update：June 28, 2024

Interviewer: Hideo Tone
Writer: Naoto Okamura

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Ms. Kry and Mr. Hyma felt their project was ideal for the Toyota Foundation’s grant program -- Cultivating Empathy Through Learning from Our Neighbors: Practitioners' Exchange on Common Issues in Asia. “That was the title of your call. At the time, I thought it exactly fits,” Ms. Kry said. “We want to also touch the heart of the mainstream people. That’s why I think we came across this concept of cultivating empathy and learning from the neighbor. Which is the Toyota grant. This is a great opportunity. So, we were trying to apply.”

They also attributed the FLD project’s success to the fact that the Toyota Foundation was not so institutional in dealing with partner organizations. This is partly because of the sensitive nature of the FLD project involving ethnic minorities in local communities. They felt that the administrative compliancy side of things at more institutionalized organizations would have made it difficult for the complex and sensitive kind of work they were engaging in. “You cannot do this type of sensitive work,” Ms. Kry said. “It is really interesting to have this opportunity. I think that is because of the way of working at the Toyota Foundation.”

What’s more, they highlighted the FLD’s “Understanding ‘Us’ to Know ‘Them’” approach can be applied to other countries including Japan. When it comes to the issue of ethnic minorities, Japan is indeed no exception. There are a number of ethnic Japanese communities spread across North and South America; Japanese-Americans and Brazilians of Japanese descent to name a few. They have been living as a minority group in their respective countries for generations. In the meantime, Japan is now home to growing ranks of foreign workers, many of whom are Japanese descendants from Brazil and other Latin America countries. FLD could also serve as a tool to help Japanese to resonate with these people. “Do you have empathy for them? Do you want them to still speak Japanese after 100 years? Would you feel proud of that?” Mr. Hyma asked. “We can actually take these lessons and make some connection to that other group… I think our project gave us the language and the experience to be able to try to get people to imagine.”

WPM began as a women-led peace building network founded in 2000, two years after Cambodia finally saw an end to decades of fighting. At the time, Cambodian youth groups started addressing issues, particularly gender issues, because more than 60% of the civil war survivors were women. Although women greatly contributed to the rebuilding of the country, not a single woman was represented at the negotiation table in the 1991 Peace Agreement. Given these circumstances, WPM was created to prevent violence and promote more women’s leadership and meaningful participation in the process and enjoyment of peace and development and became registered with the Ministry of Interior in 2003 focusing on the intersection of gender and peacebuilding.

WPM has two main focuses: the gender and women’s issue program and the peace and conflict transformation program. When Ms. Kry took up the executive director post in July 2016, the organization had only four staff members working on a very grassroots level. Today, its staff count has grown to 28 with an annual budget over 18 times from when she started. She has exponentially grown the organization from its grassroots beginnings to a national hub for work on the intersection of gender and peace issues.

But that growth does not come without challenges. The biggest of which is how to ensure the sustainability of its work. For instance, Cambodia’s private sector shows a tendency to fund fewer sensitive initiatives and rather focuses on entrepreneurship, education, or clean energy, Ms. Kry said. So, funding from the local private sector does not go to community service organizations (CSOs) working on rights issues. “Even women’s rights is political and can be sensitive…In the context of Asia, not just Cambodia,” she said.

Moreover, funds to local CSOs are often given on a project basis with less focus on the wellbeing of the institution and human resources. Even though it is clear that for the project to be implemented well with impactful results, it needs human resources. Project-based funding means that when one project is done, those members involved will be gone as well, i.e., a loss of talent in WPM’s specialized fields. Therefore, they will need to work on numerous projects in order to sustain those talents and quality of work/expertise. Yet, this also meant the leadership will have to work more than double and compromise their wellbeing. These funding structures thus have a direct bearing on both attracting/sustaining talents and while upholding peacebuilding and feminist organizational core values at organizations such as WPM. “This is the real systematic challenge and requires systematic change in international development work” she said.

