Think Creative - Issue 6

Dean Piedmont’s desire to make a difference in the world and his expertise in reintegration have taken him to some of the world’s most challenging conflict zones, from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan.

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Dean Piedmont Championing reintegration to build peace Staff Spotlight

Dean Piedmont arrived in post-war Sierra Leone with two assets: skills in construction and a knack for youth counseling. He’d spent the first 10 years of adult life as a certified journeyman and mechanic in his hometown of New Rochelle, N.Y. Itching for a new experience, Piedmont had joined the Peace Corps, which sent him to Micronesia to teach and counsel youth. Arriving in Sierra Leone some years later, Pied- mont didn’t know how exactly, but he had a hunch his skills could be put to use as the coun- try picked up the pieces of an 11-year conflict. “It was 2002. The civil war in Sierra Leone had just ended. I knew that there was work there, so I looked for work that combined my con- struction skills and vocational skills in youth counseling,” says Piedmont. After the war, thousands of newly decom- missioned former fighters were left in limbo. Among themwere nearly 10,000 child soldiers. The country faced a new dilemma as it looked to disarm, demobilize and reintegrate them into society, a process that came to be known as DDR. Piedmont ended up finding a job helping the International Rescue Committee reintegrate former child soldiers, leaving construction work behind in favor of building peace in con- flict-affected communities. “This thing called DDR appeared. No one knew what it was. There was no policy on it and very little literature, so they looked for ancillary skills, which I had,” explains Piedmont. “I became part of a small cohort that started to develop global DDR policy. That’s where my journey began,” he says. Since that journey started, Piedmont has crossed the globe designing, implementing and evaluating programs to reintegrate former combatants into civilian life and support the communities that receive them. He has worked in Afghanistan, Iraq, South Sudan, Burundi and Kosovo, to name just a few of the 50-plus country visas stamped in his passport. In his 20-year career, Piedmont has worked

and latitude for me to do work on how we represent ourselves to clients and how we become policy experts, advocates and program managers in the DDR space,” he says. Reflecting on his days in Sierra Leone, Pied- mont says that the field today looks markedly different than it did in the early 2000s. “Back in the day, we basically did two types of work: humanitarian work or disaster assistance and post-conflict peacebuilding work,” he says. “Now, we do a lot of the same type of program- ming efforts and initiatives during conflict.” He also adds that countering violent extrem- ism, though not a new phenomenon, is increas- ingly factoring into DDR programs. With his desk and mind full of the complex en- tanglements of the globe’s conflicts, Piedmont says he stays motivated by finding new oppor- tunities to lean into challenges, lend his skills to build peace and get creative to find solutions. And when he’s not deep into DDR, he finds joy in smaller things: riding his motorcycle, play- ing a round of golf or visiting his family. n

on DDR programs and policy with the United Nations, national governments and develop- ment organizations and taught at universities and globally renowned centers of excellence, preparing the next generation of DDR practi- tioners for an ever-evolving field. Today, Piedmont serves as Creative’s Senior Advisor for Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration. In a day’s work, he addresses many of the world’s major conflicts. He is currently working with the UN to support the Stockholm Agreement in Yemen; conducting precedent-setting research on Boko Haram and ISIS-West Africa defectors in the Lake Chad Basin of West Africa; and thinking through an economic- based reintegration plan for the Taliban in Afghanistan (see pg. 6), where he spent three years working on reconstruction and DDR. In addition, he has catalogued the nearly 40 Creative programs connected to reintegra- tion since the late 1980s, starting in Central America. “Creative has provided enormous bandwidth

Photo by Skip Brown

26 | Think Creative | Fall 2019