Within · With · World
Peace education teaches that peace and rights live at three levels: in the person, in relationships, and in society. corelab applies that idea to the organisations doing the work.
A programme evaluation also asks whether the team practises the rights it promotes. A leadership course connects participants to the human rights and peace frameworks they work within. A conflict analysis starts with how the team handles disagreement before it looks at the conflict between parties.
We start where the client’s question sits and trace it through the other two levels before recommending anything.
How we work, and what you can expect.
We work at the intersection of peace education, human rights, MHPSS‑informed psychosocial support, mediation, feminist leadership, and organisational insight from years inside NGOs. These fields may seem separate, but in practice they meet in one place:
how people relate to themselves, to each other, and to the systems they shape.
Corelab brings these dimensions together in a grounded, human‑centred way.
1. Change begins within: clarity, regulation, self-leadership.
Before teams or systems can shift, people need space to reflect, regulate, and reconnect with what matters. In peace and conflict work, we say “the quality of our presence shapes the quality of outcomes” – and this is even more true when we work with trauma, injustice, or crisis every day.
Our work at the Within level is informed by principles of Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) and Psychological First Aid (PFA): recognising distress early, responding with care, and building everyday practices that support psychosocial wellbeing. We support people to slow down enough to hear themselves – and to speed up again with direction and inner stability.
2. Change happens with others: dialogue, care, accountability.
Most challenges in organisations are not technical, but relational. The way we speak, listen, and interpret each other determines whether we collaborate or collapse. Real transformation happens when relationships become safe, honest, and structured enough for people to bring their whole selves – including their histories, identities, and vulnerabilities – into the work.
Our approach brings together intercultural communication, trauma‑aware facilitation, conflict transformation, and non‑violent communication. We pay close attention to how power, roles, and lived experience (for example of migration, gender‑based violence, or marginalisation) shape behaviour and conflict. Alongside these tools, we integrate the values of new work and feminist leadership.
3. Change grows into the world: structures, culture, and strategy.
Human‑centred work is not only emotional or interpersonal – it is also structural. People can only thrive when the systems around them support clarity, fairness, and meaningful action.
| Level | Question we ask | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Within — the person | How do people working for rights and peace stay grounded, act on their values and lead under pressure? | Values-based and feminist leadership, ethical decisionmaking, self-awareness and regulation, psychosocial wellbeing, professional boundaries |
| With — the team and the partnership | Do teams and coalitions practise the rights and peace they work for? | Conflict transformation and dialogue, facilitation of participatory processes, communication across cultures and power differences, collaboration in coalitions and networks |
| World — the system | How does the work advance human rights, peace and justice for the | Human rights-based approach, peace and human rights education, Women, Peace and Security, protection, people it serves? |
Rootwork
3W tells us where to look. rootwork is how people and organisations move through the three levels. It takes the tools of organisational change — stakeholder mapping, theory of change, risk and resource planning, power analysis — and applies them first to a person’s own working life. Participants map their own
stakeholders, their own risks, their own theory of change. Then they use the same tools in their relationships at work and in the rights and peace work they lead.
The method grew out of corelab’s LeadHerShip programme — a feminist leadership training for women in human rights and peace work — and proved so effective that we now use it with mixed teams and whole organisations.
The result: people who can design a participatory process because they’ve practised one on themselves. Teams that do a conflict analysis because they’ve done one together. Programmes that are rights-based because the people writing them have examined their own relationship to power.
Rootwork is in active development. We’re currently piloting it with two groups and refining it based on what we learn.
How we work
Our facilitation style is:
- Practitioner-built. Our materials and advice come from long experience of running programmes, counselling services and EU-funded projects. They are designed for organisations with tight budgets and teams with little time.
- Power-aware. We apply a feminist and intersectional lens to every level: who decides, who benefits, whose knowledge counts.
- Participatory and inclusive. everyone’s perspective matters.
- Three levels, one assignment. We trace each question through Within, With and World before we recommend anything.
- Trauma-informed and grounded in MHPSS. People in social impact work often operate close to violence, displacement and loss, and carry that into their teams. Every training, consultation and programme design we deliver follows trauma-informed principles — safety, trust, choice, collaboration, empowerment — and the IASC guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support. We work in non-clinical settings and refer to specialists where therapy is needed.
- Built to be handed over. Clients keep usable outputs — templates, curricula, facilitation guides — so the work continues after we leave.
- The right team for each brief. Every assignment is led by Asia; where a brief calls for specific regional, language or subject expertise, she brings in experienced partner consultants and facilitators.
Whether we work at the Within, With, or World level, the core intention is the same: to align values, relationships, and structures so that social‑change work becomes more humane, sustainable, and true to the principles of human rights, gender justice, and peace.