What is the World Values Project? 

This is a new project from Social Change Initiative (SCI), that aims to build understanding in communities in Northern Ireland.  We remain a deeply divided society with many social, political and economic problems, but a lot has changed in the last 25 years. The World Values Survey can help us to understand how our attitudes have changed and what similarities and differences there are in the values held by people from across different backgrounds.

SCI wants to use the findings from the World Values Survey to take a different approach to how we think and talk about ourselves in Northern Ireland. SCI hopes this will allow us to have different conversations that help us to understand ourselves and others better and to build tolerance and respect for others. The project is supported by the Reconciliation Fund. 

Workshops

SCI is coordinating a series of 6 workshops throughout Northern Ireland. Holywell Trust is facilitating the workshop in the North West. It is hoped that each workshop will include men and women, younger and older people and people from different backgrounds including ethnic minorities. 

During the workshops, people will hear the main findings from the World Values Survey in Northern Ireland and how values and attitudes vary between different groups here. There will be discussions about what the findings tell us about people’s values in Northern Ireland and how they could help us to understand each other better. 

Someone from SCI will be at each workshop to help with the discussions and to make some notes. At the end we will ask everyone taking part to give some feedback on how they think the workshop went and what, if anything, they learned from it. 

What happens next?

Holywell Trust and the facilitators of the other workshops will meet up to share their experiences from the workshops, think about whether values-based conversations were useful to build understanding in communities and if this method should be used again in peacebuilding work.   

SCI will gather the notes from this meeting and from all the community workshops, and use them to write a lessons-learned report and a practical guide for other people who want to do the same thing in future.

What can you expect if you take part in the Values Project?

• We will create a welcoming environment – We hope that the workshops will be interesting and enjoyable. We will do our best to make people taking part feel welcome, respected and listened to. Food and drink will be provided. 

• We will respect your confidentiality – SCI will take notes and gather feedback from the community workshops to use in our project reports. The purpose of this is to learn lessons and make recommendations for peacebuilding work. We will not be keeping records of any individual taking part in the workshops or naming anyone in our reports. We will also ask all participants to respect the privacy of everyone attending. 

• We will provide feedback – When SCI has drafted the project reports, the 6 community leaders working on the project will have a chance to see them and give their views on them.  Once they are completed we will give copies of the reports to the 6 community leaders so they can pass them on to all the people who attended the workshops.