Peace Village NM banner

History

The Seed Planted

Inspiration

The founders of Peace Village were inspired by a Peace Village camp held in Ruidoso, NM, in 2005. They thought, "Why not scatter this seed elsewhere," and start a Peace Village camp in Las Cruces.

Philosophy

The camp was started with this philosophical grounding: it would be community-wide, ecumenical, include children from diverse racial, ethnic, religious and economic backgrounds and intentionally teach peacemaking skills. Camper tuition would be kept intentionally low to encourage as much diversity as possible and scholarships would also be available. This philosophy meant we needed to seek outside support in the form of money, staff services, and materials. This also meant seeking the sponsors among many local organizations, churches and individual donors.

Support

We solicited support from organizations serving children; such as, Boys and Girls Club, NAACP, and others. We also formed an alliance with La Casa, the local shelter for battered women and children and reserve 25 percent of our camper spaces for children living at La Casa. La Casa provided trained bi-lingual staff who all had active background checks.

Curriculum

The curriculum consists of four core modules: non-violent communication, social justice ("if you want peace, work for justice"), media awareness, and cooperative games (having fun without competing). Each morning, these four modules are addressed and in the afternoons, campers participate in a wide variety of enrichment activities, which varied from day to day, but tied into subjects addressed in the morning's modules.

Daily Theme

We begin each day with singing and a story, which sets the daily theme. The first year's themes were as follows:

Enrichment Activities

Our enrichment activities evolved, sometimes as talent offered itself, for example; a local Native American singer/songwriter and Grammie winner volunteered to lead Native American singing and dancing, a local drumming instructor volunteered to teach African, middle eastern, and Latin drumming patterns. Sometimes opportunities developed as we sought people to do activities to fit the daily theme/strand, for example: the theme "Peace Within" lead to Zen meditation and Ikabana flower arranging; Giving and Sharing/Non-Greed lead to a modified-for-children Japanese tea service.

Other activities included a modified Oxfam hunger banquet or a hunger dessert (10% of campers sat at a table and got several big cookies and two frosted cupcakes; 25% got bread pudding; the rest sat on the floor and got nothing). We discussed what how this reflected the real world and how the campers in each group felt about their "dessert." Another activity addressed distribution of wealth on a world map (each camper drew a random "character passport" that included their nationality, income level and a list of living amenities they did or did not have, such as, clean water, TV, indoor plumbing, and so on.

On diversity day, campers ate lunch blindfolded.

Planning and Success

We begin planning for the next camp year immediately after the current year's camp is completed. Planning in earnest begins in January. In the third camp year, the camp was extended to two weeks and the upper grade limit to grade 10. Interns were trained during overnight weekend training.

After the registration deadline the first year we had over 100 volunteers, 9 faith groups and 9 community organizations, such as La Casa, as sponsors. That year 49 children registered before camp started.

The third camp year these organizations were represented on the board: Quakers, Temple Beth El, Community of Christ, La Casa, Home School Group, a university student who was going to graduate school in England majoring in Peace Studies and who hopeed to start a Peace Camp there, PFlag, NAACP, Peace Lutheran Church and the Unitarian Universalist Church of Las Cruces. Sr. Nancy, from St. Albert the Great Newman Center, dropped in on meetings from time to time and worked at the camp.