Peace X Peace lifts women’s voices, strengthens women’s capacity to connect across divides, promotes leadership and gender equity and nurtures the global network of peacebuilders. The nonprofit organization was born in 2002 when Patricia Smith Melton, a poet, playwright, film maker, and photographer gathered six experts in peace and women’s rights from around the world to discuss how they might respond as women to the violence of September 11th, 2001. It launched a website and an online news service and began connecting women, across geographic and cultural divides via the internet. Its expanding community now includes women and men in more than 100 nations.
Peace X Peace believes that the world needs women’s perspectives and skills to build sustainable peace rooted in justice, and that women’s experiences and solutions for peace have not been sufficiently recognized or valued. It has identified eight requirements as necessary Pillars of Peace:
- ·Conflict transformation
- ·Cross-cultural understanding
- ·Economic empowerment, education
- ·Environmental sustainability
- ·Health and well-being
- ·Interfaith dialogue
- ·Justice and good governance
September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows’ founding members Colleen Kelly and Kelly Campbell were among the people profiled in Peace X Peace’s documentary Women on the Frontlines. The group publishes a monthly e-newsletter, PeaceTimes and its weekly blogs, featuring first person accounts about what’s happening around the world and how it impacts women, reach nearly 20,000 subscribers worldwide. It cultivates an online audio archive of interviews with inspiring peacebuilders around the world, and has published the book Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian Women.
Peace X Peace hosts an online social network, the Peace X Peace Community, and an evolving online classroom to facilitate exchange of skills and resources among our community members. It advocates for effective, sustained policies and programs that support and advance women, and collaborates on UN initiatives for women, including the Commission on the Status of Women, Millennium Development Goals, and UN Women. Its annual awards event honors extraordinary women and men on the frontlines of peacebuilding.
Contact Peace X Peace at: info@peacexpeace.org
Website: http://www.peacexpeace.org
