Therry Alghifary, who is an alumnus of the Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Hasanuddin, batch 2007, is one of the alumni committed to realizing peace and anti-violence education. This commitment is demonstrated through the establishment of the “KITA Bhineka Tunggal Ika” Foundation, a foundation engaged in anti-violence education.
Quoted in ACTION magazine, January 2022 issue, Therry explained that his interest in education started when he decided to join the Indonesia Mengajar program. One year’s teaching experience made him love and find his interest in educational fields.
“At that time, I was quite a dilemma in choosing whether to pursue my career as an engineer or to get involved with education. In my opinion, these two fields are obviously different in terms of the focused works. Finally, after a quite long self-reflection, I chose to get into the educational path” Therry explained
Furthermore, Therry said that due to the broad scope of education, he found another difficulty to choose the specific issue to be fully concerned. However, after undergoing various reflections, he managed to figure out that education has number of fundamental points that are closely related to violent conflicts that now become his main concern.
Considering the pinpointed issues above, he then envisioned establishing a non-governmental organization endeavoring the mission of peace and anti-violence education, which then generated The KITA Bhineka Tunggal Ika Foundation, a foundation focusing on two things, peace and anti-violence education.
The KITA Bhineka Tunggal Ika Foundation has several leading programs, some of which are actively increasing capacity and empowering young leaders who are concerned with issues of peace and anti-violence, conducting training related to the values of peace and anti-violence education for teachers and education community activists.
The foundation is also active in expanding networks between organizations that are concerned with issues of peace and anti-violence education and actively conducting workshops or some other educational programs.
“The toughest challenge we are facing right now is that not all teachers and educators concerned about such issues; that rejection from those actors still become the usual problem. Apart from that, activities or training related to the peace and anti-violence issues are still considered insignificant which in return community seems less enthusiastic to get involved with the programs run,” Therry added.
Therry advised the youths to become leaders, movers who are amenable to spread the issues of peace and anti-violence education or to share their experiences with others as significant lessons. According to Therry, showing toughness can toughen others against problems, which means to make people around us tough, we ourselves need to be tough in advance in tackling any kind of situation. Therefore, it is necessary to present collective resilience to build community resilience.
Translator: Marningsih Sadik, S.S.
Editor : Ishaq Rahman, AMIPR
