Future Leaders For Peace: "Be The Change" Workshops

We are Future Leaders for Peace, a non-profit organization located in Berkeley, CA. Founded in early January of 2005 by UC Berkeley Alumni Jonathan Kathrein and Richard Hunter, Future Leaders for Peace has reached out to the community to create its volunteer base. Now, nearly two years later, Future Leaders for Peace consists of over 20 volunteers from both UC Berkeley and around the Bay Area. As volunteers, we run workshops at various middle schools, high schools, and youth organizations around Northern California. At these workshops, we teach youth how to deal with everyday conflicts, whether they are school related, peer related, or family related. We give them the tools to take these conflicts and transform them into peaceful and non-violent resolutions. By training them to become leaders, they can, in turn, teach their peers how to become leaders themselves in the hopes of continuing to promote the peaceful and non-violent resolution methods that we have given to them. We also give workshops and talks to parents. Family life is the greatest influence on a child. By teaching parents, we give them the ability to help their children continue the peace-making and conflict resolution process at home. At Future Leaders for Peace, we believe in the importance of promoting peace and non-violence. By teaching people how to break the cycle of violence, we can help them to not only better themselves, but to also better those around them. Using these skills, we leave them with the ability to be a leader in their community and make the necessary changes to help make the world a better place. What We’ve Done so Far: Each year we work with more and more youth. In our first three years we have worked with 3,500 kids and adults, half of which we helped in 2007 alone! We have led 22 workshops this year already! We have 20 college age volunteers, who lead workshops and a student club at UC Berkeley.