The Intercultural Innovation Award

2014 1ST PRIZEORDINARY HEROES (BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA)Ordinary Heroes is a multimedia peacebuilding project that utilizes stories of rescuer behavior and moral courage to promote reconciliation and increase interethnic cooperation among Bosnian citizens and youth. The project consists of several components including the Heroes in Training youth workshops, The Rescuers traveling photography exhibition, the Ordinary Heroes documentary series and the Sran Aleksi Youth Competition.The rescuers narratives represent all of Bosnias constituent ethnic groups, highlighting their similarities while reducing the significance of identifying perpetrators and victims. This project additionally focuses on inspiring ordinary people to act as heroes and agents of social change and encourages young people to go beyond conceptual learning by getting them directly involved in the peacebuilding process. Through the youth workshops and competition, Bosnian youth are given the chance to utilize their creativity while actively engaging with their own communities to discover, collect, and share stories of peacebuilding, moral courage, and intercultural cooperation. Finally, Ordinary Heroes not only incorporates the stories of Bosnian rescuers, but also features narratives from the Holocaust, Rwanda and Cambodia. This project has been designed for expansion and replication as its emphasis on pro-social behavior and intercultural awareness can be utilized in a broad range of contexts worldwide.The Ordinary Heroes project has been done in collaboration with PROOF: Media for Social Justice, Pinch Media, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), the Sarajevo School for Science and Technology, and the War Art Reporting and Memory Foundation (WARM).

2012 1ST PRIZEPUERTA JOVEN (MEXICO)Puerta Joven, a youth-led organization, visits schools and community centers with young professional filmmakers to teach the use of arts and new technologies as a way to promote cultural interaction and appreciation of cultural diversity.Lenguas Jvenes (Languages of Youth) is a project that fosters youth cultural expressions through mobile phones for intercultural dialogue. Puerta Joven, a youth-led organization, visits schools and community centers with young professional filmmakers to teach the use of arts and new technologies as a way to promote cultural interaction and appreciation of cultural diversity.The young filmmaker teaches the beneficiaries, aged twelve to twenty years old, how to use creative tools found in mobile phones (photo, audio and video) to develop short films. Young people from different cultural identities cooperate with each other to generate shared cultural expressions and express their ideas about the youth civic engagement, cultural diversity and peace.The project serves urban communities where indigenous youth groups have migrated and are being discriminated because of their cultural identity or the use of an indigenous language. The program helps people understand that migration to the cities doesnt have to represent an obstacle to the survival of indigenous languages. We encourage freedom of expression and the right to not being discriminated against because of its exercise.The project has been developed in eight different cities in Mexico, and will be replicated in Guatemala, a neighboring country that shares the same challenges to ensure respect and peaceful interaction among youths from different cultural backgrounds.

2011 1ST PRIZEMEJDI TOURS DUAL NARRATIVE TOURS TO ISRAEL AND PALESTINE (PALESTINE)MEJDI, a project designed at CRDC, is a joint Jewish-Arab tour program that creates custom group tours to Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt.MEJDI Tours is a joint Jewish-Arab tour organization that creates custom group tours to Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt. Their flagship project, the Dual Narrative tour, is led by Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders. It is an innovative approach for learning about the Middle East that highlights the different narratives of Israelis and Palestinians from a variety of cultural, political, and religious backgrounds. In addition, MEJDI provides responsible tour experiences by investing financially in the communities where they work.MEJDIs was founded by conflict resolution professionals affiliated with George Mason Universitys Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution (CRDC). CRDC engages in practice, education, and research concerning peacebuilding in conflicts where religion, economy and culture play a significant role. They partner with local educators, politicians, religious leaders, non-governmental organizations, and community groups, with the goal of offering a nuanced perspective of the region and connecting groups with local change-makers. MEJDI Tours contributes to the sustainability of CRDC peacebuilding work.