On Nov. 7, 2025, I, along with Steven Mukum ’26 and Mina Bakhshi ’27, attended Middlebury’s Experiential Learning Conference, made possible through the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. Each of us brought our own unique experience related to peacebuilding, but together, we presented on systems mapping: a technique that encourages a holistic and strategic approach to problem-solving.
With a systems map, you are able to gain a bird’s-eye view of a complex social issue, chart out the interrelated factors in the form of feedback loops, and identify leverage points for maximum impact. But what was transformative about this conference was not just the students’ presentation of systems mapping, but the idea of having motivated scholars from across the US share their frameworks, passion projects, and visions related to building a sustainable future.
As Davis Projects for Peace grant recipients, all three of us were invited to the conference. We entered feeling grateful for the opportunity, and left with a newfound sense of appreciation for student peacebuilding. The Davis grant provides a $10,000 summer grant to one or two students from select universities each year to help fund passion projects.
Mukum’s project focused on building an imagined community among displaced women in Cameroon through sustainable agriculture. To him, “the most memorable part of the conference was the practical frameworks that different student groups presented.” Mukum was “left with a concrete toolkit to refine [his] ideas and amplify [his] already existing project, making it more efficient and impactful.”
For Bakhshi, the conference taught her that “there is no one way to build peace; there are many ways, each connecting our passions with a purposeful commitment to peace.” She told me that “through this conference, [she] witnessed how powerful it is when people from different backgrounds unite around a shared vision of justice, dignity, and building systems rooted in compassion.” Her project implemented a mental health initiative in collaboration with a local athletics organization in Pakistan.
My project addressed stunting in Indonesian rural communities through the production and distribution of a documentary, aiming to shed light on this often unnoticed but chronic healthcare issue. Aside from being able to spread awareness about this issue to other attendees, my favorite part of the conference was learning about the different ways students conceptualize, research, and design interventions for complex social issues. The panel discussions also emphasized the importance of promoting a peaceful ethos no matter one’s profession, urging that in these challenging times, we could all benefit from figuring out how to work a little more collaboratively and emphatically.
One particular session, hosted by the University of Oklahoma titled “Beyond Numbers: Memory Mapping Reimagined,” explored the risks of reducing people to data points. In this session, participants were asked to create a story for an individual based on a simple sheet of statistical data and demographic information. The participants fabricated lives for nurses, activists, students, and other average citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, the Maldives, and Colombia, and then heard about real people’s stories, which each of the presenters had a connection to.
Through stretching our minds and leading with empathy, we were primed to question the assumptions we make, be inquisitive about an individual’s background, and imagine ourselves in their position, despite vastly different upbringings, bonded only by a shared sense of humanity.
Through the format of this conference, students acted as co-educators, presenting novel frameworks and workshops alongside university staff and faculty. Bakhshi, Mukum, and I were accompanied by Nimesh Ghimire ’15.5, a Swarthmore alum and senior fellow at the Lang Center, who taught us systems thinking and systems mapping during our first year at Swarthmore.
“Systems mapping gives students a structured way to make sense of complexity,” Ghimire said. “It helps them understand the current state of a system, identify where change is possible, and act more strategically. I am incredibly proud that Nayla, Mina, and Steven not only used this lens to design and implement their peacebuilding projects, but are now sharing it with others as thoughtful ambassadors of this work.”
The Middlebury Experiential Learning conference helped to spread empowering ideals amongst a passionate group of students and educators, but what are the implications beyond that?
A month after the conference, the organizers and interested attendees met to reflect on the experience. Aside from a sense of collective empowerment, one takeaway was the power of interest-based communication. Instead of fighting about individual stakes from opposite sides of the table, interest-based communication entails understanding the others’ needs and concerns that drive their position. Adopting an interest-based approach leads to more productive, mutually beneficial, and collaborative decisions.
Through striving for peaceful, empathetic, and interest-based communication, everything, from daily struggles to large-scale issues, becomes easier to tackle. This is not to say that conferences and frameworks provide all-knowing solutions to each of our problems, but they do give us a place to start; they are a stepping stone to peaceful conflict resolution and problem-solving.
