Founded in 1965 Corrymeela’s objective has always been, and continues to be, promoting reconciliation and peace-building through the healing of social, religious and political divisions in Northern Ireland.  Corrymeela’s history is built upon a committed work with individuals and communities which have suffered through the violence and polarisation of the Northern Irish conflict.  Our vision of Christian community and reconciliation has been expressed through a commitment to encounter, interaction and positive relationships between all kinds and conditions of people.

The Corrymeela Community currently has 150 members and over 5,000 friends and supporters throughout the world.  Many Corrymeela members are active in a wide variety of peace and reconciliation activity and some have created their own training agencies involved in conflict transformation work.  

Corrymeela works throughout Northern Ireland and beyond, developing and delivering focused community relations work through single-identity, cross-community and cross-border community and residentially based programmes.  Each year over 6,000 participants take part in programmes at the Corrymeela Ballycastle Centre which has facilities for over 100 residents in 3 units.  This work can be categorised under 5 strands:  

• Schools work which seeks to address community relations issues often through citizenship
• Family work providing respite and development work with groups.
• Faith and Life seeking to support individuals and church communities in their journey of faith and to support encounter with different traditions
• Youth work primarily focused on marginalised young people.
• Community work looking at issues of inter-community relations, both on a single identity and a cross community basis  

We also have an international reputation for our work and we believe that our 40 years of reconciliation practice has brought with it considerable learning.  

We believe in the importance of the residential experience.  A residential experience can create a new openness to deal with issues that people find difficult in the ‘home’ territory – often issues of reconciliation and community relations.  A lived residential experience together allows old patterns and ways of viewing one another to change.  It allows different ways of meeting to invade the world of fixed expectation or old ways of being with one another in a youth group, a school, a church, etc.  Thus a residential experience opens up new possibilities in ways that cannot be easily done in peoples’ day-to-day world.

We believe that residential work needs to be related to work in the community.  Our residentially based work is increasingly linked to community based work – particularly to developmental programmes rather than a series of one-off events.  The residential experience is being used to support change in peoples’ ordinary day-to-day world so that new patterns of activities and new structures are created, and institutions are influenced in positive directions.  We work with others in civic society to build a more shared future, and to influence public policy in this direction. 

Read more in our Annual Review 2006/7