What are Peace Messengers?

In 2003, SCI international adopted a strategic plan for 2004-2009 in order to better coordinate the action of the branches around common goals. One of these goals was "to improve the quality of peace education within the movement." Peace Messengers were formed to make this goal a reality. Peace Messengers are volunteers visiting work camps in order to run peace education activities. They can visit work camps of their own branches, or in other countries.

There is no fixed format for Peace Messengers sessions. They can run a one hour, one evening, one day or even a one week-end programme, depending on their availability and the time that can be freed during the workcamp. The activities can be very different: an exercise aiming at raising awareness on one particular issue related to peace, a presentation, a testimony, an artistic workshop, or even a whole programme resulting in workcamp participants running awareness raising activities themselves in the local community.  

Peace Messengers sessions all aim at raising awareness on peace-related issues, and giving tools to participants that they can use back home, after the work camp.  These sessions should be well integrated into the workcamp; this is why the Peace Messenger should work with the workcamp coordinator, to make sure that the activity organised fits into the general processes and dynamics. A two-hour session out of the blue from an unknown person and with no relation to the theme of the workcamp is not very likely to have a long-lasting impact...

Click here to find examples of projects run by Peace Messengers.

Click here to find resources to organise Peace Messengers activities.

Click here to read the Peace Messengers Handbook 2009