Young People Create Peace Through Art and Dialogue
Few peace organizations in the world today have the unique methods employed by Where Peace Lives, a New Jersey based non-profit group founded by Landmark Education graduates that causes peace in the world and in young people's lives through art exchanges and other forms of dialogue between students from different parts of the globe.
Where Peace Lives matches schools and/or organizations from around the world. Each school or organization creates a peace mural, starting with individual drawings from young people and developing into a giant canvas that can be displayed for everyone to see. The mural is then exchanged with another one that has been created by students from a different state or country. Each school or organization than displays the peace mural that has come from another part of the world. The mural exchange is only a piece of the process that takes place between the schools. Additionally, there are discussions, creative writing, email correspondence with the other school and other activities that the students take part in that both foster communication with global neighbors and explore peace on a personal basis as well.
Because the founders of Where Peace Lives are not educators, they have partnered with many different people within schools and organizations to make all of this a reality. They enlisted the support of art teachers, principals, guidance counselors, and a range of different experts to create a unique art-based curriculum that could be used in both regular school classes and after-school programs, that supported teachers in creating classes that fit within their own curriculums, and that was universal enough to be adapted to just about any school or organization located anywhere in the world.
Created in 2006, Where Peace Lives has achieved phenomenal results in the less than two years of its existence. It quickly arranged for mural exchanges between New Jersey high schools and elementary schools with schools in Egypt and Peru. Then Where Peace Lives and students from these New Jersey schools had an opportunity to speak and talk about the project at the United Nations, as part of its Ghandi ? King Season of Nonviolence Youth Conference in 2007.
Since then the programs have blossomed. More than 50 groups throughout the world have signed letters of intent to participate in the program, and there are mural projects now being completed in schools as farflung as Ghana and Costa Rica. Recently, one of the largest mosques in the Northeastern United States with more than 6,000 families belonging to it) has agreed to participate.
The impact of the programs has been personal as well as global. The founders point to school violence and domestic violence as major problems in our society that are in fact interconnected with the global violence we read about every day. Furthermore, the project impacts the students view of the future, One New Jersey student relates the cynicism with which he began the project:
?[Our generation] is just as greedy, selfish, ignorant and pugnacious as all the countless generations before us. What could we possibly change?? Now, he says, ?I can call myself an optimist again, and can safely say that I'm looking with great expectation toward the future that my peers and I are going to create.?