For Simran Kour, founder of the Eqra Foundation in Jammu and Kashmir, India, peace is about creating spaces for people to strengthen their mental health and find common ground through dialogue, peace education, and religious pluralism. She does this work because peace leadership feels personal for her. Growing up with the continuous violence in the region between India and Pakistan, she saw firsthand how this conflict impacted individuals and communities, and she felt the need to develop programs that intentionally brought people together to share their lived experiences as a way to build peace in the region.
Jammu and Kashmir sits at the center of the conflict between India and Pakistan that emerged from the 1947 partition of British India. The diverse region houses over 15 million people, approximately 68% of whom are Muslim, with a 28% Hindu minority, with other religions, including Christianity, making up the remainder of the population. The consistent strife over and within the region has fostered an increase in mental health challenges, child and migrant labor issues, interreligious discord, and sexual and domestic violence. In fact, ongoing militant attacks in Kashmir have resulted in multiple deaths and escalated tensions between India and Pakistan over their involvement in the region, resulting in military engagement in spring 2025. After an agreement between the countries, peace remains precarious in the region.
Founded in 2020, the Eqra Foundation is working to address the individual and community challenges that come with living within a divisive and often violent political environment. The Eqra Foundation bases its work on the integral peace leadership framework that I have worked to develop with colleagues over the last ten years. Simran was first introduced to the framework when participating in Euphrates Institute’s Peace Practice Alliance, which adopted the integral peace leadership framework for this six-month online training program. Integral peace leadership serves to identify individual and collective ways to challenge violence and aggression while building just and equitable systems and structures. It consists of four interconnected areas of practice, including Innerwork, a space for personal peace and reflection; Knowledge, where we work to understand and engage with others; Community, the collaborative space for collective peace action; and Environment, where we address larger systems and structures.
Simran identified with the framework, which is why it serves as a guide for the Eqra Foundation’s work. Most recently, the foundation has worked in peace education, providing government-approved student and teacher trainings based on two manuals they developed for this purpose. The student program occurs over seven days, and the teacher program runs for 12 days. Both trainings are designed to empower students and educators with peace leadership skills for practicing personal peace, crafting peaceful connections, and putting peace into action. The educator training programs go on to also help integrate peace education ideas into the classroom.
In 2025, these trainings occurred in both government and private schools and colleges across Jammu and Kashmir. The sessions began with the Innerwork area, where the Eqra Foundation builds participants’ skills in self-reflection to understand pre-existing biases and empower them to change. Next, the focus is on the Knowledge area, where they teach participants about peace and violence and introduce them to peacebuilding skills, such as dialogue. Moving into Community, participants work together to create safe spaces through communication, empathy, and navigating differences. These trainings ultimately lead to policy and culture change by prioritizing the work of peace in schools, therefore also engaging in the area of Environment. The trainings were well received by the participants and the school site hosts. Several educators shared that these skills were new to them and that they were enthusiastic about learning structured tools for peace education, emotional awareness, and dialogue.
This work is not without challenges, though. In fact, in one instance, Eqra Foundation was unable to bring disparate groups together for dialogue because mistrust and fear of safety were too great. There were concerns that these tensions could escalate at any moment. Instead, they had to engage with groups separately and build spaces for reflection and conversation within each community individually. Even when activities cannot be led with groups in a space together, deep hurt is illuminated, but also the quiet desire to transform conflict and engage in healing processes.
Another challenge met in Eqra’s work is that in some communities, there are negative associations with the word peace. Often, the term peace comes with rhetoric that is coded as trying to force people out of their own beliefs or cultural practices. This creates a complex environment where peacebuilding work is not seen as value-added. This challenge inspires the Eqra Foundation to find new and innovative ways into this work, highlighting the importance of creating space for deep community impact. Eqra also found that through their trainings, students and educators often identified mental health challenges around stress and anxiety, which has led the foundation to explore how deeply peacebuilding work is tied to mental health and to make a commitment to include structured mental health interventions with trained professionals in future trainings.
Much of the work the Eqra Foundation accomplishes is with limited resources and largely through community support rather than institutional funding. Eqra relies on volunteers and local community members to make their dialogues and trainings possible. This enables the organization to get buy-in from a multitude of partners and allows events like their interfaith brunch during Interfaith Harmony Week to be a successful space to address stereotypes and encourage participants to push past labels and deeply rooted gender-based issues.
The Eqra Foundation is enthusiastic about the future of this work. While they understand the challenges peace leadership and education work involve, they strive to add twelve additional schools to their work in 2026 and continue to grow this work in more schools in the future. They also hope to align their peace education work with their interfaith work, intending to build a network of religious leaders across communities. For Simran, she has learned that her own peace leadership work is reflected in the integral model that she teaches. She says, “peace leadership requires patience, humility, and persistence. It is often slow work, built through trust and small steps, but it is deeply necessary work, especially in places where histories of conflict continue to shape everyday life.”
Keywords: Jammu and Kashmir, education, leadership, peace education, peace, conflict, conflict resolution, Eqra Foundation, NGO
Whitney McIntyre Miller
Whitney McIntyre Miller, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Leadership Studies at Chapman University and is the leading scholar of the Integral Peace Leadership Framework. Her scholarship has a particular focus on international community-based and educational work. Dr. McIntyre Miller has published over 35 articles and book chapters and edited two journal special issues. She is the author ofIntegral Peace Leadership: Theory and Practice for Creating Peaceful Changeand a co-editor of a forthcoming peace leadership volume. Dr. McIntyre Miller has experience in community and international development, refugee resettlement, nonviolence, and election monitoring. She is a founding member of the Peace Leadership Collaborative and sits on several global advisory boards.
