Neighborhood & Youth Peace Programs

Tourism For Peace worked with PAPY in Fall 2008 and Spring 2009 to assist the youth in creating, writing, and performing a Play on Peace! The troop of over 20 youth, ages 10 to 24, experienced three TFP Peace Workshops, and then chose which specific topics they wished to portray in dramatic format. A partial performance was held in April 2009 - stay tuned for time and location of future performances! Please plan to attend!

Costa Rica - Baha'i Youth Project successfully held in July 2006! Twenty youth and three adults visitied the Ighani familiy in Costa Rica, in the Guyami territory, to build benches, showers, and education classrooms. Dr. Gail Lash taught classes on Peace each evening, and fun was had by all. Stay tuned for future youth international peace projects!

On our Costa Rica trip, we dedicated a Peace Pole from the World Prayer Society, for the newly constructed Baha'i Center in Progresso. The candlelight ceremony asked that "May Peace Prevail" in all the countries of the Earth, each one being named and acknowledged.

Teaching peace concepts, tools, and games to children can give them a framework from which to think, speak, and act, and to create a new world using a peaceful mindset. Adults classes are also useful to bring these peace principles into the workplace, relationships, and one's inner self. The classes cover peace principles such as unity, cooperation, and justice, and virtues such as honesty, generousity, respect, service, trustworthiness, and more. Dr. Lash can work with your neighborhood to create classes that work best for its organizations and families!

Why is peace important to me? How can our children be peaceful in a violent world? How can peace bring me prosperity? How do I talk peace? How do we create a peace-filled world? Come absorb and practice the Four Peace Principles: 1) Community, 2) Witness, 3) Non-violence, and 4) Cooperation. We will play with these principles, doing active and creative exercises that are examples of each principle. Come have fun, learn, laugh, contemplate, and challenge yourself to think differently about your world. Learn how to live the Peace Path for yourself and our children!

As Leaders, we all want unity - it would make our jobs a lot easier! As the same time, we need diverse ideas and perspectives to arrive at creative solutions for complex issues. Yet, we can easily get caught up in the "Us vs. Them" syndrome, where we define others by categories and sterotypes, and act like we are separate from each other. We all want unity, but how can we bring the principles of Unity into our business, family, and community relationships? Come to this workshop to: Identify unity principles; Envision unity through participatory exercises and discussions; Practice creating "win-win" relationships; Apply unity principles to real life situations.

Living in a major metropolitan area like Atlanta, we can easily get caught up in the fast, urban, competitive lifestyle. This can be exhilarating, as well as a burden sometimes, bringing unwanted stress into our work, home, and physical/mental/emotional bodies. Also tugging at us can be a violent world around us, as portrayed by newspapers, TV, and possibly our own lives. How can we find peace inside, and choose to act in peaceful ways? Come to this workshop to: find your peace sanctuary; broadcast the vibration of peace; learn energetic tools to remain peaceful around violence and/or stressful or distracting situations; and apply "being peace" to real life. When we are at peace inside, we can bring harmony to both our lives and others, allowing the chaos to be transformed into order, beauty and grace.

Peace is not just absence of violence, it is much more; choosing to act and be non-violent is a key concept of peace. In this workshop, we address the concept of non-violence and how it plays a role in creating peace. We see, hear, feel violence around us in many forms - and we can learn to eliminate it from our life, and learn to live and act with love. Come to this workshop to: examine non-violent choices and actions; choose love and transcend fear; learn the power of thought; and how to speak with love in any situation.

In the struggle for power in this world, we forgot that cooperation is the road to prosperity and peace, not competition and force. When we can work together, hear each other, be mindful of other points of view, and honor various cultures - new and better solutions can be found and implemented. Peace is about "power WITH others," instead of "power OVER others." Come to this workshop to: examine how we act with other cultures; see examples of 'circles of change"; learn to create win-win solutions; and implement the practice of cooperation and a sense of service in your life.