2024 UN International Day of Peace Boston: "Cultivating A Culture of Peace"

Sunday, September 22, 2024, 2 - 4pm ET

The Cathedral Church of St. Paul

(138 Tremont Street, Boston)

Park Street MBTA Station

FREE

Click here for more info

We have planned and organized the Boston area celebration of the United Nations International Day of Peace each year since 2010. This year's theme is "Cultivating a Culture of Peace." "In a world with rising geopolitical tensions and protracted conflicts, there has never been a better time to remember how the UN General Assembly came together in 1999 to lay out the values needed for a culture of peace. These include: respect for life, human rights and fundamental freedoms; the promotion of non-violence through education, dialogue and cooperation; commitment to peaceful settlement of conflicts; and adherence to freedom, justice, democracy, tolerance, solidarity, cooperation, pluralism, cultural diversity, dialogue and understanding at all levels of society and among nations."

Join us for a program of music, arts, and peace education led by emcee Dawn Duncan, including brief presentations by peacemakers such as Sara Ting, Joanna Don, Karilyn Crockett, Zakiya Alake, Ron Bell, Leigh Meunier and Rev. Vernon Walker regarding their work, with artistic performances by Cellist Miranda Henne, Singer Lina Marcela Sarmiento Tellez, and Spoken Word Poet Zenaida Peterson. It will conclude with a tribute to longtime organizer, Ian Harrington, from our friend, John Bach, and a reading of the list of recent local victims of violence. We will then walk to the nearby Garden of Peace to pray for peace among stones engraved with the names of local victims of violence. Co-sponsored alongside Friends Meeting at Cambridge and the Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness, with a grant from the Mass Cultural Council.

Click here to download flyer

One of our friends, Anja Schönau, is a change maker, fine artist and designer from Germany (also tenured and teaching art & design at university). She is part of the Art Collective Kaleidoscopic Visionaries, that develops interdisciplinary, collaborative, international projects with social impact for a more sustainable future. Anja has created a series of postcards, which initiate and foster to reflect on, to exchange and to co-create strategies for peace building for you. The postcards invite to scribble, to cut, to glue, to paint, to draw, to fold own unique approaches to peace building. To become a CO:CREATOR! You can print the postcards on thick paper with your printer at home, get creative and share your ideas by sending the postcards in the world. Please see below the pdf and feel free to share them with your communities (giving credit to the art collective)! The pdf is so designed, that there is a front and back of the postcards. If you print first pages 3, 5 and 7, then insert the paper a second time in the printer (the colored side up) and you print again the pages 4, 6 and 8, you have postcards with a front and back. You can cut along the edge, and the postcards are ready to be designed! You can furthermore CO:CREATE pages 2 and 9 with your ideas, e.g., with a unique poem, an encouraging hope, an utopian vision, a planned action, a critical demand, with folded paper flowers, with filigree drawn doves of peace, with colorful painted moments of happiness like community, music, literature, art, theatre, sport, animals, ... Help cultivate a culture of peace with us!

Click here to download the CO:CREATE project

MORE CMM EVENTS

Saturday & Sunday, November 2nd & 3rd, In Celebration of Rumi, with recitations of Rumi's poetry in Farsi and in English, along with a sema of whirling dervishes and the musical stylings of Orkestra Marhaba. Locations & times TBD. Click here for a recording from last fall.