Innovative Projects for Former Child Soldiers and Refugees
We support former child soldiers, refugees, and war-affected communities in northern Uganda to help heal war trauma, rebuild their lives, and reconcile through locally designed projects.

Our Impact in 2019
2,623 former child soldiers and refugees reached with our programs
153 new small businesses created through entrepreneurship training
500+ children attended school continuously for the first time

Make a Change
The Grassroots Reconciliation Group is a non-profit organization, registered as a 501(c)3 public charity in the United States and registered as a local NGO in Uganda. Over 95% of funds go directly to support GRG programs in northern Uganda.

About
Founded in March 2007, Grassroots Reconciliation Group (GRG)’s mission is to support war-affected communities, refugees, combatants, and former child soldiers in northern Uganda to help heal their war trauma, rebuild their lives, and reconcile through holistic, culturally appropriate, and locally designed projects.

Why We Do It
For over twenty years, Northern Ugandans have suffered a brutal war between the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda. The abduction of thousands of children to serve as soldiers in the LRA was one of the worst aspects of the conflict. At the height of the war, up to two million people were living in internal displacement camps, vulnerable to hunger, disease, and brutal LRA attacks, often forced to be carried out by the child soldiers themselves.

Former soldiers who manage to escape from the LRA usually spend six to eight weeks in reception centers trying to recover physically and psychologically. GRG helps to meet the extensive need for follow-up work with these individuals by strengthening long-term reconciliation between ex-LRA combatants and their communities of return.

Our unique participatory approach enables communities to design community-led projects, with GRG working directly with the groups over several years to ensure sustainability. On average, GRG works with each group for 4-5 years before they graduate to lead their own programs, building on the support from GRG. Our five program areas include livelihoods, microfinance, reconciliation, trauma counseling and care, and culture and recreation.

From 2018, we have adopted our holistic bottom-up approach to foster peaceful integration of refugees from South Sudan into the northern districts to reduce tensions and promote social inclusion through trauma counselling, local peace dialogues and mediations and sustainable livelihoods. All this using our expertise and lessons learned from the complexity of reconciliation and reintegration between former child soldiers and their war-affected communities.

What We Do
Our Mission
Our mission is to facilitate the transition process to help LRA ex-combatants and their war-affected communities to rebuild their lives and improve their socio-economic status through holistic, culturally appropriate and locally designed projects.

Make an Impact
When child soldiers come home, they face tremendous stigma and trauma. Our programs are designed to transform that situation. At GRG, we use a holistic, bottom-up approach to the community reintegration of ex-combatants. We have worked with groups of 30-70 people composed of half ex-combatants and half of other community members. So far, we have worked with over 2,500 participants, supporting groups to examine their own problems and to come up with their own solutions.

We have five main types of projects:
Livelihoods
Trauma support
Community microfinance
Reconciliation
Cultural activities
Each group designs its own projects. The group first develops its own multi-year development plan, which may include a range of different types of projects to support the individuals’ and groups’ development. Our three objectives throughout these interventions are:

To promote the reconciliation and psycho-social healing between ex-combatants and their war-affected communities;
To facilitate the economic recovery of ex-combatants and post-conflict communities through support to needs-based, community-driven livelihoods projects; and
To support ex-combatants and other community members to overcome the trauma of war and to become role models and leaders.

Group members identifying and ranking the problems they face in their community.
We work in phases of 4 to 5 years graduating groups at the end of each cycle allowing for a sustainable approach. We aim at empowering beneficiaries through trust-building and commitment to the projects while we observe the patterns of social interaction over the time. Graduating means the beneficiaries are ready to move on, on their own, having acquired the tools, knowledge and resources to become independent and self-reliant.

Phase 1
1000 people graduated in 2011

Phase 2
1500 people graduated in 2016

Phase 3
In progress