2025 MBBI Awards! Recognizing their Caring, Courage, and Commitment to Global Peacebuilding

Mediators and peacebuilders in this community of practitioners at MBBI, work tirelessly every day toward building a “peaceable” world. The teams conduct analysis, design interventions, facilitate training, convene gatherings, and a whole lot more. It is time to recognize them at this time with a celebration of their work and a spotlight on their impact.

Congratulations to the following recipients of the 2025 MBBI Awards presented at the Closing Gala of the 11th International Peace Summit in Lima, Perú.

Peacebuilder of the Year: Somia Sadiq

Somia Sadiq is a space-maker for more women of colour to assume leadership roles, and a tenacious boundary-pusher advancing peacebuilding and reconciliation efforts across the globe. She believes stories have the power to advance diplomacy, break barriers, and promote healing. With ancestral roots in post-colonial Punjab and Kashmir, Somia Sadiq holds experience in environmental sciences, natural resources management, negotiations, counterterrorism and countering/preventing violent extremism.

Somia is the founder of Narratives Inc., and also founded Kahanee, a non-profit dedicated to amplifying stories and promoting peacebuilding. Most recently, she published Gajarah in September of 2025.

MBBI Project of the Year: Cashew Gardens (Trinidad and Tobago)

Roslyn George, the President of Cashew Gardens, accepted this award highlighting the impact Cashew Gardens has made in fostering social entrepreneurship and community building in Trinidad and Tobago. Its mission statement is to build a model community with a focus on waste management, environmental projects, and empowerment of youth and women. Cashew Gardens 2030 vision is to create a community that looks after the needs of its residents and its environment alike. Through its community programs, it is their hope that we can create models for other communities to follow.

This project brings local Trinidadians and Venezuelan refugees to establish a community “Green Market” for Positive Peace. In the past several years, there has been a surge of Venezuelan refugees seeking a better life on the island of Trinidad. Though instances of violence are low, there are rising tensions and economic challenges facing both communities. The community of Cashew Gardens is engaged with the Venezuelan community to work together to share knowledge, culture, and resources in what could be a model for social cohesion globally. The project focuses on the creation of a Green Market where traditional goods and services can be shared through commerce and people from all communities can come together to connect, learn, and communicate in a mutually beneficial forum. Further, in 2024, this project received a Rotary Positive Peace Activator Seed Funding Grant to support its continued work at the Green Market.

Partner of the Year: National Association for Community Mediation (NAFCM)

This award is presented to DG Mawn, the visionary President of National Association for Community Mediation (NAFCM) who has led the organization through an extraordinary transition over the last ten years. DG’s commitment to integrity, partnership and dignity has resulted in a robust network of organizations that are all deeply embedded and engaged in communities across the country.

NAFCM’s vision is that community mediation leads to community mobilization (both individually and collectively). It supports the maintenance and growth of community-based mediation programs and processes, to present a compelling voice in appropriate policy making, legislative, professional, and other arenas, and to encourage the development and sharing of resources for these efforts. NAFCM supports peacemakers by being the hub for advancing the work of community mediation, aggregating the wisdom of community mediation and amplifying the voice of community mediators. NAFCM’s purpose, as a membership association of peacemakers who employ the practices and values of community mediation, is to help these peacemakers to create brave spaces for the transformation of conflict to opportunities for engagement, resolution and partnership through the work and will of the participants and those impacted.

MBBI is proud to collaborate with NAFCM as a co-convener of the TRUST Network: a civic architecture and infrastructure that braids social justice, democracy, and legal and peace-building communities The TRUST Network is a broad U.S. network designed to prevent violent conflict, reduce division, build community cohesion, strengthen our democracy, and address legacies of injustice.

Innovator of the Year: Lalen Palacios

Lalen is an alumna of our IPTI Program in the Andean region and was a panelist on the “The Perspective of Civil Society, Activism, Dialogue, and Reconciliation” Panel at the 2025 Lima Summit. Her work focuses on the Reality and Future of Choco Youth in Colombia. She has facilitated and trained youth and women for dialogue initiatives throughout Colombia and established a peace and mediation training school for women, especially Afro-Colombian women. Lalen speaks to the power of centering the voices of survivors, and to the importance of recognizing the wisdom of integrating historical knowledge with inclusive democratic practices.

Lalen is a Protection Specialist with Alianza por la Solidaridad-Actionaid. The organization has been working in the Colombian Pacific region for over 27 years. Part of Lalen’s focus is on the regulatory framework for Afro-descendant communities, Law 70, a law that recognizes communities as autonomous peoples, with their own forms of government and the primary owners of land in the form of collective ethnic territories. This is a unique model of representation and collective decision-making that may be replicated globally.