A Nobel Effort for Peace

Group has recruited 12 laureates to work with young people

Over the past decade, Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff have been steadily waging peace. The organization they

founded in 1996, the PeaceJam Foundation, has recruited the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and other winners of the Nobel Peace Prize to work with young people to carry out community-service projects and study nonviolent ways to stand up to injustice, both in their lives and in the world at large.

While dozens of charities have one or two Nobel peace laureates on their organizational letterhead, the PeaceJam Foundation boasts 12, all of whom have worked intensively with the group to develop its peace-education curriculum and travel the globe to meet face to face with young people at conferences sponsored by PeaceJam.

All told, the group estimates that 500,000 youths worldwide have participated in PeaceJam programs, carrying out some 300,000 community-service projects. Activities have included building skate parks, painting murals, organizing conflict-resolution workshops, creating libraries, opening a “fair trade” coffeehouse, and writing letters to help free political prisoners.

Despite its distinguished membership roster and the large number of youths it has reached, PeaceJam has worked quietly for 10 years, spending almost nothing on fund raising or public relations.

“It’s really been done with duct tape and Band-Aids, and the Nobel laureates love it, because they all started that way,” says Ms. Engle.

A ‘Global Call to Action’

While those tactics have allowed PeaceJam to accomplish much on a shoestring, the charity is now about to pull off what may be its most audacious feat yet: a three-day conference at the University of Denver attended by 10 of the laureates and 3,000 students from 31 countries.

It will be the largest-ever gathering outside Oslo of Nobel Peace Prize winners, and Ms. Engle says it will serve in many ways as a “coming-out party” for the organization.

The conference, to be held September 15-17, is billed as a “Global Call to Action,” and the laureates have prepared extensively for it. They have identified 10 global problems that they deem the most important for young people and others to work on over the next decade: for the Dalai Lama, it’s access to clean water; for Rigoberta Menchú Tum of Guatemala, racism; and for Shirin Ebadi of Iran, women’s rights.

BBC World, in London, is producing a one-hour television show about the “Global Call to Action” campaign and has committed to a 13-part series chronicling PeaceJam’s work over the next decade.

Each of the Nobel laureates plans to bring about two dozen young people to the Denver conference, and the organization has raised more than $250,000 to pay for their travel and other costs.

The challenges involved in pulling off such a large-scale event were evident in the days just before the conference as the group’s staff members, which include seven full-time employees and two AmeriCorps Vista volunteers, worked on final preparations.

In PeaceJam’s headquarters, a small, historic house decorated with large abstract paintings by Mr. Suvanjieff, staff members were busy finalizing visas, lining up translators, even buying shoes for a delegation of streetchildren slated to accompany Adolfo Pérez Esquivel of Argentina, who received the Peace Prize in 1980 for his human-rights work on behalf of “the disappeared” in Latin America.

“Peace is hard work,” says Ms. Engle. “What we’re hoping to do with this 10-year campaign is to break it down for people, saying if we work together, doing relatively simple things, we can make dramatic progress on these 10 seemingly overwhelming problems.”

The Power of Serendipity

When they founded PeaceJam in 1996, neither of the co-founders had backgrounds in nonprofit management. Ms. Engle was a former Congressional staff member who had helped create the Colorado Friends of Tibet, and Mr. Suvanjieff was a painter, a musician who played in punk bands, and the publisher of a literary magazine.

“The entire history of PeaceJam is one long rebuke to the whole notion of strategic planning,” says Joel J. Orosz, professor of philanthropic studies at Grand Valley State University, in Allendale, Mich., and a former program director at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in Battle Creek, Mich., which has provided approximately $500,000 to the group since its founding.

“When Kellogg came on board as a funder, Ivan had this great idea of Peace Prize winners working with kids, Dawn had some human-rights connections, but they had no elevator pitch, no mission statement,” says Mr. Orosz. “You’d think the laureates would require people at the highest level, but they also rightfully have a fear of being exploited for political reasons. Dawn and Ivan’s crazy alchemy worked: It was too improbable to be a scam.”

Today, their simple idea revolves around its educational curricula, which use the lives of the laureates as case studies.

PeaceJam staff members have also tailored materials based on the lives of the 12 laureates for kindergarten and elementary-school students and are developing similar materials for middle-school and college students.

