Cheyanne Church – Lecturer
True to Fletcher tradition, Lecturer in Human Security Cheyenne Church wears many hats. In addition to her role as a lecturer at Fletcher, Church spends a considerable amount of time in the field as an independent consultant and as the West African Liaison for the Reflecting on Peace Practices Project at Boston-based CDA Collaborative Learning Projects. Her role as the West African Liaison has most recently taken Church to Liberia, where she is researching the challenges and successes of peacebuilding in Liberia and the inclusion of peacebuilding efforts in United Nations operations.
Church brings with her considerable experience and expertise in peacebuilding. Prior to joining Fletcher, Church worked as the Director for Institutional Learning and Research at Search for Common Ground (SFCG) in Washington D.C. and as the Director of the Policy and Evaluation Unit at United Nations University’s Center for International Conflict Resolution (INCORE) in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland.
As an independent consultant, in 2006 Church led the largest and most comprehensive evaluation of The Missing, a major initiative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the Balkans on the issue of missing people. Covering four countries and spanning 15 years, the evaluation was the largest and most comprehensive evaluation of the initiative. More recently, she served as the Peacebuilding Fund Advisor to the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), conducting an evaluation of the Peacebuilding Fund. The Fund is a United Nations mechanism to provide funding for immediate post-conflict countries to support peacebuilding efforts.
Church’s research and professional focus on peacebuilding has been motivated by a simple philosophy of positive social change. "We have the responsibility to positively help people in need; and if given the trust by those most vulnerable, we have an ethical obligation and a professional responsibility to evaluate the impact of our own actions to the very best of our ability.” At Fletcher, Church addresses these issues and teaches students practical skills in the practice of peacebuilding through her courses “Design, Monitoring and Evaluation of Peacebuilding,” “Corruption, Conflict and Peacebuilding” and “Evaluation of Peacebuilding.”
As a lecturer-cum-practitioner, Church says that she maintains a “practice-focused perspective” in her courses. “All of my courses discuss current theory, but I ground the theory in real-life situations and day-to-day reality. Of course, it is important to understand relevant literature and schools of thought. Yet at the end of the day, I recognize that students want to practice what they have learned. So I strive to give them a strong grounding in practical skills that they can apply in the field.”