Making Peace with Fire. Member Spotlight: M.D. Kinoti
M.D. Kinoti is no stranger to conflict and poverty. In fact, he was born into both and has dedicated the majority of his life to building community and peace.
Kinoti grew up in Meru, Kenya, amid ethnic tensions stemming from the history of conflict between the Meru and Somali tribes. After earning a degree in sociology, he moved to Nairobi to work for the NGO World Vision International. His work consisted of implementing microfinance programs in urban and rural communities whose residents were not accepted by traditional microfinance. After a year back in school, he earned a degree in finance to better understand and improve his work. This fact shows how dedicated Kinoti has been to his mission; he has spent the rest of his career to the present putting in whatever work is necessary to help others. In regards to how microfinancing functioned as a tool for economic and social community development, M.D. remarked that “a small loan, like $200… spurred their personal development and helped them contribute to not just their family well-being but also the community well-being” by allowing informal self-run businesses (he gave examples of selling vegetables, clothing, or car maintenance) to hire from the community and keep money circulating within the same neighborhood for its own benefit. Through World Vision’s program, those in need would not only receive a microloan; Kinoti and his colleagues would work with groups of community members to teach them every stage of business management and the workings of the financial system so that they could use their microloans to the greatest success.
Kinoti left World Vision in 1999 to obtain a Masters degree in theological studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in Los Angeles, California. There, he partnered with a local church working in their community development program, which assisted second-generation Asian families with spiritual support and integrating into life in the United States. For his doctoral dissertation, he had wanted to return to Kenya to study tribal relationships and conflict, but could not because of 9/11-related travel restrictions. His focus then shifted to studying peacebuilding and the role of religion in social harmony among ethnic groups in Los Angeles.
Religion has had a profound impact on Kinoti’s life and directly informs his view of peacebuilding. He remarked, “It’s very clear to me that God created all things and created human beings in his own image and put his image in us… therefore, we’re starting from that basis of equality.” To Kinoti, religious teachings “place us in a vertical relationship with God that… that should then inform our horizontal relationships with one another.” From there, it is our choice to take religious teachings like righteousness and justice based in Christianity and similar ideas in other religions and then apply them to “building peace, whether that’s in a family or community – defined on any level up to that of a social circle, city, county, or country.”
His first experience with mediation was during his time in Los Angeles. As a community worker, he was trained as a mediator through the Los Angeles County Bar Association in collaboration with the Pasadena Police Department. He stated that “The idea was to train more community mediators to work with the police in helping to mediate some of the community disputes.” He spent about a year and a half mediating community disputes, mostly about housing and roommate issues, for Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, CA.
After finishing his PhD, Kinoti briefly returned to the NGO world, working for a water, sanitation, and hygiene organization. There, he carried out similar functions to his previous work, including developing community and physical infrastructure as well as training others in community development and management. After the 2010 economic crisis, he found an opportunity at Regis University in Denver, where he has used his rich experiences to teach NGO and nonprofit management for the last decade and a half. He has not only been teaching the next generation of peacebuilders for this time, but he has also served as the co-chair and chair of his entire department at Regis, using his expertise to expand and improve their program. He currently directs the Master’s in Nonprofit Management and the Master’s in Sustainable Development programs at Regis.
Additionally, Kinoti has been a Rotarian for more than a decade and is a trained ambassador with the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). He is a member of the Rotary E‑Club for Peace Educators (ReCOPE), where he collaborates with others committed to developing peace‑training curricula. His service within Rotary has focused on supporting international peacebuilding programs and development initiatives, including serving as a volunteer evaluator for several global grants and as a member of Rotary’s global cadre of technical experts in peace and development. He has served on the Peace Fellows admissions committee and as part of the Makerere Peace Center establishment team.
Though he did not foresee his career trajectory, he says that he “started to see the connections and then study the connections between peace and development, that in most communities, including in the US, which many do not think about as having or needing NGOs as much as less developed regions and elsewhere, those two things almost always go together. You cannot develop a community, a society that is at war, at conflict. There has to be a level of peace in order to do any kind of level of community development.”
Kinoti’s view of peace is that it “begins from the individual, who makes interpersonal peace development and then moves on to community peace” and beyond. His book, “Making Peace with Fire,” examines all levels of peace by comparing peace and the role of peacebuilders to maintaining healthy fires. His work has sought to examine how peacebuilding can be successfully facilitated at all levels–specifically nurtured at the community level through institutions like religion–to work towards a more peaceful world. Kinoti serves as an inspiration to all working to build peace.
Article by Hunter Siegel, MBBI Writer