Three orientation meetings were carried out under NPC’s new project Consolidating Ongoing Multi-level Partnership Actions for Conflict Transformation (COMPACT) funded by Misereor and CAFOD.

COMPACT is a two-year extension of NPC’s Initiating Multi-level Partnership Action for Conflict Transformation (IMPACT) project that ended in Septmeber last year.

The new project seeks to use the experience gained by members of District Inter Religious Commitees (DIRCs) in preventing and solving ethnic and religious conflicts that arise in their areas. Solving unresolved issues that were identified under the IMPACT will be a focus of the project, which will be implemented in 16 districts and target new benficiaries including local level politicians and youth parliament members to address the problem of diminishing space for liberal and plural values.

Another focus was to foster discourse on the process of conflict transformation with national level religious leaders, professionals, academics and journalists. These are preliminary interventions aimed at using the space that has opened up to discuss the reconciliation from a pluralistic perspective.

Two meeting were also held in Anuradhapura and Puttalam. In Anuradhapura the DIRC formed a Civil Society and Trade Unions Collective with activists and trade union representatives while in Puttalam, a District Civil Society Collective was initiated to organize activities to promote Constitutional reform at the grassroots level.