Therefore, she underscores the importance of supporting civil society organizations through not just a one-off project-based fund but also through core funding, a type of unrestricted financial contribution that covers basic “core” organizational and administrative costs, including office expenses, salaries of non-project staff, etc. “If you want to really support institutions, especially civil society organizations, it's not just about project based but about how you could also support them to grow stronger to become more resilient and innovative through unrestricted core funding” she said.

This is because she believes that securing a variety of funding sources is necessary for sustaining civil society organizations like WPM, which will in turn lend itself to keeping a more vibrant and more dynamic civic space for young generations. “As a CSO, we need to really think how we are going to adapt particularly in this very context of a shrinking civil space and shrinking resources,” Ms. Kry said. “It is not about growing bigger. It is about growing stronger from inside. For us, it is about how are we going to make an effective and efficient positive impact on the issue that we want to address with our creativities.”

In early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the world and indiscriminately hit countries, including Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam where FLD activities were conducted. WPM and its Toyota Foundation-granted project were severely affected as well. For instance, WPM organized an art exhibition as part of the FLD project in Phnom Penh in late February 2020, but it had to be closed in the first week of its opening due to the pandemic lockdown.

Moreover, some of their FLD participants lost their jobs, making it difficult for them to stay engaged. Indeed, the Covid-19 upset people’s priorities in life. It was all about survival. “People aren’t thinking now about cultivating empathy with their neighbors. They are thinking how to survive,” said Mr. Hyma.

Seen from a positive side, the pandemic proved to be a lesson in disguise. It helped them to see the importance of relationships. While it was difficult for them to keep the FLD participants engaged, they eventually came to the big question: who wants to be engaged and who no longer wants to or is unable to? “We can completely change everything. Thanks to the Toyota Foundation, we had the space to adapt and do something new,” Mr. Hyma said. “From our existing participants, who else wants to join, and then you see more people joining us.”

In addition, Ms. Kry stresses that openness would be one of the lessons from the pandemic; “I think how we navigate through these challenges is through openness. Being open to any possibility and also at the same time to any difficulty, challenges, and rejections. And then through that, one motives us to continue moving,” she said.

In retrospect, they have learned from the experiences of the FLD participants – and in particular, that humanity is, after all, what connects people in the end. All humans have the need for safety, tradition, and culture, thereby developing a sense of belonging. FLD is designed in such a way as to allow people to listen and see things from the other side and cultivate empathy. “That is important. It really transcends all these borderlines, all the things that we call political or geographical. That is how we are connected as human beings. It touches everyone,” Ms. Kry said. “That is when we can transcend all this conflict… when we can connect human-to-human first. And then whatever differences we have, we can manage to address it in a nonviolent way.”

With an aim to carry a lot of these learnings from the FLD project, as peacebuilders and peace practitioners, Ms. Kry and Mr. Hyma are exploring what is next for WPM. And one of their focuses is on the issue of statelessness, a significant finding coming out of the Toyota-granted project in respect to one of the ethnic minority groups involved. “We are actually working on the statelessness issue in Cambodia,” Mr. Hyma said, adding that the issue is increasingly being talked about across the Asia-Pacific region. As such, WPM is collaborating with counterpart organizations in Indonesia, Nepal, and Australia to look at this issue from a regional perspective. “We are finding a new space where we can bring up this really important issue in Cambodia,” he said.

In fact, WPM got a second chance to hold the art exhibition from the FLD project which had been shut down early due to the pandemic, this time not in Phnom Penh but at Taylor’s University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In late February, the university hosted the 2024 World Conference on Statelessness in which over 400 people with lived and learned experience of statelessness gathered from around the world to share their knowledge, perspectives, ideas, and skills. “We actually held that same exhibition, and it was a huge success. So many people thought it was incredible,” Mr. Hyma said. “So, it feels very much like an extension.”