Peace Projects

Today, an after school tutoring program exists at Gad's Hill Center in a low-income community on Chicago's Westside.  Each week, students from nearby Cristo Rey Jesuit High School mobilize fellow classmates in an effort to work toward reconcilaiton and lessen gang-related violence.  The entire high school community has been transformed by the vision and leadership of these students.

This is just one example of a peace project designed and implemented by a participant of Peacebuilders Initiative.  Many of the hundreds of projects that have been implemented in and around the city of Chicago since our program's inception, still remain active today.

Over the course of the program year, Peacebuilders participants create and develop a project to advance peacebuilding and reconciliation in their school, parish, or community. They may address one of the many issues that divide society and prevent peacebuilding and reconciliation from thriving, such as cross-cultural dynamics, racism, and intolerance. 

As they work through their project, our participants come to know themsleves as leaders within the Church, and the adults who support them come to realize the same.  Through the course of their project, our participants are encouraged to call forth the leadership of their peers, to build relationships with other church and school leaders, and to establish two-way transformational relationships with the people they have been called forth to serve.