Town Hall Meeting - Madison, WI

Dear Friend:

You are cordially invited to attend a focus group meeting at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at the Union Bank and Trust Conference Room located at 2 East Main Street at Evansville, Wisconsin. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss how Evansville might develop a collaborative vision to become a national role model as a Community of Peace focused on supporting its children.

What is the Children’s Global Peace Project?

The mission of the Children’s Global Peace Project (CGPP) is to help children find peace and power within, harmony with others, and unity in diversity.

CGPP empowers children worldwide to transform their challenging emotions and conflicts into healthy self-expression and peaceful co-creation. Through experiential games and exercises, multicultural songs, dance, and art, students learn to move beyond prejudice and assumption to realize their potential, their connection to each other, and the global human family. We aim to build a global network of schools where every child discovers the power of peace and our interconnectedness.

To date, we have worked with over 3000 children in 50 classrooms in Wisconsin, Colorado, Uganda, and Brazil with additional international connections being created in Thailand, Cambodia, Canada, and Costa Rica. Evansville schools were the first to participate and piloted our program.

We provide schools with a range of service options including:

· multi-cultural day celebrations

· an introductory one-week program that explores “What is Peace?” and includes a collaborative banner-making activity and the Dances of Universal Peace, which are simple circle dances that represents all the world’s cultures

· an ongoing program that develops a peace curriculum uniquely tailored for each classroom, grade level, and school and creates international classroom-to-classroom connections

One of our goals for the coming year is to develop criteria, based on the national peace index, which describes a National Peace School, one that promotes peace at all levels of the organization. We have identified two school systems who are interested in assisting us with this effort. One of these is the Evansville School District. The school superintendent and principals of the elementary, intermediate, and middle schools have all expressed an interest in collaborating on this effort. It is our desire to see the Evansville

School District receive recognition as a model of a National Peace School. As such, every child in this community will have a skill set on how to access and utilize their social and emotional intelligence. This will result in a reduction of bullying, vandalism, gossip, and aggression in schools and in the community. This vision will be accomplished over a five year period and will be built one class at a time, one grade at a time, one school at a time.

Community Integration

Part of being a National Peace School is the school’s ability to connect with and influence its community. Children need to know they belong within their families and their community and that they have an important contribution to make. They need adults to model for them and support them as they grow and evolve into their full capacity.

For this forum, we are gathering people who have been identified as community leaders, to accomplish several goals. We want to share information with you about the Children’s Global Peace Project and the working relationship we are building with the school district. We want to connect a network of individuals and organizations who are interested in the welfare of children and discover ways that we can support each other. And we want to build community attunement for peace and model this for our children and for other communities around the world.

Tentative Agenda

The goal of this meeting is three-fold:

• • To provide an overview of CGPP and our plans for the 2009-10 school year in Evansville and globally.

  • To describe how our work in Evansville provides a platform for a new community vision and how that vision could have national influence.

  • To discuss the community’s interest in moving forward on such a vision and to identify next steps in a collaboration.

We thank you very much for your time in reading this invitation. We hope that you feel inspired to join us. Please RSVP to Donna Kuelz (donna@cgpp.org, 882-0669) and let her know if you will be able to attend.

Warmly,

Tajali Theresa Tolan

Co-Director, Children’s Global Peace Project

www.cgpp.org