2024 Trustbuilding Awards

We are delighted to award the Young Trustbuilder of the Year Award to Pascal Biruru, an inspirational young man, for his impactful work in the education sector of the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Biruru’s project, League Academia, seeks to transform the ‘multifaceted inequalities and exclusions that plague the Congolese academic sector.’ These injustices create a climate of tension and mistrust, and they prevent students from realizing their full potential. 

We particularly appreciated Pascal's role as a youth leader, mobilizing thousands of young people to transform the culture of the education sector, bringing together stakeholders to target the issues of exclusion and inequality that impose barriers to the lives of many in DRC. 

We are delighted to award the Trustbuilding Award of the Year to May Thu Ne Win, a woman who truly demonstrates all the qualities that this award seeks to showcase. 

Against a backdrop of decades of ethnic conflict, exacerbated by brutalities committed by the military in Myanmar, which have made immense gender inequality and violence against women the norm, her work facilitates initiatives that raise the voices of women in the community, and that empower them to step into roles of leadership and advocacy to bridge ethnic and gender divides and advocate for peace and trustbuilding. ‘To be here, I'm not just representing myself,’ said Thu Ne Win. ‘I'm representing all the ethnic women in my country, because they all suffer but have so much resilience and dedication for our community.' 
 

We are delighted to award the Lifetime Achiever of the Year Award to Jo Berry for her deep commitment to healing and building bridges over the last 25 years.

The legacy of Berry's work is now in many communities beyond Northern Ireland where her personal story began. Her work integrates many aspects that are at the core of trustbuilding — transcending divides between different tribes and religions, changing narratives around conflict, and working from a place of deep individual vulnerability and commitment. ‘To get this honor means the world to me, because it means I can have more strength to carry on,’ said Berry. ‘Because I haven’t finished.’