THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
INTRODUCTION
The Peace Child Thought Leadership
From the beginning, Peace Child International has been in the business of developing new ideas. That is the main product of our mission to empower young people: young people don’t suffer the pressures of peer review or publication to worry about whether or not their ideas are new or old. They just pour forth a profusion of new ideas – from which jewels emerge like those that have shaped the History of Peace Child International. Here are some of them:
Keep your Bombs! – not Ban the Bomb!
In its first performance in London, Peace Child upended the age-old BAN THE BOMB! slogan of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament with a child’s speech to the Presidents at the end, saying: “Keep your bombs! They are not the problem: the problem is whatever it is in your heads that makes you think you need them.” By focusing on building friendships between Soviets and Americans, Peace Child resurrected President Lincoln’s great thought: “You don’t destroy an enemy by killing him. That only creates more enemies. The only way you destroy an enemy is by making him your friend.” Ultimately, it was the trust relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev that ended the Cold War.
Youth-led Education
Peer-to-Peer education is an ancient and effective approach to teaching, employed by the Literacy Brigades of Cuba and Nicaragua, to the Child-to-Child and Each-one-Teach-One programmes in India. But youth-led text-book creation was a new idea. It came about, like so many things in Peace Child’s history, by accident. We were at the UN with group of kids for a conference when a UN Officer gave us all a small green pamphlet entitled: “A Children’s Introduction to Sustainable Development.” They asked us to go away and read it, then tell them what we thought of it. The next day, they did: they said it was boring – and no child would ever want to read such a book. They said that it should be fun – with pictures and stories…
“I don’t think that we could write such a book at the UN…” said the officer.
“No – but we could,” said one child.
That conversation led to our first book: A Children’s State of the Planet Handbook – which was presented to UN Officers at the Rio Earth Summit. They liked it so much, they commissioned us to create the Children’s Edition of Agenda 21: Rescue Mission – Planet Earth which became a world-wide best-seller, and the Earth Summit Director, Maurice Strong’s favourite edition of Agenda 21. Many, many more books followed – most of them Children’s Editions of weighty UN tomes. All were designed and written for “bright, interested 14-year-olds,” we considered, rightly as it turned out, that if young people of that age could understand the UN’s complex messages, every other age group could as well!
Sustainable Behaviours & Career Development
Having pioneered the idea of youth-created text books, it was natural for us to engage students in peer-to-peer teaching about complex Sustainable Development issues. The Peace Child musical remains the most powerful tool in our armoury for delivering this education, but not every school or student has time to mount a full-dress musical. So young people came up with the idea of a ‘Lifestyle Contract’ – a promise / a commitment by every child to change their own, and their families, daily consumption, leisure and work behaviours to become more environmentally sustainable. This Contract was at the heart of Peace Child’s Create the Change programme which was funded by the UK government’s DEFRA Ministry. It morphed into a full-scale school-to-work peer-to-peer career development programme called Work the Change funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Both were run by Peace Child founder, Rosey Simonds and Work the Change continues to this day, offering excellent resources to teachers and students to develop their own programmes in this field.
Youth-led Development
Young people have always been excited by the idea of “learning by doing…” It is a heavily contested idea but there has to be some truth in the aphorism that: “If you tell me, I will forget; if you show me, I may remember some of it; if you get me to do what you’re telling, I will remember a whole lot more – and – if you get me to teach others what you’re telling me, I will have to remember all of it!” As well as providing a theoretical justification for our peer-to-peer education programmes, as we moved to promote sustainable international development, it made the idea of Youth-led Development irresistable. Again, the phrase was coined by a young person. We never got his name but it was at our 1st World Youth Congress that a young African said that “Youth must lead development projects. They must design and implement them, not just be the beneficiaries of them.” The idea of Youth-led Development has grown and been mainstreamed in organisations as various as USAID, the World Bank and UNDP. Student Partnership Worldwide rebranded itself as Restless Development – the Youth-led Development Organisation. Peace Child Intl. carries on promoting Youth-led Development through its Be the Change Academies. The West African BTCAs, led by Fred Fenwick and his local partners have pioneered the creation of icon-driven and voice-activated mobile phone apps to help illiterate women in remote, rural areas of West Africa to expand their sole-trader businesses, increasing their income, and improving their own, and their families’, livelihoods.
Kids on Strike
In 2008, former Peace Child intern, actor, teacher and director, Rick Staropoli, put together a Peace Child show in Rochester, New York with a cast of talented kids. Though they used the Peace Child songs, and format, they decided to call their show: Kids on Strike – because in the final scenes of the show, they called a Global School Strike, forcing their governments to implement policies that would save the world from catastrophic climate change and the destruction of the biosphere on which we all depend for Life. Ten years later, when Greta Thunberg sat outside the Swedish Parliament and started the Schoolstrike4climate – life imitated art and her worldwide strike for Climate raised the issue of the Climate Emergency to the top of the International Agenda. Greta became Time Magazine’s person of the year. Sadly, we cannot claim any credit for her amazing achievements: she says she was inspired by Emma Gonzalez and the survivors of the Parkland School massacre. But putting these ideas out in the ether help makes them real.
