Staff Profiles: Alison Lazarus

Alison Lazarus is an educationist, senior trainer, mediator and organisational development facilitator. She taught at a high school for 15 years from 1981-1995 and has since 1996, pursued her interest in peace building and development.

She is an accredited trainer with the United Nations System Staff College(UNSSC) and has been associated with Africa-focussed NGOs in South Africa namely the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) where she headed the Training Unit, the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) where she managed the Senior Government and initiated and led the Gender Project and the Denis Hurley Peace Institute an associate body of the Southern African Bishops Conference where she was interim director.

Her strengths are course design, development and delivery; programme design, implementation and evaluation; facilitation and training in participatory forms of multi-stakeholder processes for peace-building at organisational, community and national level. Her approach is multidisciplinary bridging the fields of development, peace-building and governance.

Prior to joining ELRU in November 2011, the focus of her work as an independent consultant was on supporting stakeholders both civil society and those in the three tiers of government in South Africa, particularly local government to mainstream the human rights and conflict sensitive perspectives in development programming and evaluation.

Alison was awarded the Chevening Scholarship (2005-2006) and undertook post-graduate studies in social research methodology at the London School of Economics and Politics.

In 1996/7 as a Harvard-South Africa Fellow she undertook post-graduate study in International Relations, International Law and Institutions, and Conflict Resolution, Youth Development Policy and Strategic Planning for Education. She holds an MA in Cultural and Media Studies, from University of Natal, South Africa. (1996)

In her position as director of ELRU, Alison is committed to co-labouring for a world where children are "free from want, free from fear and free to choose".