Peace Child - The Books
INTRODUCTION
Having had such success with young people creating different versions of the Peace Child Musical, it was natural that, coming to prepare publications, we should empower and enable young people to do the leg work. And they did: for our first book, Children’s State of the Planet Handbook, they selected every question they wanted answered and did all the interviews; they did the illustrations, wrote up the answers, designed and laid out the book - all on cardboard templates we used in the days before desktop publishing.
For our next Book, Rescue Mission : Planet Earth, we decided to prepare a little better – but not too much better: one NGO partner we talked to urged us to do a feasibility study and spend a year raising a 6-figure budget. Young people aren’t like that: they want to get started immediately! So we tossed together a “Contributors’ Guide” – assembled a Task Force of 100+ students from around the world, and set to work. The book was finished at an Editorial Meeting at a British Youth Hostel in the Cotswolds and published in time for a launch at the United Nations with James Grant, the legendary head of UNICEF. It went on to be translated into 23 languages and sell over 500,000 copies.
We did a similar launch at UNESCO in Paris and the diplomats were so impressed, they took the two young editors and I to present the book to the celebrity diver, Jacques Cousteau. As we sat outside his office, we heard him exclaiming to his assistant: “This is a fake! Children could have never created this…” The two editors would have put him right but, sadly, they never got to meet him. His assistant showed us the door.
Very few people believe me when I tell them quite how magnificently Peace Child Intl. has been youth-led: any success we have had has been almost entirely due to the trust we have put in them. One such believer was Jane Grisewood, the Publisher of Rescue Mission. She believed to the extent that, though she had hired a professional editor to design the book, when a young Chilean, supported by the rest of the young editors, said he didn’t like the template and suggested another, she accepted without question – embarrassing though this must have been for her. The success of the book proved the rightness of her decision, as does the fact that the young designer has now gone on to manage the biggest and most successful design agency in Santiago de Chile!
All the books featured here were written and illustrated, designed and edited by young people under 20. We archive them here as they remain an abiding testament to the exceptional creativity of youth and contain some moving insights and answers to problems that have never been fully resolved – and maybe never will be.
Enjoy – and Learn! [Note: some books are heavily illustrated and are thus very large files. We have split these books into two parts to ensure quicker loading from this website.]