Philosophy
The IDEFOCS Philosophy
The IDEFOCS leadership team uses its deep community inroads to identify and enroll at-risk citizens in and around Buchanan. To equitably serve the needs of its community, IDEFOCS uses a methodology known as “Survey, De-traumatization, Rehabilitation, and Reintegration,” or SDRR. Morris Matadi and his team developed the SDRR methodology with help from partners at the University of Pittsburgh and the Ford Institute for Human Security.
The SDRR methodology was designed to continue and improve upon the “Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration” process, implemented by the United Nations Mission in Liberia between 2003-2018. While IDEFOCS acknowledges the many successes of the UN’s efforts to demobilize combatants and build peace, it continues to advocate for a stronger reintegration process for former child soldiers and their families. Without adequate emotional, financial, and community support, those bearing the visible and invisible scars of war face higher rates of addiction, gang recruitment, and cyclical poverty.
The first step in the SDRR
The first step in the SDRR method involves an extensive survey process across Buchanan’s underserved communities, made possible by IDEFOCS’s team of locally sensitive leaders. By personally seeking out and meeting at-risk community members, IDEFOCS leaders are not only offering critical services; they are creating useful data about the number of conflict-affected Liberians still not receiving help from the government or international aid sector.
The SDRR method’s latter three tenets—de-traumatization, rehabilitation, and reintegration—are designed to holistically address the challenges facing former child soldiers and their families. Group therapy, one-on-one counseling, and addiction rehabilitation—often tailored to the needs of the individual—are prerequisites for the educational and professional services IDEFOCS offer.
the University of Chicago affirmed IDEFOCS’s
In 2022, academics from the University of Chicago affirmed IDEFOCS’s approach to fusing therapy with professional opportunity, finding that eight weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy followed by a cash injection resulted in a 50% reduction in drug dealing and a marked decrease in violent crime among troubled Liberian youth. IDEFOCS is an organization that understands the interconnectedness of financial and emotional security; it helps its community pursue those goals in unison.
Personal, financial, and communal sustainability is at the core of the IDEFOCS mission. And sustainability is impossible without a whole-of-society effort. That’s why IDEFOCS continually works with its community business and political partners to devise new forms of employment economic recourse for its members and the families it serves. IDEFOCS currently operates a stationery store and lamination center in downtown Buchanan. It also operates a local laundry service and organizes routine trash pickups with its students. As the IDEFOCS family grows it hopes to begin converting collected trash into eco-friendly charcoal briquettes, thereby opening a new revenue stream, and advancing Buchanan’s environmental sustainability initiatives.