What I Learned...Peace Studio

​Their Mission: ission & History – The Peace Studio
The Peace Studio equips artists and journalists with opportunities and strengths-based tools to restore hope, challenge injustice, and bridge divides. Peace isn’t just the absence of violence or war. It’s a way of being in the world. It’s the enactment of compassion, kindness, and love. It includes all the small concrete steps we can take individually and collectively to pursue justice, protect human rights, and help others facing hardship, oppression, or other adversity. If “peace” is a noun, “peacebuilding” is the verb that means everything people, communities and nations can do to ensure and preserve peace. Some of the peacebuilding our organization focuses on includes:

• teaching and practicing mindfulness, empathy, and kindness in ourselves and others.
• leveraging the power of storytelling to bring awareness to injustices that have not been fully addressed. 
• organizing and supporting community-based artistic collaborations and events to foster lifelong social-emotional learning for all. 
• giving inspiring performances, publishing original works, and hosting conversations to help communities heal past traumas, and discover their shared humanity across ethnic, religious, and other differences.

 
My Interpretation...  
By investing in a generation of creatives, we will shift public dialogue from fear and conflict to hope and possibility and inspire our youth to

• say something and self-advocate
• be mindful of their choices 
• cultivate a culture of change
• show compassion across differences
• appreciate, collaborate, and donate  
• volunteer and hear their stories
• focus on capturing beauty through a curious lens
• look outside the box and then decorate it with your imagination
• encourage those underrepresented to realize their potential
• provide a sanctuary for misfits, creatives and dreamers…  

 
 
What I Learned…
In November of 2019, The Peace Studio officially merged with Images and Voices of Hope, a nonprofit founded in 1999 when nearly two hundred media professionals gathered to discuss the media’s impact on society. Realizing that existing media content often had negative effects on the public, ivoh was founded to promote and produce storytelling that builds empathy and compassion, connecting us across differences and to “restore the world with story.” In coming together, The Peace Studio and ivoh recognized that both organizations were deeply aligned in their missions, in understanding the urgent need for narratives to be put out into the world that focused on what’s possible instead of solely on what’s broken, and in their desire for developing and amplifying the voices of young artists and journalists in order to build a more just and peaceful culture.

What I heard…" I have always wanted to teach other kids how to use the camera.  When photographing my friends I got sick of them always being critical of their appearances.  I want them to feel confident."
 
What I know…Being too critical can make you unattractive.

What I imagine... a curriculum designed to target the impact of media messages while using media to tell their stories we can focus on celebrating the beauty we see in each other that we may not see ourselves.