Meet the community

The CCHN community of practice is a global network of humanitarian professionals who share a passion for humanitarian negotiation and learn how to become better humanitarian negotiators together. Our community members meet regularly in a safe, confidential, and informal space to exchange their experiences, develop new negotiation approaches and feedback their learnings into the community.

Our story

The CCHN was born out of the realisation that accessing people in crisis relies on the ability of humanitarian workers to negotiate.

And yet, there are few opportunities across the sector to develop negotiation skills; the confidential nature of frontline negotiations makes it difficult to learn from the experience and perspectives of others.

In 2014, a group of humanitarians gathered in Kenya to discuss their challenges negotiating access, assistance and protection for people in crisis.

Reflecting on their experiences, those professionals created a conceptual framework that helps humanitarian workers prepare for and manage field negotiations more systematically.

The framework was called the “Naivasha Grid”, after the Kenyan town where the meeting took place. Those were the early roots of the CCHN community of practice.

What does the CCHN do?

To support a more systematic approach to frontline negotiations and help humanitarian negotiators improve their negotiation skills, we facilitate the capture, analysis and sharing of humanitarian negotiation experiences and practices through different activities.