Libby Hoffman has been active in peacebuilding for 25 years – as a professor, trainer, facilitator, program director, consultant, and funder. A former Political Science professor at Principia College, she left academia to focus on the practice of peacebuilding , emphasizing the link between individual and community transformation. She has developed and led conflict resolution training programs in corporate, congregational, educational and community settings. She founded Catalyst for Peace (a Portland, Maine based private foundation) in 2003, to mobilize and support locally owned peacebuilding around the world, and to bring the stories of this work to the world. In the course of working with award-winning photographer Sara Terry to document stories of forgiveness and reconciliation in post-conflict Africa, Hoffman met John Caulker in 2007, and they began the partnership that led to the founding of Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone, alongside the commitment to document the process in film. Fambul Tok incorporated as an international organization in 2009 with Hoffman serving as its first President. Catalyst for Peace is still the US funding and program partner for Fambul Tok, and continues to focus on ways to share its stories and lessons more broadly. Fambul Tok (the film) was released in 2011 to great critical acclaim – with Hoffman as Producer/Executive Producer.

John Caulker founded and has led the implementation of the Fambul Tok program since its inception in 2007, first as the founding Executive Director of Forum of Conscience, and currently as the Executive Director of Fambul Tok International – Sierra Leone. Caulker became a human rights activist as a student leader during the initial years of the war in Sierra Leone. Risking his life to document wartime atrocities, he infiltrated rebel camps disguised as a rebel to gather information and stories to pass along to international organizations such as Amnesty International, Article 19, and Human Rights Watch. He founded Forum of Conscience as a human rights NGO in Sierra Leone in 1996. With Forum of Conscience, Caulker strove to prevent recurring violence by connecting the root causes of Sierra Leone’s brutal conflict to the need for rural community participation in the national decision making process and acknowledgement of wrong doing to victims through the reparations program. As the national chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Working Group, he pressured the government of Sierra Leone to implement the recommendations of the TRC’s 2004 report, and fought to ensure that some of the revenues from the sale of natural resources benefit Sierra Leoneans themselves in the form of a special fund for war victims.