Editor’s Note: Dance 4 Peace is a global peace education program that engages young people through dance and creative movement. They inspire a generation of leaders and peacemakers through an innovative curriculum that promotes empathy, mediation skills, anger management, and conflict resolution to instill social and emotional competencies for peace.

Sara Potler, Fulbright Scholar, Beyond Sport Award Shortlister, and Youth Leader Award winner from the Inter-American Development Bank, is the Founder and CEO.  

This past week, Dance 4 Peace went to an idyllic paradise resort to talk about how we can be doing better for the poor. At the part-incubator, part-“problem-solving strategic retreat” that is Opportunity Collaboration’s annual unconference, the best, brightest, and most promising leaders in social enterprise came together to coalition build around strategies for poverty alleviation.

Having been awarded a Cordes Fellowship to attend Opportunity Collaboration, I was a bit nervous going into the event for several reasons. For one, my organization, Dance 4 Peace, is relatively young, and was selected to participate in a cohort of some of my greatest mentors, including Martin Burt of Teach a Man to Fish, Laura Hattendorf of the Mulago Foundation, Regina Starr Ridley of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Heather Weiss of the Harvard Family Research Project. The connection between dance and poverty alleviation is also not quite intuitive. For me, this was a tremendous opportunity to show how Dance 4 Peace can step up as a player in economic empowerment.

To date, Dance 4 Peace has shown tremendous potential for financial value creation. While the year since our inception has been a tough economy for nonprofit professionals, artists, and others, we have created 3 full-time jobs and offered part-time, hourly, and stipended positions to more than 30 individuals worldwide. In this way, our low-cost, fee-for-service model has been like an engine for job creation. We are lucky to now be poised with the challenge of scaling this success outside the US and leveraging our value as a potential poverty alleviation strategy.

In developing economies around the globe, Dance 4 Peace is piloting several models geared towards scaling our programs while empowering lower income individuals and cash-strapped NGOs to become leaders in our movement, without financial burden. In Panama, for example, we work with universities who pay to lead D4P’s certificate program in Conflict Resolution through Creativity within their institutions, serving as a hub for training global PeaceMovers and growing our programming in nearby communities. In this way, our international direct partners – community centers and schools –  are freed from the financial commitments made by our US partners, and we are still able to generate revenue that helps us create full-and part-time jobs.

Job creation, however, isn’t the only way Dance 4 Peace is thinking about our ability to tackle poverty.

As a peace-building organization, Dance 4 Peace is positioned to address poverty by virtue of our impact: by promoting a path to employability through social and emotional learning, and helping communities save the costs of violence through prevention. Core to our model, we can now think about how our impact can be leveraged to do better for low-resource communities and the base of the pyramid.

As evidenced at Opportunity Collaboration, we need to think creatively and outside the box as to how we address poverty alleviation. What we’re already doing isn’t enough – the solution is likely to be more collaborative and interdisciplinary than any one sector can imagine. We already have the network and talent to take on the challenge of poverty alleviation full force, and meetings like Opportunity Collaboration are a critical first step in unlocking that potential for the benefit of the world.

- Sara Potler