Help Increase Peace – Age-Responsive Peacebuilding for Youth with Refugee Experience

Students from refugee and refugee-like backgrounds often enter school while navigating multiple transitions, adjusting to a new country, learning a new language, and forming new social networks, while coping with the effects of displacement and trauma. These challenges can surface as conflict, disengagement, or behaviours that strain classroom relationships, especially in mixed-age, mixed-literacy cohorts.

Help Increase the Peace (HIP), adapted from the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), is a trauma-informed, age-responsive program for young people aged 10–18. It equips students with skills in communication, cooperation, and non-violent conflict transformation. HIP’s experiential approach uses cooperative games, role-plays, and structured dialogue to develop “transforming power”: the ability to respond to conflict with empathy, respect, and creativity. Activities are scaffolded for English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D) learners and tailored to developmental stages, ensuring accessibility for diverse age groups and cultural contexts.

This half-day workshop immerses participants in HIP’s core methods. Half of the workshop will focus on group cohesion, trust-building, and emotional regulation. The second half progresses to structured conflict-resolution practice and collaborative problem-solving. Guided reflection links activities to real-life school contexts, enabling participants to adapt strategies for diverse settings.

The workshop draws on the evaluation of a pilot program with 30 culturally diverse students in an Intensive English Centre, which demonstrated measurable gains in mutual respect, cross-cultural connection, emotional regulation, and student–teacher relationships. Key implementation lessons include cultural adaptation, literacy scaffolding, and strategies for sustaining engagement over time.

Attendees will experience a condensed sequence of HIP activities, learn to adapt it across age ranges and take away an evidence informed framework to embed peacebuilding and resilience into schools. The aim is to empower community development workers, educators, and school leaders to create inclusive spaces where refugee and migrant youth can thrive socially, emotionally, and academically.