to write and share my story initially began as a joint writing project with my good friend and colleague, Charles Gibbs. I had been trying for years, in fits and starts, to write a book about my peacebuilding journey, and I just couldn’t seem to do it. Charles had just retired as the founding executive director of the United Religions Initiative, and although we had different bodies of experiences and stories to write about, our vision and values were so aligned — we decided to write a book together.
We had a blast working together for several months — the conversational approach helped my ideas flow much more freely, and it also made the writing process much more fun. Mostly, I had to learn to trust myself as a writer. I imagine all writers face strong inner critics, but mine has been rather herculean. It took a lot to break through that, and I couldn’t have done it without strong and skillful accompaniment from a trusted peer. I eventually got to the point where I realized that I needed to — and could — write my own story, and the writing from that process became the springboard for this book.
So much of my work has about “accompanying” other leaders in manifesting their vision, and that approach is in fact what I wanted to write about. However, in order to write my book, I had to be willing to let myself BE accompanied in the process. I could only write my book, in other words, by deepening my own experience and expression of the values of what I was writing about.
Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?
In our 15 years of work supporting post-war reconciliation, community healing, and people-led development in Sierra Leone, I have worked from the grounded vision that even in the places most devastated by war, poverty, or other social ills, people and communities have important resources for leading their own recovery. In sharing the stories of what it took to work this way, I want to inspire other social change leaders to new visions of possibility of what their communities can accomplish, and of the powerful support they can ask for from others to actualize those visions.
I want to inspire funders to examine the way the status quo of philanthropy and humanitarian aid is broken and perpetuates a neocolonial legacy, and to engage in the self-reflection and behavior change necessary to break out of that, and to do things better. Money can, and should, be used in the international system in ways that are liberatory — for all.
I want to see money used in the international system in ways that animate the potential of ordinary people — people as people — and help us strengthen the community. Not only do I think this is possible — but I know it is. Because I’ve done it.
So much more good is possible in this world than we can even imagine. Getting to see and support communities in Sierra Leone coming together after the civil war and drawing on their culture and tradition to heal and reconcile has made this so powerfully visible and alive for me. In sharing the stories of what happened in Sierra Leone, and of how it happened, meaning the way we worked and the ideas and values that have guided it — I want to give others hope and inspire new action for community healing in other cultures and settings. Including my own. I want to open imaginative space for new social change possibilities, including new ways of working to animate those possibilities. Ways of working that center people-as-people, and that make time and space for and process for people and communities to lead in their own healing and development.
Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?
Daabu is a tiny village in a remote part of eastern Sierra Leone. It was a rebel stronghold during the country’s 11-year civil war, and it had been the site of many atrocities. Seven years later, it still bore physical and psychic scars. Its vibrant community center had been burned down during the war, and the charred remains were a visual reminder of the paralysis of division and disconnection that now characterized the community. Its ruins, with weeds growing in the cracks, literally and metaphorically dominated the center of the village, a gaping wound. Left alone and untended.
Until now.
A lone drummer began a soft but insistent beat, the sound of calling people to gather. Other musicians joined in, and steadily people arrived, gathering in an open dirt clearing next to the burnt out building. Children danced, carefully avoiding the massive pyramid of dried branches and gathered wood that sat in the middle of the clearing. The spontaneous drumming and dancing turned more purposeful, both calling and celebrating — celebrating everyone’s presence and their shared purpose. People sat on rocks, chairs, benches — anything they could find. As darkness settled in, village leaders reached torches into the tower of wood until it burst into flames. As the fire settled into a steady burn, the crowd also settled into its own alert, alive, almost quiet circle.
It was March of 2009, just over a year into the Fambul Tok (‘family talk’) post-war reconciliation program and four months into Daabu’s planning process, and its residents joined people from neighboring villages for their fambul tok reconciliation bonfire. Chief Maada Alpha Ndolleh sat among the crowd. Originally from Daabu village, he was the town chief of Kailahun Town, the capital of the district, and the chairman of the Fambul Tok district committee. In that role, Chief Ndolleh moved from village to village with the Fambul Tok staff, opening honest conversations about the war and laying the groundwork for reconciliation. Tonight, he got the evening starting. Walking to the middle of the circle, next to the bonfire, he welcomed the crowd. He reminded them why they were gathered, and how they could finally talk about what had happened in this place during the war. He urged people not to be afraid to speak, emphasizing that those who confessed would not be prosecuted, nor would there be any shame for sharing how you had been hurt. “If something is disturbing you, you have to speak it out,” he said passionately. “And when you speak it out, you’ll be relieved. You can once again talk with your brothers and sisters.”
Hardly able to wait for the introductions to finish, a young man jumped up and walked purposefully into the center of the circle, near the fire. He faced his community with eagerness and resolve. His name was Michael Momoh, and he described the day the rebels first came into Daabu, capturing him and ordering him to find them food. As they roamed the area, they found a family working on their farm. The family fled, all escaping except their seven-year-old girl, who was captured. The rebels ordered Michael to tie her up and beat her, which, in shock himself, he did. He beat her so badly, she later died.
