S2 E23 | Maya Soetoro – Peacebuilding, Climate Resilience & Becoming Family Again
What if peace is not passive, but participatory?
What if climate resilience is built not only through policy, but through relationship?
In this episode of Beloved Futures, Aubrey Morgan Yee sits with educator, peacebuilder, and climate justice advocate Maya Soetoro-Ng for a rich and deeply human conversation on positive peace, community resilience, and the power of reimagining how we belong to one another. Together, they explore peace not as the absence of conflict, but as an active, relational practice rooted in compassion, deep listening, and collective care. This episode is both grounding and galvanizing – an invitation to move beyond despair and remember our capacity to contribute meaningfully to the world around us.
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About Our Guest
Maya Soetoro-Ng is an Indonesian-American educator, peacebuilding leader, and climate justice advocate based at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she serves as a faculty specialist at the Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution.
Her work bridges peace education, restorative practices, leadership for social change, and climate resilience. She is also the co-founder of the Institute for Climate and Peace and The Peace Studio, organizations dedicated to uplifting community-centered solutions, restorative storytelling, and creative approaches to collective transformation.
Drawing from her upbringing across Indonesia and Southeast Asia, Maya’s work is deeply informed by multicultural education, interfaith understanding, and a lifelong commitment to nurturing the very best in human nature.
What We Explore in This Episode
In this expansive conversation, Aubrey and Maya explore the difference between “negative peace” – the absence of acute conflict – and “positive peace,” the active cultivation of connection, justice, care, and belonging within our communities.
The conversation also explores the intersection of climate and peace – how climate disruption acts as a “threat multiplier,” intensifying displacement, instability, and fragmentation, while also creating opportunities for communities to remember their interdependence and resilience.
Key Takeaways:
Climate & peace – Climate disruption is not only an environmental issue, but a relational and social one.
Community resilience – Some of the most powerful solutions emerge directly from frontline communities.
Deep listening – Peace requires the willingness to listen with compassion and remain open to discomfort.
Re-familializing – Remembering how to become family again with one another and with Earth itself.
Love as superpower – Choosing empathy, tenderness, and humanity as pragmatic acts of transformation.
Throughout the episode, Maya returns again and again to one essential truth: we are never powerless. There is always something we can contribute – some small act of care, restoration, or bridge-building that ripples outward into the collective field.
With Love and Gratitude,
Aubrey Morgan Yee
GUEST INFO
Learn more about Maya’s work:
LinkedIn: Maya Soetoro-Ng
Wikipedia: Maya Soetoro-Ng
Website: www.ourbelovedfutures.com
Instagram:@aubrey.morgan.yee
Substack:ourbelovedfutures.substack.com
Book:Our Beloved Futures