Forum for Cities in Transition (FCT)

This Friday (2nd September 2016) we are delighted to restart our Lunchtime Events with a session on the Forum for Cities in Transition.

As always, the event will run from 12.30pm until 2.00pm. At the session we will hear about the work of the Forum for Cities in Transition in which the city has played a major role.

Forum for Cities in Transition (FCT) Background 
In April 2009 five cities – Derry/Londonderry, Belfast, Nicosia (Greek Cypriot community and Turkish Cypriot community), Kirkuk and Mitrovice/Kosovska Mitrovicie were invited to a conference at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, hosted by the Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation. The purpose was to have the cities explore, after listening to each other’s conflict, whether they had sufficient common attributes, experiences and collective identification that they could form a collaboration, where they would share their differences and similarities in a more formal way. This was in the hope that learning from each other would strengthen the social/political fabric of their respective cities.

Those at the Boston conference drew up a document titled, ‘A Call to Action’ and the five cities became the founding cities of the FCT. Today there are 15 cities involved that come together under the guiding principle that ‘one divided society is in the best position to help another’.

The cities involved include:

• Baghdad
• Belfast
• Craigavon
• Derry/ Londonderry
• Haifa
• Jerusalem
• Kaduna (Nigeria)
• Kirkuk (Iraq)
• Mitrovica
• Mitte (Berlin)
• Mostar (Bosnia)
• Ramallah
• Sarajevo
• Srebrenica
• Tripoli

The forum is served by a joint Secretariat: the Moakley Chair (Boston) and the Northern Ireland Foundation. The FCT has held conferences in Metrovica, Derry/ Londonderry, Kaduna, Iraq and Belfast. At the conferences each city undertakes pledges that they will work to help another city or cities that are either coming out of conflict or still in conflict.

Derry/ Londonderry pledges have included training programmes with the Kosovo Police in conjunction with the PSNI, sending young people from the city to take part in a youth Conference in Metrovica on working and living in divided societies and a pledge to share mediation skills training programmes with Tripoli. Another pledge made by our city delegates was initiated to look at how communities and policing can work together. The city has since developed a Police and Community Together training programme that is currently being aimed at cities in America that have been experiencing difficulties over these past number of months.

The chair of the local FCT group Michael Doherty will present the work of the FCT and after his presentation there will be an opportunity to ask questions about their work with other cities.