“I need peace, and I want my conscience to be clear,” he said with intention and intensity. “I am confessing so that they forgive me. It was not my wish; I was under duress. I did not do it out of my own wish.”
“Is the mother of the child here?” the elder facilitating the ceremony asked, with hardly a minute to process what Michael had just confessed. Mariama Jumu came forward, acknowledging that it was her daughter whom Michael had killed that day. Michael approached her and leaned over in a deep bow, a cultural symbol of repentance and submission. With the whole community watching, he begged Mariama to forgive him for what he had done. She touched his bowed head, a symbol of her acceptance of his apology, and said, “Yes.” They embraced and danced together as their neighbors watched and clapped, then everyone joined in the dancing and singing.
It was a stunning moment on many levels. That a perpetrator had jumped forward to initiate the truth-telling and apology. That Mariama was so quick to accept his apology and express her forgiveness. That right away they could embrace and dance together, embodying their commitment to a new future — side by side, ready to go forward together.
People testified in a constant stream that night, sharing stories of their experiences during the war. They were propelled by eagerness to move forward, by the desire to reconcile, to talk about what happened with their community. By the will to acknowledge, apologize, and forgive…together.
The next day, I discovered that Michael and Mariama lived literally next door to each other in this tiny village. And they told us that they had never spoken of what had happened. Not to each other, and not to anyone else. Prior to the ceremony, Mariama had avoided Michael completely. If he was part of an activity, she wouldn’t join. If there was a meeting he was attending, she wouldn’t go. As neighbors in the intimate circle of thatched-roof mud houses that make up the village of Daabu, they lived in isolation, from each other and from the community itself. And they were not the only ones. This pattern repeated itself across the village, and in other villages across the country. This is the invisible nature of a broken community. In a community whose web of connection has been broken, it’s almost impossible for anyone, much less for the community as a whole, to go forward, to develop.
The day after the bonfire, we interviewed Mariama about her daughter and what happened during the war in general. Mariama spoke of the sadness she carried about her child’s death, but she nonetheless reiterated her forgiveness in a very straightforward way: Because Michael had confessed, she forgave him. She felt that forgiveness was important, in her words, “for unity and progress. For us to live together. For our community to forge ahead in terms of development. If we are not together, for us to work, it would be very difficult.”
“Did someone tell you to think this way?” my colleague asked Mariama. “Or do you actually feel this inside your heart?”
Mariama looked slightly annoyed when the question was translated for her. But she nodded calmly and quietly straightened and settled back on her bench. “Well, we are able to think for ourselves on these things,” she said bluntly. “Once we’ve come together, we are going to continue.”
Michael and Mariama interact regularly now; Michael calls Mariama “Ma,” and she refers to him as a son. He carries water for her, helps with her farming, and does other household chores when she needs help, wanting to make up as much as he can for the absence of the child who would have grown to support her mother and the family. They also work side by side on community initiatives, alongside others in Daabu who had been avoiding each other at all costs.
Their story also exemplifies the way the community itself holds a healing presence and power for reconciliation. Michael didn’t approach Mariama in the privacy of her home. Living next door to her, he no doubt would have had ample opportunity. Rather, he opened up to tell his story in front of his whole community, and even several neighboring villages. In Sierra Leonean culture, the presence of the community is crucial to the forgiveness process. Acknowledgment of, and an apology for, a wrong must happen in front of the community before forgiveness can be considered. Why? What Sierra Leoneans describe as the “naming and shaming” that occurs in this context is felt to be fitting punishment, even more severe than being sent to jail in most instances. Given the central value the culture places on connection of the individual to and through community, and especially contributing to that community, this makes sense. As Fambul Tok national staff member Tamba Kamanda noted, “Without your community, you are nothing.”
And with your community, you can heal even some of the most painful wounds.
What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?
I’ve been committed to bringing my story to the world from the beginning — it’s just I didn’t really know I could, or exactly how to do that. I had been so focused on the work of making space for others’ leadership, and on telling/sharing others’ stories as they step into their leadership — that I found it really hard to allow myself to believe that my story was as worthy of writing and sharing. I needed help to do that — and didn’t really know how to ask for/receive it — until after I had created my Wisdom Circle. Nearly a decade ago, facing a time of near complete burnout and having no clarity on the way forward, I gathered a trusted cohort of friends and colleagues for a week on the peaceful shores of Long Lake, Maine. They gathered to support me in my leadership, in my growth as a person, and in discerning the way forward for Catalyst for Peace and my work in Sierra Leone. This group, which I came to call my Wisdom Circle, helped me reclaim what was mine to do, and demolish my strong internal barriers to receiving the same kind of support I had so freely and easily offered to others.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
Take the time to reflect on your own learning and leadership journey, and especially on what you yearn to see more of, at the deepest soul level. Then find a few like-minded/like-hearted others to have conversation with about this, and about how you might make those qualities come more alive in your work. While this may seem completely separate from overt political change (and it has been intentionally structured that way), I think it is the arena that holds the most potential for genuine positive transformation. Our longings, our heart-and-soul-yearnings, hold incredible potential for social change, when we find ways to carve channels for them to come into great expression in the world.
