We believe…
that peace is not just a feeling, it’s an action. Everyone can be a peaceful person. Above all, individuals must feel empowered to find their peace, and to stop and think before they act. When they do this, they can ensure their actions are rooted in caring for themselves and others. This makes their power grow and ripple out to their friends, their school, their community. Imagine if everyone around you understood their own value and treated others with the respect they deserve – what kind of community would that be?
At Peaceful Schools we are committed to giving everyone the power to be peaceful. To us this means helping everyone identify their own peaceful power and how to use it to make the world a better place. Being a peaceful person means acting safe and in control. A peaceful person cares about and acts to help themselves, others, and their community.
The C.A.R.E.S. skills – Cooperation, Assertion, Responsibility, Empathy, and Self-Control – are at the heart of all we do at Peaceful Schools. We teach these core skills with children, teens, and adults in a variety of formats — breaking down each skill into smaller, tangible, rehearsable and observable skills, and teaching them in real-life, meaningful ways. These skills are embedded in our direct instruction with students, training and support with adults, social-emotional curriculum for others to implement, and community outreach and support.
Being a peaceful person isn’t always easy – it takes commitment, practice, self-reflection, a willingness to fail, perseverance. It takes belief that peace matters, that it’s possible.
Peace is purposeful.
Our Story
In the late 1990s, a group of teachers created Peaceful Schools to prevent youth violence in the wake of the Columbine High School shootings. Since the beginning, research into resilience skills informs our approach to mediation, conflict resolution services, school-based systems of support, and curriculum to build social-emotional and problem-solving skills in youth and adults. We integrate behavioral rehearsal into all of our programming to develop social-emotional competence, using role-play and real-life scenarios as the base for our activities and lessons. We believe that every individual can discover their own worth, use their power for good, and that together we can build the peaceful people of the world.
