By John Reiff

Through the International Day of Peace, the United Nations reminds us that “Peace is more than the absence of war; it is the foundation necessary to collectively tackle humanity’s challenges. It is the lived experience of safety, dignity, opportunities and cooperation in our daily lives,” and “it is shaped by everyone, everywhere, every day.”

Servas is a peace organization, and we invite you to join us for a Peacebuilders event, the first in a series of ongoing conversations sponsored by the Peace Team. This online event will take place on Saturday, November 7th from 10:00 – 11:00 am PST (starting 11am MST, noon CST, 1pm EST). Please register on our US Servas Events page and a virtual link will be sent in email reminders.

At the August US Servas conference, participants were invited to identify and share one concrete action they wanted to take after the conference to build peace--at any level, from internal work to interpersonal relationships to advocacy for system/structural change. In this upcoming conversation, those participants are invited to connect with one another and share stories about what they did and what happened. BUT ALSO, all you other Servas members are invited to join this conversation and share specific examples of your work as peacebuilders—something you already do, or something you would like to take on--so the conversation goes far beyond the conference.

I will be facilitating this meeting. We’ll begin this first conversation as a whole group; I will suggest a process and some ground rules. Then we can go into breakout rooms where each of you can share a story of your work with about four or five other Servas members, hear their stories, and discuss whatever stands out for you in this story exchange. When we return to the whole group, we will collect ideas about what follow-up group members would like to see, which could be as simple as scheduling more times for follow-up conversations, or could be to set up some form of training, or very likely a number of other good ideas will emerge.

I am excited to see what this diverse, talented, dedicated membership will do with this forum!