It is with great pleasure that I present to you this latest newsletter for the summer of 2022. It has been an exciting period for everyone at WPDI, not just because of what was achieved but also because of the perspectives that these achievements open for the coming years. The movie we presented in Cannes, “For the Sake of Peace”, is a perfect illustration of this, with Forest introducing the public at a high-level event to the work of youth peacemakers living in remote places plagued by conflict and fragility. These are places that the world tends to forget and overlook – and, yet, as we always find, such places always happen to be host to incredible individuals who are determined to make peace happen – sometimes at personal cost. From Torit, South Sudan, to the Cannes Festival in France, or from the UN, in New York, to Mitontic, in Chiapas, Mexico, the distances seem impossible – but they are not. Distances can be broken.
This is an overarching goal of WPDI, embodied in the very title of our flagship program, the Youth Peacemaker Network: we aim to establish networks for peace, gathering very different people behind this most vital objective. This is what we seek to achieve, for instance, when we bring skills to our young leaders. During the summer, for instance, we organized different workshops to strengthen our young leaders’ skills in confl ict resolution, that help to reduce conflict – that is distance – between individuals and groups. Another example is the workshop on advocacy skills that we held in July, aimed to train our peacemakers to champion peace and human rights values before a wide array of audiences – villages or elected assemblies and officials. Disseminating skills in conflict resolution and advocacy skills, teaching our youth how to break distances, is clearly one of these achievements that is rich with perspectives.
Caroline Descombris, Executive Director of WPDI
