Trustee’s annual report 2024-25
APPROVED AT A MEETING OF THE TRUSTEES 22 October 2025
OBJECTIVES AND ACTIVITIES
The purposes of the charity are stated in our 1991 Trust Deed as: “The advancement of Education, in particular, to promote the understanding of conflict in the community.”
The focus of the Trust’s work is associated with the development of reconciliation.
In shaping our objectives for the year and planning our activities, the Trustees have considered the Charity Commission’s guidance on public benefit. The direct benefits, which flow from the purpose, include:
The development of a greater understanding of, and a new openness to, people from diverse, and sometimes previously conflicting identities.
increased personal skill and confidence in citizens dealing positively with conflict.
an increased capacity of community organisations to address community conflict constructively.
an increase in the number of reconciliation projects and organisations being formed.
reduced levels of fear in the community.
These benefits were evidenced through: Feedback from individuals and existing groups.
We have had positive feedback from all groups we have worked with. We have been asked to assist local (United Kingdom) and international (Korea, Japan, Lithuania, USA and Republic of Ireland) educators interested in our ‘Nurturing Hope’ materials and their use with Formal and Informal Educators. We are establishing educational links with the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, South Africa.
From late 2023 we have made the resource available free of charge as Open-Source materials. This will be associated with the provision of a Community of Practice Learning Hub. This development is being funded by a Philanthropic Learning Partner for 2024 - 2025.
DERICK WILSON – Founder of Understanding Conflict Trust It is hard to imagine the Understanding Conflict Trust (UCT) without the passionate commitment and unstoppable energy of our beloved friend and founder Derick Wilson. In many ways Derick is the reason for Understanding Conflict Trust. His commitment to finding a vehicle to support people building relationships based on real humanity, on crossing the gulfs which society put in front of us and on making real the faith he found in Corrymeela was the reason UCT came into existence. Derick had already stepped out on a limb both while Director of the Corrymeela Centre and as a Research Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Conflict. But in the 1990s he dedicated his life to taking that thinking back into the community. To make that happen, he needed people who shared his vision and believed in what he was doing. Over thirty years ago, five fellow-members of Corrymeela came together and created that vehicle in UCT. Over the years Derick was at the heart of so many projects – Understanding Conflict and Finding Ways out of it, Future Ways, Western Routes, Relationships of Equity, Diversity and Interdependence in Newry and Coleraine – and so many opportunities for face-to-face work and for writing. Nurturing Hope was the latest of his babies. Without Derick and his insistence that we develop a hub for creating resources, none of this would have happened. He was our inspiration and our encourager. Always generous, always passionate and never egotistical. We will miss him enormously. And he left us in the middle of a new lease of life, through the Nurturing Hope and Seeds of Hope Programmes. And he is always with us. Thank you, Derick, for all you did. we will try to live up to your passion and vision.
Through the Nurturing Hope programme, 2024-2025 turned out also to be a very busy year for UCT. Through the generous support of the Rotary Club of San Antonio and Humanity United, we have been expanding our programmes.
The centrepiece of our year is the Nurturing Hope Learning Journey which brought 75 people to the Corrymeela Centre in Ballycastle to learn together for a week, this time without Derick Wilson for the first time. Made up of people from as far apart as Korea, Northern Ireland, the United States, Lithuania, Lebanon and Afghanistan, we learned about the value of each person, used the models we learned over the years on relationships, rivalry and scapegoating, and shared our own situations with one another.
Our conviction that peace is a quality in our relationships was renewed, and we found both encouragement and practical ideas for the next steps. The Learning Journey also included young people who came directly from our ‘Seeds of Hope’ youth programme. This programme is now becoming part of the Corrymeela programme and we hope to see it grow and flourish in coming years.
Aside from the Learning Journey in the summer, we also hosted a weekend at Corrymeela for all those interested in understanding the models underlying our work by reflecting on their own lives, conflicts and relationships. We are discovering that there is a huge appetite for real meeting in the midst of conflict in many places.
Derick’s work in San Antonio is bearing much fruit. Aside from the group of young people and Colleges coming to the Learning Journey, a number of third-level Colleges – from Community Colleges to Universities – have adopted Nurturing Hope as a framework for on-campus relationship building.
This year, Jean Horstman spent a week in San Antonio coaching and advising the network and we look forward to further engagements. Duncan Morrow meanwhile worked with staff at Policy Link, a major NGO in the US, to consider the relevance of these models for future development of their work across the United States. Meanwhile in South Korea, our Trustee and colleague Kim Dong-Jin, has pioneered the concept of ‘trans-local learning’, where people share their own experiences, stories and challenges, draw lessons from others and open up windows of possibility for others.
This year, the Okedongmu Children’s Project in Korea has pioneered the global ‘Drawing Hope’ exhibition, which uses children’s drawings as a mechanism to re-establish the human face in the midst of Conflict. The project now has a global reach and there are plans to bring the Exhibition to the United Nations in New York in 2025.
We think Derick Wilson would also be pleased that this work is reaching a wider audience. In June 2024, Jin and Duncan Morrow published an article on “Ontological security and protracted conflict in frontier societies: towards a trans-local turn in peacebuilding” in Peacebuilding as a contribution to academic debate.
