EuropaWorld 16/3/200 Did you Know about Peace Child International?

Peace Child International (Peace Child) is one of the world's oldest and most respected youth run organisations. Its mission is, very broadly, to empower young people and to give them the confidence and skills to take action to change the world around them.

Peace Child gets its name from a tradition. In Papua New Guinea, when warring tribes made peace, they each exchanged a child. The children would grow up with the others' tribe and if in the future, conflict threatened to break out between the tribes again, those children would be sent to negotiate. Such a child was called a "Peace Child." This legend represents the important role that Peace Child International believe young people can play in changing the world.

Born in America in 1981, and then subsequently moving to Holland and then the UK, the organisation originally focused on programmes to help put an end to the cold war and to promote peace between East and West. Exchanges were set up between young people in the Soviet Union and in the United States with the object of producing a play about peace. Five hundred individuals from the former Soviet Union and the US participated in the very first Peace Child play, the success of which led to repeat exchanges and plays being produced for the next 10 years.

With the end of the cold war Peace Child's focus moved toward educating young people about the concepts of sustainable development. One of the main tools for this was the creation of youth-focused books on key global issues. The first book, "Rescue Mission - a children's edition of Agenda 21," sold 320,000 copies in 18 languages. After this success, Peace Child was invited to create a whole series of books including a youth edition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The books are written, illustrated, edited and designed by young people from all over the world with a minimum of adult supervision.

The involvement of young people in such projects are at the core of all Peace Child activities, which include assisting schools all over the world in re-orienting education towards sustainable development and promoting Student-Teacher Partnerships in Human Rights Education.

The organisation now works with a network of over 500 groups in 120 countries to achieve these aims, representing millions of young people, their teachers, their parents and government liaison officers. Some groups are offshoots of Peace Child, some are non-governmental organisations working in the field of development and some are groups of young people wishing to take an initiative themselves to make a change in their communities.

Given the wide range of its activities it is both surprising and inspiring to learn that Peace Child International is currently staffed by only two full time staff members, one part time accountant and ten interns from all around the world. They live together at PSI headquarters - an eco-friendly residential facility located near Cambridge, England - where Peace Child's beliefs in peaceful and sustainable living are translated into practise. Interns currently come from Argentina, France, Greece, the UK, India, Japan, Ecuador and Spain.

Peace Child's latest initiative is the Be the Change! project, which supports local community development projects as diverse as AIDS education programmes in Swaziland and environmental clean-up projects in the Ukraine (see EuropaWorld Recommends).

For more information about the work of Peace Child International, including how you can help and how you can get involved, please see: http://www.peacechild.org