When Gert Skoczowsky‑Danielsen ’96 stepped into a training room in Sierra Leone this year, he was carrying decades of UWC‑USA values into a country still healing from civil war.
Gert has been collaborating for nearly 20 years with Dominic, the director of a local children’s and youth organization in northern Sierra Leone, building trust and community connections long before this latest project began. Together they recently completed a major training that brought youth, community leaders, police, correctional officers, and city council members into the same room to practice new ways of listening and responding to conflict. One city council elder told him after the workshop that he felt like an elder in the community, a sign of how deeply the work was touching participants across generations.
For Gert, this is not a one‑off intervention. He and his partners are laying the groundwork for a West African Center for Nonviolent Communication, with plans to expand trainings to Ghana, Liberia, Guinea‑Bissau, and possibly Nigeria. Each Sunday, he meets online with a core local team for an hour and a half, building their capacity so the work will continue without him. “I don’t want to be the white guy who comes in and trains everybody in Africa,” he says. “I want them to keep doing it.”
He describes nonviolent communication as a shared human language built on feelings and needs. Feelings, he tells participants, are a dashboard: uncomfortable emotions signal unmet needs; comfortable ones show needs being met. In a culture where many people “just put a lid on” painful memories of war, simply naming those feelings and needs can open space for reconciliation and renewed relationships.
Gert traces this work directly back to Montezuma. “UWC-USA just made the whole difference to my life,” he says. He arrived planning to study medicine; exposure to classmates from conflict zones and to the conflict resolution program with Bob and Carol Pearson shifted him toward international relations, languages, and peacebuilding. “UWC is with me in everything I do,” he reflects. It’s where he learned to live with profound differences, come out as gay, and still find belonging.
What he carries forward from UWC‑USA is courage grounded in humility: the belief that “we can always do something”—even if it’s working with 20 people at a time in a post‑conflict town—and that small, steady wins can help shape a more peaceful generation.