Peace Games

CONTACT:

280 Summer Street
Boston, MA 02210
(617) 261-3833
www.peacegames.org

Eric Dawson, President

DESCRIPTION:

Peace Games began as an annual one-day children’s festival to celebrate peace. In 1992, Harvard University students, working with Phillips Brooks House Association, the university’s community service program, expanded the concept into a K-8 “peace and justice” curriculum. In 1996, Peace Games was incorporated as an independent beneficial corporation. Today, Peace Games is a multi-year curriculum at four schools in Mattapan, Cambridge, Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. In 1999, it engaged 4,000 school students and family members, 200 school teachers and administrators, and 250 undergraduate volunteers from eight Greater Boston colleges and universities. Over 1,000 volunteers have invested 100,000 hours in teaching peace. This is a practical program, whose basic idea is to develop children’s knowledge and skills for violence prevention and conflict resolution, both in school and in their personal lives. It has won numerous local and national awards for its influence in preventing interracial and teenage violence in Boston. Here is a community organization working in a crucially important, philanthropic-identified niche.

(2000: HUMAN SERVICES: Children and Youth: General)