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PeaceJam founders Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff are predicating a busy new year for PeaceJam. Village Voice's Westword Magazine recently did a series of articles discussing the husband and wife team's work to dispel the myths around Mayans in 2012 and plans to expand the PeaceJam Foundation to reach more youth worldwide in 2013 and beyond.
"We're an overnight success story...seventeen years later," says Ivan Suvanjieff. Actually, he got the idea for PeaceJam almost twenty years ago, during Denver's so-called Summer of Violence, in 1993, when he noticed that four Latino kids living across the street from him on Wyandot were all carrying guns. Despite having had an ill-fated stint as the Rocky Mountain News's society scribe, the fast-talking musician/artist is no fop, and so Suvanjieff went up to the wannabe gangsters and asked why they were carrying guns. Because they had a business, they said, and they had to protect their turf. You have to be smart to run a business, Suvanjieff responded: "Who's the president of the United States?" "We don't know and we don't care," they replied. But as they talked, Suvanjieff discovered that the kids knew all about Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, and what he was doing to end apartheid — peacefully.
That got Suvanjieff thinking about pairing up kids with not just Tutu, but other Nobel Peace Prize winners who could inspire them, teach them a better way to make a difference in the world. It was a wacky idea, especially for someone with $1.79 in the bank, living in a part of town that was far from the hot neighborhood LoHi is today. But he found just the person to help: Dawn Engle, a woman he met when they were both working on a Beat poetry event at Naropa University. Engle, who was the youngest female chief of staff in the U.S. Senate when she worked for Republican Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, had another important credential: a connection to the Dalai Lama. Suvanjieff would bug her every day about his idea of pairing kids with Nobel winners. "He drove me crazy," she remembers. Finally, she agreed to help him come up with a plan for PeaceJam, and even got an appointment with the Dalai Lama in India. They scraped together the cash to make the trip, and the Dalai Lama not only signed on to the PeaceJam concept, but encouraged them to contact other Nobels. By 1996, the year PeaceJam became a reality, they had ten prizewinners on board. |
Read the full article here
Also see:
PeaceJam's founders hope to dispel myths about the Mayans
Mayan myths: PeaceJam on the ten worst doomsday predictions, and one surprise |
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