We began with songs. words and music. A peace movement is an incredible thing, people coming together, mobilizing like an army, and in this case armed not with guns but with songs and something more powerful than any bullet; compassion,…
Hunter Heaney returned from northern Uganda and together with friends Chris Holmes and Jay Sweet began putting an organization together. At a dinner hosted by Sweet, Heaney met Anna Gabriel. Anna, daughter of Peter Gabriel, had grown up around the…
Defections and home returns increased dramatically following the Amplify Peace radio and "come home" song initiative, but there were also some issues of violence from communities where returning abductees were surrendering. So the next challenge was for the communities to…
Increasingly, what we were seeing was that artists using their voices for dissent were being prosecuted with greater frequency and harsher punishments.
I had gone to work at an IDP camp (Internally Displaced Persons...a refugee camp essentially) in Agoro, it's a tiny village on the border of northern Uganda and southern Sudan. I'd heard about this initiative to set up a job…
Working together with international organizations like the United Nations DDR/RR team (Demobilization, Disarmament, Repatriation, Reintegration and Resettlement of foreign armed groups) within MONUSCO (Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies en République Démocratique du Congo), The Voice Project began supporting efforts…
As we'd seen in Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic, music can be an effective agent of conflict transformation. As Olivier Urbain, the author of "Music and Conflict Transformation" has written, "The real question is why has…
Pussy Riot was not an isolated case. Around the world, as protest have been growing, so has the crackdown on artists who use their voices to speak out for change. In the fight against oppression and injustice, the first step…
