The project is part of a wider ten-year action-research programme (2003–2013) created and coordinated by TRANSFORM. The programme aims at facilitating the bottom-up mobilization of empowered constituencies for a socially just peace – making it a unique intervention in its scope and philosophy of action especially in the Middle East case and within the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

The IICP, together with the ARIA Group and the Institute for Cultural Affairs, have formed a consortium tasked with demonstrating the effectiveness of a methodological synthesis combining identity-based conflict transformation approaches with action-oriented community development methods. ARIA, ICA and IICP experts are developing a nine-stage process, elaborating the intent, the necessary steps, and the possible tools within each stage.

The new toolkit, called KUMI (meaning "Rise Up" in both Arabic and Hebrew) combines three distinct approaches to conflict transformation and community development and will allow communities, organizations and other groups to creatively engage in dealing with conflicts and the sustainable development of their societies. It is a vision-led, action-orientated process to enable a group which is in conflict, wants to make a contribution to peace, but is insufficiently organised to do so, to get to a point where they have a deeper understanding of each others’ perspectives and needs and where they are ready to start moving forward together.

Over the last few years, the programme received funding from NOVIB (Oxfam Netherlands), the MBI Foundation, the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, the ZIVIK programme of the German Foreign Ministry and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). In 2009-2010 the programme is funded by generous grants from the European Commission’s Partnership for Peace programme and ZIVIK. This phase is implemented by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Germany), the Young Israeli Forum for Cooperation (YIFC – Israel), the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH - Palestine), and TRANSFORM.