Structure aid/funding to be LONG TERM and LOCALLY FOCUSED. Commit money and time to the process work of building and organizing local communities for collective action on their own behalf — and don’t just focus on building things that are visible. Relationships and community are huge sources of untapped power. See that, and support and magnify it.
Look for the “positive deviants” — the people working on something innovative, or positive, or community-focused, even in the middle of a severe challenge. Find them, support them, connect them, hold them up and build programming around them. They are the key to real social change — and we need structures that recognize that and build accordingly.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
I think real leadership is actually the work of inviting others into their leadership. The best leaders as those who make more leaders. That comes from inviting people into action, voice and leadership — and then supporting them as they step into it. Like Fambul Tok’s Lilian Morsay did with Fatim Sesay — and hundreds of other rural women across Sierra Leone.
One day in 2015, just as Sierra Leone was recovering from Ebola, I stood on the edges of the village of Gboundu and watched Fatim Sesay speak with clarity and conviction to a hundred or so women gathered in a circle, under the cover of a few large mango trees. The women had traveled from 17 neighboring villages. Gboundu had been ground zero for Ebola and half the village had died, along with another 90 from neighboring villages. Fatim was inviting women from across her region to organize to help lead their community’s post-Ebola recovery — at a time when virtually all outside aid had either dried up and disappeared, or never reached them in the first place. She spoke powerfully to the women about how they could be important leaders in their community, and how their participation was critical to the future health of their families, their communities, and their region.
Though she spoke like a natural leader, Fatim hadn’t wanted to step into this public role, and when Fambul Tok staff member Lilian Morsay first approached her, she literally ran away and hid in her house. But Lilian saw her potential, and patiently coaxed her out and invited her to step up to help her community, assuring Fatim that she could, in fact, do that — and do it well.
Lilian herself had been invited and supported in just such a way years before, by Fambul Tok director John Caulker, and now she was the national director of Fambul Tok’s Peace Mothers program. And she was committed to identifying and mentoring other rural women into new action on behalf of their communities. And that hints at the other dimension of good leadership — it can be organizationally embedded and supported — structured into the work itself. Fambul Tok’s way of working involved going into communities and identifying those with an unselfish, other-orientation and good communication skills, and then inviting them into more leadership roles and activities, on behalf of their communities. This approach actively makes leaders at every turn. And then these leaders, in turn make more leaders — inviting and supporting others in their communities to work for the good of the whole. It’s like a positive spiral. It is relationally intensive, and it takes time up front — but the long-term impact is exponential, and sustainable.
The best leaders are those who make more leaders. The best social change organizations are those whose work is actually about the cultivation of new change leaders.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“You can hold the fire of difficult truth, with the fire-proof container of mercy.”
In the mid-2000s, I had the privilege of working with the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, an extraordinary interfaith group of religious leaders from northern Uganda who came together to try to end the brutal civil war there, to end the reign of terror of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, and to help people and communities heal from its devastating destructiveness. One of the founders, Anglican Bishop McLeod Ochola, became a hero of mine. Bishop Ochola’s wife and daughter were both killed by rebels in the fighting that plagued northern Uganda, and yet he was leading national calls for forgiveness and a restorative justice process, even for those responsible for his own losses. He shared a beautiful metaphor for what helped and guided him in this process:
Once the truth is known, it is very bitter for you to swallow. Truth is very deadly, it can kill. But how can you handle, accept it? It is only through mercy. Mercy can let you hold it. If you want to carry live fire in your hands, you will throw it away because it will burn. But if you hold it in something good, that does not conduct heat, you can take the fire. So it is the same with this, truth revealed — you can receive it with mercy.
You can handle the heat of painful truth by holding it in something good — something Bishop Ochola named as mercy. In Sierra Leone, we held the heat of truth with the community. Whether for reconciliation, for Ebola response, or for people-led development, Fambul Tok has focused its work on repairing the fireproof container of community to hold the people and the work they, and their country, most needed. A healing and whole community is itself a living organism. Working for it helped people work from it — to live out the values and practices of a healthy and whole community in the present, even while working to grow its lived expression. A living whole greater than the sum of the parts, the restored community connects us to that which is bigger than ourselves, opening us to new inspiration, energy, and capacity. It is the channel to the universal, ancestral wisdom, at once invisible and yet so tangibly present and powerful as to resource even some of the most difficult challenges we face.
That greater wisdom, the wisdom of wholeness, is the ultimate fireproof container for the work we are called to do. I fundamentally believe that that wisdom wants to be more fully expressed in the world today. It wants to be expressed in and to us, as individuals and as communities, and in and through the work we do. That greater wisdom resources our core. It is the wholeness that ultimately holds us all. And it is a strong and trustworthy container.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why?
My favorite conversations are with anyone who is working at the living edge of their growth. People who are fundamentally committed to their own inner learning journey, and also to living that out in the world in ways that make a positive contribution. No matter who, or in what arena — those are the people I learn from and love love love talking with. And, they are the people I offer the most to. I love the interplay of that kind of learning and offering, in conversation, more than almost anything else in the world. So pretty much anyone that fits that description — call me! Let’s have lunch.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Libbyhoffman.com and catalystforpeace.org
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
