Active Change Foundation

The Active Change Foundation (ACF) is an NGO that was set up to deal with serious violence such as gangs, violent extremism and hate crime. The objective of the organisation is to produce and further develop intervention tools and trainings that help to create a better, safer and stronger society by both strengthening community resilience and directly intervening with targeted individuals.

In the area of prevention ACF works on the promotion of religious and societal harmony for the public benefit by facilitating knowledge and mutual understanding between ethnic groups and persons of different faiths. Particularly, ACF promotes a greater inclusion of young people in activities of preventing violent and hateful crime as well as a more trustful rapport between young people and other members of the community, including statutory bodies.

Methodologically, in the area of intervention ACF practitioners have developed a varied and flexible set of sophisticated strategies to engage in one to one interaction with difficult to access individuals that are con-sidered high-risk. To this end tailor made action plans are developed that are geared towards the situational and individual circumstances of the targeted person. In so doing, practitioners are intimately familiar with extremist recruiters’ ability and techniques to take advantage of young peoples’ vulnerabilities. ACF thus engages their clients in a process of challenging, readjusting, and broadening their world-view and develop protective factors to insulate them from being recruited. This also includes raising community awareness on the issue as a tool to both create community collateral and community resilience.

At a national level, the ACF is called upon to re-integrate people convicted of extremist activity back into the community. Internationally, ACF provides trainings on both intervention methods and community engagement strategies and thus supports institutions to become more aware of how to best build community resilience to extremist activity. ACF has trained a number of international delegations.

A particularly promising aspect of ACF’s work might be the multi-agency approach in which it is able to work closely with various state agencies, local institutions and at the same time engage high-risk individuals in the pre-criminal space in a trust-based, open process and personally challenging interaction.

Contact details:

Email: enquiries@activechangefoundation.org