Geneva Peace Week 2017: 5,000 participants at 50 events organized by 100 partner organizations featuring over 150 speakers: A tremendous increase in interest accompanied this year by key organizational innovations, a report and an evaluation.

• Peace Talks: The fifth edition of the Geneva Peace Talks attracted nearly 1,000 participants and featured Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General, as a speaker.
• Building peace in urban settings: The Platform co-convened the conference ‘Reviewing the Safety in Cities’ and incubated a conversation about how Geneva-based actors can collectively strengthen city-level networking. These efforts led to a feasibility study on a ‘Geneva Cities Forum’.
• 21 networking events: Co-organized with 15 different event partners, featuring four informal events with senior officials from the UN system in New York. There is increased recognition that the Platform reduces transaction cost for senior officials on mission to Geneva to reach out to a diverse range of peacebuilding actors.
• Communication: The new Platform website is ready to be launched in early 2018. Social media outreach more than doubled.
• Faces of Peace: A new collaboration that features 13 professionals illustrating Geneva as a hub for peacebuilding across institutions and sectors, to be released in 2018.
• New programme: 2017 was a year of stock-taking and vision-building for a new two-year programme (see also ‘Outlook 2018’).
• DCAF joins the Platform: On 1 January 2018, the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) joined the Platform. DCAF has a comparative advantage in security sector governance and security sector reform which are complementary strengths to the existing expertise of the other four partner institutions.
• Modest budget, collective action: All Platform activities in 2017 were implemented on the modest resource base of CHF 385,000 with a focus on advancing activities in collaborative ways to foster collective impact.