Intergenerational Conversation Cafés & Model Citizens Assemblies
Not everyone can be a Greta Thunberg – or create a ground-breaking Peace Child musical. But any group of concerned kids can get their friends, parents and teachers in for a conversation about what to do about the multiple crises heading towards the rising generation down the 70+ year corridor of their lives. They take very little time to organise – and, though it is sometimes hard to get parents and community leaders to come into a school for a dialogue, it is entirely worthwhile. For many years, the UN has promoted such dialogues through the tried-and-tested Model UN process: valuable though this is for helping young people understand the inner-workings of the UN, Peace Child’s Intergenerational Conversation Cafés & Model Citizens Assemblies are much simpler, and less time-consuming to organise and they can focus on LOCAL as well as GLOBAL issues – bringing the conversation back to things that young people can actually change. That is their value.
NEXT STEP?
Peter Russell’s 1982 best seller, The Global Brain, offers a bold vision of planetary consciousness ushered in by New Age science.(Read a Short Summary here – or – buy the book here) Peace Child Intl. – and many others – are trying to realise that vision by supporting institutions like the UN and the EU to reach their full potential and unite nations. Back in the 19th Century, people like Bismark and Garibaldi united disparate dukedoms into nations. Getting disparate nations to unite into a cohesive Global Community is, according to Russell, our generation’s ‘evolutionary test.’ Now, as populism and right-wing nationalism rears its ugly head across Europe, the USA and elsewhere, it looks like we are failing that test: if we have failed, we may have consigned the human species, in Russell’s words, to the “evolutionary scrapheap.”
What’s a Peace Child to do?
Well – for a start, we never give up!! The European Commission may have been forced to water down its ground-breaking Green Deal, and the UN become so beleaguered and marginalised by its biggest government members, it’s barely able to make payroll some months but we have to believe that those institutions will form the foundation of the kind of Global Governance system that will conserve and regenerate the Biosphere of our planet so that future generations can live comfortable, satisfying lives here on Planet Earth.
Though I am always delighted when I hear of Peace Child Alums getting together to sing Peace Child songs, it saddens me to have to admit the hopes and dreams that Peace Child peddled to them when they first sang those songs back in the 1980s and ‘90s are shattered. Everything we dreamed of seems to be unravelling: the nuclear arms race is hotting up with China set to double the size of its nuclear arsenal. Trump, Johnson/Brexit, Putin, Assad, Erdogan, Modi, Xi Jinping, Orban, Bolsonaro and others – all of them, in different ways, are disfiguring our planetary family in a way that is the polar opposite of what the 1981 Peace Child imagined. Things are going backwards…
We have to acknowledge the depth of our generational failure: in 1987, the UN defined Sustainable Development as “Meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” The fact is: we have massively compromised the ability of future generations to come anywhere close to meeting their needs. We must acknowledge this and start educating and empowering our children to correct our failures and construct a way to govern human behaviours in a way that will enable their children and grand-children to meet their needs.
A Digital United Nations? - or Youth-led United Peoples
For the UN’s 75th Anniversary, we worked with the LASER group and other UK-based UN Associations to hold Intergenerational Conversation Cafés and climaxing in a week-long series of online Dialogues with a Concert on the final day. At the first of these, a young person came up with the idea of a Digital UN – a way for We the Peoples to have a permanent relationship with the International policy-making body and shape a positive future for our Planetary Family together. On May 19th 2020, we submitted this idea in a letter to the UN Secretary-General. We also developed the Lockdown Peace Child, telling a plausible story of how, in the time of COVID-19, a Digital UN might be created.
Peace Child is part of MEGA (Mobilizing an Earth Governance Alliance): a coalition of civil society organizations working in cooperation with like-minded governments, legislators, experts, private sector actors and others to promote 7 Campaigns and 23 detailed proposals for strengthening existing environmental governance mechanisms and to create new ones. Peace Child sees its role in this Coalition as promoting the 4th of MEGA’s stated goals: promoting public education and building public engagement in international environmental governance. So the new Peace Child play, designed for a Festival Premiere followed by a Tour of P5 Capitals (London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing and Washington DC) with a climactic performance at the UN General Assembly, is designed to re-invent the UN as a digital peoples organisation, modelled on the technologies pioneered by Facebook and the global digital streaming services(Amazon, Youtube, Netflix etc.) It looks to AI to assess people’s opinions and propose policy solutions to politicians and citizens of all nations.
Who knows where that initiative will go. All we know is that, as long as organisations like Peace Child, and individual teachers and parents engage and empower young people to come up with new ideas, youth will be a source of beneficial thought leadership for our planetary family.
I can say that with confidence as – for 44 years – I have watched it happen.
David R Woollcombe, Founder and President, Peace Child International – March 2024