Our Mission: "Building Peace Together with People of Faith and Conscience"
News from Audra
In June we launched our first monthly electronic newsletter to keep you up-to-date on our work, share reflections on peacebuilding, and inform you of ways to get involved! Email Audra to sign up for this publication!
I am thrilled and honored to be able to serve as the new director of our Center, and am equally excited to share some of the momentum, enthusiasm, and energy of our board members. We had a board and staff retreat on May 22nd in order to revisit our mission, further shape our niche in the community, and to build consensus around a vision for continuing our work. During the course of four hours, we came up with three main areas of programs and vision that we would like to build up over the upcoming year:
- Developing and hosting trainings to equip peacemakers of all ages to be effective, confident, strategic, and powerful. This will include the continuation of our annual Peace Schools, as well as movement into new territory as we work with religious communities to develop peace and interfaith training curricula, and a training-of-trainer program for disseminating interfaith peace education models.
2. Creating a place of safety for talking about issues and the experiences of violence, conflict, cooperation, and peacebuilding within and among our religious communities through forums, events, and community conversations. We hope to encourage the asking of questions, the building of relationships, and the deepening of compassion among faith groups.
3. An annual large event, such as a conference and peace awards ceremony, to celebrate and strengthen our successes, learnings, and growth in the community. We may use our fall conference (see below) as a base for planning such future events.
These three areas describe a deliberate shift towards placing a stronger programmatic emphasis on the need for an interfaith emphasis in our peace work. We feel this is the uniqueness of ICP that we can celebrate. As many other organizations focus on either peace or interfaith work, our role is to bridge those two movements and the best practices of each of them so that we are able to identify and address issues of conflicts that can emerge from living in a religiously pluralistic society and world, and to strengthen people's capacity to draw upon resources within their faith tradition in order to build peace. These resources may be based on spiritual values and practices, cultural models, scriptures, and human or divine models of inspiration.
As I wrote in December's newsletter, if you are familiar with people, communities, or religious groups that would be interested in working with us on peace and/or interfaith issues, please do let me know. If you have ideas, skills, and contacts that you think would strengthen our programs, I would be happy to talk with you. As we expand our board, broaden our reach into the community, and continue to heighten our sensitivity to the community's needs, we welcome your insights and passions! I hope you will join with us as we deepen our commitment to interfaith peacebuilding, and as we strengthen our spirits and engagement in this work!
