MISSION, VALUES AND INTRODUCTION
Mission Statement
The Peace Child Mission statement was, originally:
“Harnessing the Arts in the Service of Peace”
As a result of the power and confidence children derived from doing the Peace Child play, it then became: “Empowering Children.” By 1985, as the young people we were working with became older, the Mission statement changed to –
“EMPOWERING YOUNG PEOPLE”
This has been our mission ever since and it still makes sense today. When we started the ‘Be The Change’ programme in 1999, the mission statement is sometimes extended to include the famous Gandhi quotation: “Empowering young people to be the change they want to see in the world.” That word ‘empowering’ identifies exactly what we hope to offer young people: we seek to give them the skills, the confidence, and the appetite to make a difference in the world before their 18th birthday.
Take a look at this 1-minute cartoon if you’re still not sure what we mean:
Grab the Wheel
VALUES
People often ask: “What are the values that define a Peace Child?” Some hope for an answer relating to faith: Christian values, perhaps. But Peace Child has always been studiedly ecumenical, welcoming people of all faiths and of none. In 1983, we agreed the values of a Peace Child should be: “Selflessness and Integrity.” A 100% commitment to caring for others before yourself – to put the concerns of others and the wider community before your own. It is also a 100% commitment to telling the truth in all things – in relationships, professions, politics and – especially – to yourself. Interestingly, in 1993, Selflessness and Integrity became the first two values of ‘The Nolan Principles’ identified by the UK Committee for Standards in Public Life. Recent political history has shown just how disastrous it can be for our nations and our planet when politicians fail to live by such principles. So, Peace Child encourages every young person to learn and live the values of: Selflessness and Integrity. In that way, young people can become the conscience of the human family.
INTRODUCTION
In Papua New Guinea, when warring tribes made peace, they exchanged a baby to seal the peace between them. The babies grew up in the others’ tribe and if, in the future, conflict threatened, the elders of the tribe would send out each child to negotiate a new peace between them. Such a child was called a ‘Peace Child.’
The Missionary, Don Richardson, who discovered this story used it to explain how God sent His Peace Child – Jesus Christ – to negotiate peace between Himself and human beings. I first heard this story on the day of the 1st production of Peace Child, the Musical, and have used it ever since to encourage older people to empower young people to take responsibility for important decisions relating to their future – like saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war, poverty, and climate change. Founded in 1982, PCI has empowered young people to seek resolution to global challenges by the simple device of imagining a future in which those changes have happened, then back-casting to the present to tell the story of how youth of today deliver those changes in their lifetimes. The story that embodies this device is called: Peace Child – a musical written by David Woollcombe with songs by David Gordon, based on The Peace Book by Bernard Benson.
If you venture further into these pages, you enter a world where miracles happen. Around the world, in 10,000+ performances, the musical, Peace Child, has transformed the lives of the children, youth and audiences it has touched. It also changed the countries: it went to the USA and Russia: The Cold War ended. It went to Central America: Peace broke out. It went into ex-Yugoslavia, Ireland, the Middle East, Cyprus, and the inner cities of the USA and elsewhere, and its energy started sowing seeds of peace in the hearts and minds of peoples caught up in conflict.
The scripts you read here are a synthesis of many classic Peace Child stories, scenes, and characters – and we encourage every cast to continue the process of re-creation: develop your own characters, your own scenes – learn and explore, improvise, write new songs and raps, think of new solutions. Use the Peace Child process to make up your own dramatic solutions to the world’s problems and embed in your young casts the belief that such solutions are both possible and essential. For – by baking the happy ending into the Peace Child story, young people can confront the horror of the situations that we face right now in the firm belief that their generation WILL solve them. Some parents and teachers are concerned that we should not encourage young people to bother their pretty little heads about such matters as climate change, war, inequity, and resource depletion. Even more so now than when Peace Child was born back in 1980, young people are aware of those problems: they may not know the detail they should, but the internet and mobile phones confront them with these issues daily. But – though some young people are choosing not to bring children into a world with so many existential challenges, a recent UNICEF study finds young people (15-24) much more likely to identify as global citizens than over 40s, especially those who live in cities rather than rural areas and those who use the internet daily. They have planetary loyalty.
The latest Peace Child generic script tells how two young conscientious objectors from different sides in a conflict, meet, fall in love, and through their friendship persuade the fellow members of their generation to rise up and work with the United Nations to tackle the greatest threats to humanity’s survival: Climate Change, pollution, resource depletion, inequality and nuclear weapons. It draws on the extraordinary courage of actual student leaders like Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai, Vanessa Nakate, Emma Gonzalez (who led the Parkland Florida Gun protest) – and urges other young people to rise up and, like them, follow their conscience to make the changes that will ensure their own, and their planet’s survival.
In the shorter, Primary School version, written in 2017, you will recognise the influence of the wars in Syria and Yemen, arguably the most horrific wars of modern times, the more so for the UN’s inability to prevent them. This Peace Child goes back to our original message that peace is fundamental to sustainability as it is to ending poverty: nothing can happen without it. This short show is a passionate and hopefully plausible appeal for younger children to play a part in bringing about an end to such conflicts.
The shortest show, the 10-minute Assembly presentation, is a time-travel TV chat show – which allows your students to travel back in time from the sustainable world that they have created in their working lives – showing that, if they make the right decisions, they, and their children, will enjoy a happy, prosperous future. After a commercial break, they confront the misery they will suffer if they carry on as we are and make no changes to our behaviours. The choice is dramatic!
Doing Peace Child is much, much more than just doing of a musical play: it is a life-changing experience for young people as they think about their future in a world descending into evermore serious turmoil. Peace Child’s history shows that change can happen: the play allows young people to devise their own road map to that change. As an organisation in consultative status with the UN, it is able to influence decisions made by member states – and give young people a platform on the world stage. The dreams formulated in the pages of these plays – along with the ideas that you and your cast will contribute to them – are thus not idle fantasies. They are expressions of commitments that you and others will take off the stage and live out in your daily lives, in the careers your students choose to follow, in the relationships they choose to form with people from different backgrounds, different cultures.
To be a Peace Child is to inhabit that richest of all possible worlds where each person is appreciated for what he or she is, not what they are expected to be or to become. Love, Hope, Peace, Truth shine brightly in such a world, as they shine in the eyes of a Peace Child. To create a world peopled by Peace Children is to create a world in which the actions of Vladimir Putin would be impossible. In which the needs of the people of Palestine, or Yemen, or the Central African Republic would be dealt with, and enforced, by an International Court.
Unthinkable?? – maybe now, but remember the changes that have happened since Peace Child started in 1982: as you experience the joy, the fun of doing the musical contained in these pages that follow, be careful what you wish for: the fantasy that you create on stage and in the minds of the audiences that come and watch your Peace Child show, could well become real.
For there are ways to end wars and eliminate nuclear weapons. There are ways to create a green, sustainable world: they take courage, they take energy, and they take leadership. Those qualities lie trapped in vast quantities in the minds of young people. Peace Child provides them with a platform to display them. That’s why it has been called the “most inspiring community musical of our generation” – “an education that no parent, politician or prime minister can afford to miss!” If you love children and have a talent to produce shows, – if you know the business of blocking, teaching parts, setting dances, sewing costumes – you can change the world by doing Peace Child.
You will certainly change yourself.
I know I did.
David R. Woollcombe, March 2024