We leverage insights from research and practice to
understand the relationship between communication and violence. We use this knowledge to build an active peace.
We support organizations, leaders, and initiatives to be as effective as possible.
We offer assistance to a diverse set of partners, including civil society leaders and organizations, funders and large institutions, and other leaders within society. Our trainings and workshops offer new skills and design tools for creating effective and informed programming. Our strategic advising provides critical insights for high-impact initiatives.
We incubate and learn from new initiatives.
Through sustained engagement in specific communities and sectors, we seed and learn from new approaches. We bring together community leaders with interdisciplinary experts to design, implement, and test interventions. This ongoing engagement is also designed to empower and activate new voices to effectively speak out, take action, change narratives, and generate new norms through leadership in key communities.
We advance the field.
Over Zero advances the field of identity-based violence prevention by translating, connecting, and sharing learnings that span sectors, disciplines, and geographies. We tie together research from different academic streams, apply local learnings for wider accessibility, create connections where different sectors and disciplines are not informing each other, and support efforts to interpret geographically-specific best practices across the spectrum of identity-based violence. This act of translation not only connects parallel, oftentimes siloed streams of work, but also reveals a more comprehensive picture of existing knowledge.
Our Focus
We work to prevent and reduce violence that targets groups of people based on their identity - whether religious, ethnic, racial, national, political, or otherwise.
This type of violence continues to have an indelible effect on the human experience, from lost lives and widespread trauma to economic stagnation and forced migration. We work along the full spectrum of identity-based violence - from its earliest stages to its most extreme manifestation in the form of genocide and mass atrocities. Across this spectrum, communication is weaponized to drive division, tap into and mobilize powerful emotions like fear and disgust, shape social norms and pressures, and coordinate action.
Communication is a powerful and transformative tool — it can be used to move societies towards or away from identity-based violence. Wherever we see identity-based violence, communication is weaponized, often most visibly through hateful and dangerous rhetoric. This rhetoric activates and influence underlying societal dynamics, playing a critical role in moving societies towards violence. Over Zero builds new tools and knowledge for resisting this manipulation and strengthening societal resilience to identity-based division and violence.
Our Partners
We believe that in order to break out of silos and truly build something new, we need to bring together unlikely partners to co-create new models, methodologies, and realities.
We build resources
for learning and
action.
