We invite you to become a part of the expanding Peace Child family around the
world and get involved in one or more of our activities: 1. Do a Be the Change!
Get Involved in Peace Child International We hope you will enjoy this 2nd World Youth Congress! However, do remember Peace Child International doesn’t just exist to organise youth conferences. Its most important work happens between congresses, supporting and empowering young people to take action to achieve their dreams. We invite you to become a part of the expanding Peace Child family around the world and get involved in one or more of our activities: 1. Do a Be the Change! Project: Be the Change! projects are now organized exclusively through our Field Offices in Ghana, India, Kenya, Peru and Sierra Leone. However we do encourage young people everywhere to follow the basic guidelines and be the change in their own community. Often such changes can be made at very low cost – or NO cost. Our friends at the International Youth Parliament encourage all participants to make their own Individual Action Plan (IAP) and we urge our delegates to do the same: create your own, individual plan for how you are going to Be the Change! in your community when you get home. And tell us what you have been able to achieve – so that your success can inspire others! 2. Adopt a Be the Change! Project: Young people living in the industrialised world can help their peers living in less developed countries enormously by adopting one of their Be the Change! projects. Young people in the UK raised over £27 million for charity last year: world wide, the figure is close to $500 million dollars! We hope that some of that income will go directly to projects designed and implemented by young people living in the least developed parts of the world. By working with a project through one of our field offices, you can watch a project take shape by receiving digital photographs of its progress over the internet. And we can organise for you to have a live chat with the young people doing their project – where you can learn about the lives, hopes, and ambitions of young people, your age, living in very different circumstances. 3. Start a Be the Change! Club: If you have a good experience adopting a Be the Change! project, why not set the system up as a permanent fixture in your school, college or youth club. This way, students every year/term can have the experience of getting to know and supporting their peers in less developed countries to be the change in their communities. Clubs will have the pick of the new projects, before they go up on our website; you will receive regular newsletters about actions across the world of youth-led sustainable development. 4. Become a Be the Change! Ambassador: As we launch the youth mobilisation for the Millennium Development Goals and move towards the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, we need hundreds – thousands – of young people to sign up and be trained to go out and campaign to schools and youth groups everywhere. As a Be the Change! Ambassador, you will be equipped with the best powerpoint visuals, presentation scripts, background materials, briefing notes and public speaking tips. It will give you an invaluable experience in public speaking and presentation – skills that you will have to use in almost any job that you take on in later life. And you will be talking about the great challenges we are discussing here at this Congress: it will be your chance to promote the Casablanca Declaration! 5. Do an Indicators Project: Learning about sustainable development should not be done cocooned in a classroom! The best way to learn about it is to get out into your community and measure the key indicators – water pollution, lichens, air quality, traffic levels, business start-ups and closures and – most significantly – people’s attitudes. Peace Child has two packs of Indicator Questionnaires – one for primary level students, the second for High School and University students. Use them – and figure out if your community is moving towards – or away from – a more sustainable way of living! 6. Do a Human Rights Education Project: The Foundation of any sustainable society is the protection of every citizen’s human rights – and that includes the rights of young people! But do you know what they are? Or how to protect them? It is absolutely true that you never know how important your human rights are until you lose them – and by then it’s too late! So Peace Child has a whole programme of Human Rights education built around our two books – Stand up for Your Rights! and Stand up Speak out! They both exist now in several languages – so use them: get out and teach your peers about their rights and figure out if they are being adequately protected by your government, your schools and your parents!
Get Involved in Peace Child International 7. Do the Play: This is where Peace Child started – and the musical play, Peace Child, remains our most powerful educational and inspirational tool. It really is not very hard to do – all you have to do is to persuade your drama teacher that, instead of doing “Annie” as the school play this year, do Peace Child! We have a pack that includes the script, the score, a music-cassette with the songs on one side and the instrumental tracks on the other – so you can do the whole musical without any kind of band – just a tape player! But the best thing about doing the Peace Child play is that you get to re-write the dialogue and the characters as though you – yes YOU! – are the young people of the story. This way you get to use the stage as a platform to put across your most profound concerns about what is happening in the world, in your community, your school and your life! It’s great – do it! Peace Child International is looking to develop new projects in the fields of media, TV, performances and publications. Keep in touch to learn of new projects as they come up. 8. Sell the publications: We are always looking for agents to sell our books. As you will see, our young members have created the most gorgeous and interesting series of books – and you would be doing us all a great favour by promoting and selling them in your community. You will get the normal trade commission just like any other book-seller. Go for it! 9. Become an Intern: Peace Child is run by a team of international interns between 18-25 years old. Interns come to Peace Child for between 6 months and a year. As our staff changes, so do our jobs, and we all do a bit of everything. It's fun! It is far from being your typical internship program, but if you want something different, this could be the place for you. For a current description of our staff and projects, visit www.peacechild.org/what is pci/our people. 10. Become a National Organiser: At the heart of the Peace Child family are some of the most wonderful human beings you will ever meet on the planet. These are the people that carry a torch for Peace Child in their countries – organising events and projects in large towns and rural areas. Most of them have been with us for a number of years – and we would love to have more of them in more countries. Their role is just to do whatever they can to promote Peace Child projects to young people in their countries – to get young people to be BTC Ambassadors, delegates to come to Congresses, artists and writers to contribute to our publications, schools to adopt projects, perform our plays etc. etc. As new projects, like Be the Change! and Science United come of age, the role of National Organisers will become more powerful. Contact us if you are interested in developing this role in your country.
For more information, contact: Rosey Simonds or David Woollcombe,
Peace Child International The White House, BUNTINGFORD, Herts, UK SG9 9AH Phone: +44 176 327 4459; Fax: +44 176 327 4460; e-mail:
[email protected]; or
[email protected] or
[email protected] web: www.peacechild.org; www.bethechange.info