The 12 laureates have said that they ultimately hope to see a comprehensive package of kindergarten-through-college materials that PeaceJam can distribute worldwide.

For instance, in the PeaceJam program for high-school students, groups of teenagers meet with teachers or other adult sponsors who have taken a training course on the curriculum.

The teenage participants commit to a yearlong program during which they study the history of one of the laureates for six months, attend a conference hosted by the laureate, and present their plans for community-service projects to the laureate and other attendees.

At the conferences, young people spend two hours in a question-and-answer session with the laureate.

“When Nobel laureates come out of the Q-and-A sessions with the kids for the first time,” says Mr. Suvanjieff, “they always say that these young people ask them tougher, better questions than any adult anywhere has ever asked them.”

Several months later the teenagers meet again at a “PeaceJamSlam” to share their experiences and report on the progress of their projects.

“It’s a one-year program that goes on, again and again,” Ms. Engle says. “That’s really important, because if it was just a weekend with a Nobel laureate, it would just be a sort of distinguished speakers’ series and that’s not what we’re about.”

“What happens is transformative,” says Mr. Orosz, who has attended several PeaceJam events over the years. “The authenticity is the one irreplaceable thing when you’re working with kids — they have built-in [expletive] detectors. Give them direct contact with a laureate, not as a celebrity, but as a fellow striver, and it works. The laureates say, ‘I’ve made mistakes too, but I have some ideas, and I want to hear yours.’”

Changing Outlook

Rudy Balles, a longtime PeaceJam participant who now serves as program director at the Gang Rescue and Support Project, a nonprofit group in Denver, attests to PeaceJam’s potential to change young people’s outlook.

Mr. Balles, now in his late 20s, has both Chicano and Native American roots, and came to hear Rigoberta Menchú Tum speak at a PeaceJam conference in 1996 when he was an equivocating gang member.

He was wary of the event, wondering if it was going to just be a group of hippie kids singing “Kumbaya.” But Eddie Montour, a local Mexican-American leader he respected, had told him about Ms. Menchú Tum’s work on behalf of indigenous people and he was intrigued enough to attend the two-day conference.

In a documentary produced by PeaceJam, Mr. Balles describes the effect she had on him: “Polite, beautiful smile, all little. And here I am, thinking that I have to be bigger and better and crazier-looking than anyone else to get a point across. And here’s this nice, short, smiling woman, standing up against the whole world for her people to live. And I saw that I had to look inside myself for another direction.”

Surveys of other PeaceJam participants show that the charity’s work is changing how many young people think.

According to PeaceJam, 93 percent of young people who attend a conference leave with the belief that “one person can make a difference,” and 97 percent say that they will “strive to be peace makers” in their lives.

And at Foster Elementary School, in Arvada, where the PeaceJam Juniors program has been used for two years, Leigh Hiester, the school’s principal, says that she suspended half as many students last year as the preceding year.

“They’re just not fighting as much. Through the curriculum, we’re giving these kids — most of whom live below the poverty line — the opportunity to read, write, or speak about someone who’s even worse off than they are. It helps them think about what they are going to contribute to the world, rather than just what the world is going to give them,” says Ms. Hiester.

But it’s not just gang members like Mr. Balles or children from low-income backgrounds who are drawn to — or benefit from — PeaceJam’s message. The group’s co-founders are quick to point out that young people from all demographic groups and walks of life are susceptible to feelings of hopelessness and alienation.

“The idea of an at-risk youth has changed over the years,” says Mr. Suvanjieff. “Out in the suburbs they were never referred to as at-risk youths. But as we found out here in Colorado, in an affluent community like Columbine, Mom and Dad had more money, but they weren’t at home. More money can buy better drugs, better guns.”

Role Models

The idea for PeaceJam was born 12 summers ago, when Mr. Suvanjieff was living in a bare-bones loft in a north Denver neighborhood. Temperatures — and tempers — were running high, and the city was reeling from a rash of gang-related violence.

One day Mr. Suvanjieff approached some local gang members and asked them if they knew who the president of the United States was. They said that they didn’t know — or care. But as they kept talking, the discussion eventually wound around to events in South Africa.

To Mr. Suvanjieff’s surprise, the gun-toting teenagers not only knew who Archbishop Desmond Tutu was, but also praised him unabashedly for his nonviolent work to dismantle the apartheid system in South Africa, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

The conversation stuck with Mr. Suvanjieff.

