Making Peace Where I Live
(MAPWIL)
A Peace Project for Youth
July 2001
Dear Friend:
Thank you for your interest in MAKING PEACE WHERE I LIVE. This is a learning guide designed to support young people to research the peacemaking traditions in their own communities. It is intended as a contribution to the UNESCO's Year and Decade for Education for a Culture of Peace. This version is being developed by an independent group of peace educators from New England. Pamoja, a new organization devoted to encouraging the association of professionals from public, private and nonprofit sectors who promote innovative approaches to challenges facing communities both locally and globally, has agreed to act as fiscal agent and to provide support for the project.
If you have requested a hard copy of "Making Peace Where I Live", enclosed you will find a draft copy of the learning guide written for young people. A supplement for teachers or youth leaders is also included. We have written the materials thinking of 6th graders or youth between 10 and 12 years old.
We strongly urge those who receive copies of MAPWIL to be in touch with our group, so that we might be in touch with one another. Our initial hope in developing this project was to find educators who would commit to using MAPWIL and to give us feedback so that we may continue to revise and update the project. You may email us at mapwil@pamoja.net or contact Mary Lee Morrison, 129 Penn Dr., West Hartford, CT 06119, USA with your comments.
We are asking the teachers or responsible adults to commit to: 1) engage a group of young people to carry out a "Making Peace Where I Live" project; and then 2) be in conversation with us giving us detailed feedback on the project and the guide itself. We will personally call or email you to talk with you about your experience using the work. Your feedback will help us revise the project guide for broader distribution.
In exchange for this commitment, we will send you a set of learning guides (one for each child in your class or group) and a teacher or leader's guide. We are seeking funding for this so that we might provide additional copies at no charge. In the meantime charges for hard copies of MAPWIL are $9 USA each, for both the guide and the teacher supplement, to cover costs for printing and postage, payable by check or money order to PAMOJA, 1462 Green Mountain Turnpike, Chester, Vermont, USA 05143. If you desire to see and download MAPWIL from the Web, it is available at www.crinfo.org. Donations to MAPWIL, c/o PAMOJA, will help support the distribution of the project to those peace educators who can't afford to pay for hard copies. This is especially true for educators in developing countries. Donations are tax-deductible, as PAMOJA is a 501-C-3 non-profit organization.
This draft is based on the experiences of the initiating group, working in the United States. We are anxious to hear from people who adapt this for use in their own regions. We want to be in connection with others who use these ideas in some way. We emphasize that this effort is based on experiences with peace making in the United States and recognize that even the language of peacemaking has significant differences from culture to culture. We do hope that there will be a number of Making Peace Where I Live projects in each world region.
Thank you for your interest in this project and for your willingness to contribute to the Year and Decade for Education for a Culture of Peace.
Sincerely,
The MAPWIL group
Elise Boulding
Cynthia Cohen
Lyn Haas
Gail Jacobson
Mary Lee Morrison