• Program Area

  Education, Human Rights, Public Service & Civic Engagement

• Location of Impact

  Global

• Headquarters Location

  Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Founded 25 years ago, Peace First is an international nonprofit organization which believes in the power of all young people to change the world for the better through peacemaking — not someday in the future — right now.  Since our founding, Peace First has prepared young people with the skills and commitment to solve community problems by connecting across lines of difference with compassion, standing up for ideals and others with courage, and creating collaborative change.  Today, through an innovative digital platform for social change, our work supports a global community of peacemakers in all 50 U.S. states and in over 90 countries. Peace First is now focused on creating and supporting a movement of young people to counteract the rising culture of violence, intolerance, and hatred that plagues too many communities. Through our Peace First Challenge, we are calling young people (13 – 24) to identify a critical issue in their community and, through our digital platform, putting project design tools, caring adult mentors, and small start-up grants into their hands to imagine and implement compassionate solutions to our world’s most urgent problems. With the goal of true culture change top of mind, we aim to have at least 100,000 young people registered and engaged with this peacemaking work within the next two years. From thousands of initial projects, we will choose top innovations for support, amplification, and further investment, creating the world’s largest marketplace of youth-led, youth-created social change initiatives.  Furthermore, we will source and amplify powerful stories from peacemakers around the world, helping millions of young people develop the skills and commitment for social change.