“I’d thought about who were the role models in pop culture, looked at what kids had been sold, and thought who’s the true moral arbiter here? And when these young gang members lit up over the idea of the life, the work for nonviolent change of Archbishop Tutu, I thought, bingo.”

While the idea for PeaceJam came from Mr. Suvanjieff, it was Ms. Engle who provided the initial entree that made the organization a reality.

When she was a Congressional staff member in the 1980s, Ms. Engle had worked as a volunteer with the International Committee for Tibet and helped draft the first legislation that tied China’s “most favored nation” trading status to its human-rights record.

As Mr. Suvanjieff described his vision of linking kids with world-famous peace activists, Ms. Engle says, “he wouldn’t shut up, he was so on fire about this idea.”

Mr. Suvanjieff continues the story: “So finally she says, Well, I know a Nobel Peace Prize winner. I know the Dalai Lama.”

Seeking the Dalai Lama

Once Mr. Suvanjieff got over his initial shock, Ms. Engle worked to set up a meeting with the exiled Tibetan leader.

“The Dalai Lama doesn’t talk on the telephone,” she explains, which meant that the two would have to travel to Dharamsala, India, to present their idea in person. They were extremely short on funds — Mr. Suvanjieff recalls having $1.97 in his checking account — and borrowed money to fly to India in May 1995.

The Dalai Lama agreed to participate, as long as other Peace Prize winners joined the effort. “He didn’t want it to be just about the Tibetan cause or about him,” says Ms. Engle.

Back in Denver, the two set about contacting other laureates, starting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

“I was sitting on the floor in my loft,” says Mr. Suvanjieff, “calling information in Cape Town and asking, could you please look in your Yellow Pages under ‘Nobel Peace Prize winner’ and give me Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s phone number? And the operator would hang up on me.”

But their persistence eventually paid off, and they were able to arrange a meeting with Archbishop Tutu, borrowing yet more money to fly to Cape Town.

Although he has since written that “it seemed like a crazy idea at the time,” he also agreed to work on the project.

“It does sound crazy now, because we didn’t realize how impossible it was, what we were trying to do,” says Ms. Engle. “And that’s probably why it worked.”

Within six months, eight Nobel peace laureates had agreed to participate.

“We had no funding yet, no curriculum,” says Mr. Suvanjieff. “That they [the laureates] would even let me into their office to pitch this idea is a testament to their compassion and open-mindness.”

Mr. Suvanjieff and Ms. Engle have developed strong bonds with the Nobel laureates that extend beyond charity work. When the couple were married in 2000, it was in Cape Town, with Archbishop Tutu performing the ceremony. Jody Williams, who received the Peace Prize in 1997 for her work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, served as maid of honor.

Unusual Governance System

Getting the Nobel laureates to back the idea of PeaceJam was hardly the only challenge the group faced as it got off the ground. It also had to figure out how best to keep the prize winners working together on a consistent basis.

Ms. Engle and Mr. Suvanjieff decided to incorporate their charity — whose budget today is approximately $550,000 — as a membership organization, with the sole members being the peace laureates.

They took that approach, Ms. Engle says, because “the laureates had never worked together before, so we wanted to create something that they felt was theirs, where they all have equal say. All decisions have to be made by unanimous consent and everyone has veto power. And it works well, because everyone knows that nothing will happen unless they have consensus and they really want this work to succeed.”

The co-founders also wanted to ensure that the focus remained primarily on the Nobel Peace Prize recipients and their work with young people.

“Ivan and I can be fired at any moment by the members of the foundation with 30 days’ notice, just like anyone else,” says Ms. Engle. “In that way, we’ve fully empowered the laureates — PeaceJam is of, by, and for them.”

The organization also maintains a Board of Directors, with each member representing one of the laureates, and currently has eight regional affiliates in the United States and eight chapters in several of the laureates’ home countries. And although many of the laureates have strong spiritual and political views, the PeaceJam Foundation says it is careful to remain secular and nonpartisan.

“We get kids from both sides of the aisle,” says Mr. Suvanjieff. “We have kids who say, my brother is in Iraq and I support his efforts over there, I support the war. And we have kids who say they don’t support it. And what we have to do here is create honest, civilized discourse, and that’s something we encourage. We’re trying to teach young people to make their argument better, not louder.”