Creating a Conflict Resolution Revolution. Member Spotlight: Enda Young
As a professional mediator and negotiator, Enda Young has balanced working in both the nonprofit and private sector throughout his career. Hailing from Northern Ireland, he became involved in cross-community work to overcome the historical and societal divide there. After completing a degree in mechanical engineering, he pursued a Masters at Queens University, Belfast, that focused on conflict transformation and never really looked back. Later, he was selected for the Rotary Peace Fellowship in Bangkok, Thailand. Enda has facilitated many workshops at conferences with MBBI and Rotary International from Brazil to Turkey. Notably, he managed the MBBI Twitter account, worked on the Kenya Initiative and was Chair and Co-Chair of the Rotary Working Group. He is also an MBB Consultant.
Hometown Mediation
To begin his mediation career, he was the Mediation and Training Director for TIDES Training and Consultancy where he set up the largest community mediation project in Northern Ireland. It consisted of working with housing executive clients, noise disputes, peacebuilding, and more complex cases. He notes that he has “cut his teeth” working with community groups and former paramilitaries on contentious cultural issues. This led him to set up his own organization, Transformative Connections (TransConn), homing in on the intersection of technology and peacebuilding. Enda is a certificated mediator with the Mediators’ Institute of Ireland and an accredited mediator with the International Mediation Institute. Through his work in conflict resolution, he became interested in the impact of mental health issues and soon became a Director and Trustee of Lighthouse, a suicide prevention charity. He also founded OutdoorDadNI, an initiative that focuses on how to use the outdoors to encourage positive mental health.
Furthermore, Enda co-founded FactCheckNI, the first independent fact-checking organization in Northern Ireland. He recalls that there was a huge flag dispute in Belfast over the taking down of the Union Flag over the City Hall several years ago. He explained that “It was probably the worst civil unrest that has been here in the last 5 years.” The situation occurred over deep identity issues and sections of the community objected to the flag being taken down and flown with the same frequency as those over government buildings in London. “It’s the perception of things as we know,” he stated. On one particular occasion, social media was buzzing over images of the flag burning, but the reality of the flag imagery was quite different, it was actually cropped from a German magazine from Iran and images from Dublin from four years previous, with just the buildings cropped out, “What we were seeing was the real-life impact of those digital conversations.”
Lack of critical thinking or the idea of being able to reverse image search was new to people and lacked in the conversation people were having in their communities. It became apparent that there was a need for a fact verification entity in Northern Ireland. Enda, along with his wife and colleague, set up their organization modeling it after Full Fact in the UK. They approached the issue with a conflict-sensitive lens and. Since its inception, they have trained thousands of people in fact-checking skills, critical thinking, and how to reverse image search using open source tools. FactCheckNI has just become a legal entity Community Interest Company and is a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network’s code of principles.
Global Negotiation Training
His career took an unexpected international turn when he started training and consulting in Dubai and Malaysia. This later led him to conduct negotiation training for senior management teams in the oil and gas extraction industry for companies such as Shell and BP where he followed his principle of only taking on contract if he could teach ethical negotiation. He trained professionals working in the Niger Delta, working on multibillion-dollar oil plants, examining and advising them on their community engagement strategies. “Peacebuilding in general needs to learn the language of business more, and business needs to take on more of the human elements of this crossover of language and discourse.”
Currently, Enda works as a Programme Director at the William J. Clinton Leadership Institute which is part of the School of Management at Queen’s University in Belfast. Enda has been working with the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), jointly running positive peace workshops in Northern Ireland. He is interested in how mediation and businesses interconnect from a systems-thinking perspective. Through the Leadership Institute, he trains elements of the World Health Organization in Geneva, multiple companies and organizations in Northern Ireland and delivers mediation lectures to Durham University and the University of Kent in Brussels.
“Harm is harm, hurt is hurt, pain is pain, once you really get into it. It doesn’t matter how much money they have in the bank, or who they manage or how much they travel. If they go home an suffer from mental health issues caused by hurt or trauma, deep down everyone is the same for the most part. That is why every single person regardless of nationality or what they do for a living should be trained in basic mediation and negotiation skills.” He believes that everyone should be taught their personal conflict style, how to actually genuinely listen and how to analyze a conflict.
Article by Kylea Shropshire, MBBI Writer