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Peace Story: Hope in the city

Historical wounds and ongoing mistrust between people need active engagement or they can persist for generations. Honest conversation, taking responsibility and moving beyond blame and personal pain along with acts of acknowledgment and reconciliation can break the cycle of guilt and anger and allow people to reach understanding and healing.

Richmond, Virginia, in the United States was known as “the great slave market of the South”. Historical divides persisted. In 1990, called to address the need for racial healing,  Initiatives of Change launched at program called Hope in the Cities (HIC). Continue reading Peace Story: Hope in the city

Peace Promoter: the Eco Preservation society

OVERVIEW

Name: Eco Preservation Society Ecopreservation.org

Type:  incorporated in the US State of Washington as registered non-profit organization with  501c3 tax exempted status with the US Internal Revenue

Mission Statement:

Our mission is to promote research, travel and education programs that advance environmental consciousness and facilitate public awareness with a call to action.

Peace-promoting activities: EPS provides a  is a Learning Platform where members and contributors can connect and share information about eco system preservation. The organization encourages and supports individual conservation projects communities,  and indeed new initiatives at regional level. By preserving functioning eco-systems EPS lays the basis for local food, fuel and even housing security, one of the foundations of peaceful existence.

Continue reading Peace Promoter: the Eco Preservation society

Peace Story: Music and cultural events to promote peace

Cultural expressions of peace that look beyond religion to the basic values all humans share can promote peace. Events can be designed to  appeal to a wide audience and form a meeting place for people of many different backgrounds to come together.

peace-poster-a4Retreat director and musician Peter Elmberg (center, vocals) set out to create a  music event that would reflect the universal quality  of peace and be appropriate to be performed in churches , mosques, synagogues etc. as well as at public halls and at events at his retreat center.

Peter created a concert based on the twelve poems chosen by representatives of the twelve different religions invited  to  meet in the Franciscan Monastery of Assisi  by Pope JOHN PAUL II in 1986, the UN year of peace.

The Peace Concert performs twelve songs and twelve prayers set to music. Each song transforms into a prayer that everyone is invited to join in singing.

The prayers for peace come from sources that are Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Muslim, Baha’i, African traditional, Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist,  Native American Indian and Shinto.

Peter and his musicians have performed the concert many times in packed churches and halls. Concert-goers in Sweden and Norway have appreciated hearing the various strands of the peace message woven from a wide range of cultural sources. One called it “a beautiful manifestation of human goodness expressed by twelve of the world’s most prominent religions”.

Read more:

The Peace Concert

Mundekulla Retreat Center

Video Now is the time with Peter Elmberg

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The Economics of Happiness: preparing for a transition

These Videos are from talks given at the “The Economics of Happiness: Creating a More Equitable World” event organised by Initiatives of Change and Local Futures.
The session was based around the ideas of Helena Norberg-Hodge that designing an economy on a human scale can bring wealth, happiness and prosperity in an ecological way. She talked of the steps local, national and international, to getting there. Continue reading The Economics of Happiness: preparing for a transition

A new narrative for the Economics of Happiness

London 14th September 2016, Initiatives of Change center:

At a recent workshop Helena Norberg-Hodge shared an alternative paradigm she calls the ‘economics of happiness’. Below is a trailer from a film Helena produced on the subject.

What if human well-being didn’t have to be at the expense of the environment? What if we could simultaneously increase genuine prosperity,reduce social inequality, and tackle climate change? With some simple economic shifts, all this becomes possible. That’s because so many of our current crises—financial, social and ecological—are linked to the scale of the economy. Localisation is a solution-multiplier that systemically reduces economic scale, creating benefits that ripple throughout society. In this day-long seminar, her talk highlighted human-scale economies and the steps—at the community, national, and international levels—that can bring us there.

Stephen Hinton provided his perspective from helping local initiatives in Sweden.

[slideshare id=66411742&doc=economicsofhappinesssummary-160926082905]

READ MORE

Peace Promoter: Interviver

OVERVIEW

Name:  INTERVIVER  Interviver.org

Type:  Portugese not for profit organisation

Mission Statement:  to promote of health, well-being and Peace in Portugal

Peace-promoting activities:   InterViver is working with municipalities in the Greater Lisbon Area with civil society mobilisation for health, well-being and Peace. InterViver offers a Peace Education Program as well as, in cooperation with the Higher Institute for Social and Political Sciences (Lisbon), well-being lessons for 7 th, 8th and 9th graders. The pilot project is being implemented this academic year in a public school in Cascais.

Continue reading Peace Promoter: Interviver

Inside peace, the documentary film


The Inside Peace documentary follows a group of inmates doing hard time in a Texas prison as they embark on a journey of personal discovery while struggling with society’s roadblocks and dangers.

“These stories bleed through Inside Peace, and they are crucial to it, but they’re only part of what the film is about. The men manage to take the message to heart that they have value as people – no simple lesson… This is where, for the viewer, the awe comes in.”
—Peace Behind Barbed Wire by Robert Koehler, Huffington Post.

About Inside Peace

Criminal offenders with lives marked by generations of violence, addiction, and poor social conditions attend the Peace Class in a Texas prison where they struggle to discover their humanity, improve their outlook on life and rebuild their lives from the inside out. Four years in the making, Inside Peace is a feature documentary that focuses on several compelling characters who were incarcerated at Dominguez State Jail in San Antonio, Texas. There, they embarked on a journey of change by enrolling in the Peace Class, one of the few self-improvement programs offered in prisons across the country that are not faith-based, but instead concentrates on the individual’s inner strength and self-worth.

Read more on the Inside Peace documentary website.

Invest in an NGO Peace Bond

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Invest in Peace has the idea to create a prototype crowdfunding platform. The service is at concept phase. You you can get an idea of how it is intended to work from this video.

https://youtu.be/RRVeYo2hzgk

The purpose of the platform is for people to invest their money in helping NGOs working for peace. The money Invest in Peace collects will be lent to NGOs to help them build up their operations.

The loans are interest-free, but bond holders will get bonus points, which can be redeemed in the points store. Participating NGOs offer their products and services for redeemable points.

To try the system out, go to our test site by  following this link

Sign in using the name: test

Password: test

Your test account has an overdraft facility so you can go to the catalogue to browse items and redeem them against Peace Points. Search the classified Ads section. You can enter advertisements for your own things as well.

Contact us if you would like to help out with developing this investment platform.

Beneficiaries will be Peace Bank Members. Contact us if you would like your organisation to join.