3 posts tagged with "peace"

A friend of mine, Sarah Talcott, recently wrote the Global Youth Cooperation Circle about an interfaith youth exchange she is planning in Cyprus. In that message she asked,

I would love to get your thoughts and ideas about how you see peacebuilding and sustainability education linked. How do the two influence and / or impact the other? How do you see these links in the work you are doing in the world? It would be nice to be able to integrate the ideas and input from this global network of young people into the exchange, as well as to take the findings and insights of the exchange back to you all.

I happened to be thinking of these very issues as I pulled dandelions up from my front yard this afternoon, so when I came inside and read her message, I felt called to respond by rapidly composing the following, which is thought-through but admittedly makes a few leaps in logic (to do otherwise would require a far larger tome!).

April 7, 2005. San Francisco, USA – The United Religions Initiative Global Council in March voted to endorse the Darfur Unity Statement in recognition of the continuing necessity for international intervention in the Darfur region of Sudan. Originally signed by over 100 non-governmental agencies in July of 2004, the Save Darfur Coalition's Unity Statement remains relevant today with over two million refugees in need of aid and death toll estimates in the region now exceeding 300,000 (the statement can be found at www.savedarfur.org).

Yesterday's Minnesota Public Radio story Finding culture and history in the suburbs was perhaps the most poignant I've ever heard, spotlighting a wonderful program in a Minneapolis suburb and displaying the full power of audio to move the heart in ways text alone cannot.

The slam against suburbs is they lack culture or history. Wrong and wrong. Eden Prairie school children are discovering their suburb is loaded with culture and history, but it takes some digging to find it. Students at Eden Prairie's Oak Point Intermediate School interviewed elders in their community including people from other countries. They've put the stories to song.