Peace Education is back!During my involvement in CISV in the last 10 years I observed an interesting trend: The driving force behind CISV these days are no longer the rainbow-sweater- and batic-shirt-wearking, long-haired hippie-people, who spent their lives on the streets demonstrating against the cold war and nuclear weapons. Instead, the classic CISVer today is a pragmatic, well-educated, adapted, alligned, job-wise successful individual, with a blackberry or iPhone to efficiently manage his or her private and professional life. Peace seems far too much an abstract and unrealistic goal to strive for, so Intercultural Competence has become the buzz-word of the last decade within CISV: With the merger of Daimler and Chrysler and subsequent millions spent to connect the respective corporate cultures it became obvious that whatever CISV teaches has value to the money-making world. Intercultural competence seemed like something worth mentioning in a resume. CISVer even suggested to offer costly Seminars to teach managers the secrets of CISV. Removing the word "Peace" from the "Education Circle" is one example of this trend. Another one is the fact that the majority of CISVers were upset when Italian CISVers protested against the war in Iraq in the name of CISV.
We are yet to find out where CISV will move in the next years, but flipping through Mosquito Tactics and the recently published CISV Passport shows that maybe this trend is being reversed and CISV is in fact moving back to Peace Education. Digging deeper into the concept of peace and how to promote it, had been neglected in the past years. Maybe this will also bring back some of the spirit that has gone lost along the way. If you see Intercultural Competence as a subset of Peace Education (I do!), that means, we are broadening our scope beyond the cross-cultural field.
I really welcome this development - but please, without the batic T-shirt
Interesting article. First question would be to which degree this applies to all NA's, and if it applies to international, national and/or local level. My feeling is that it varies a lot from NA to NA and chapter to chapter.
On international level we have always had manyof those that are "professional volunteers", often seeking to make a career in different organizations, and actively seeking leadership positions.
On a local level you often have the parents, often very practically oriented, many without any particular interest in peace education (hence programs like Local Work, Mosaic and IPP struggle in many chapters), and are mainly focused towards operations. Sending delegations, hosting camps etc.
So while I agree that content awareness has increased internationally, I am not sure if it is a local trend, especially in the chapters that are not having a large portion of younger people in their boards. (Take Norway as an example; some chapters are having a large pool of students - often pre-educated CISVers moving from other parts of the country - to draw from, where as others again has to rely primarily on parents as the youth leave.
Nevertheless; the future is going to be interesting. Will we focus more and more on local activities? How will this impact the (international) organization (we earn money from international activities, and not from local activities)? Will a move away from "sending kids abroad" to "doing things in the neighbourhood" impact the degree of which kids and parents get involved?
I think what makes CISV unique is how it is both a family organization and a youth organization at the same time. I mean in many chapters its families who are taking care of sending deligations, hosting camps and dealing with money and logistics (maybe even on a national or chapter board) and youth are working locally on organizing another organization within the NA to work on peace education and CISV's values on a national level.
I think these two go hand in hand, and they are what makes CISV what it is, I don't think it should be a choice on whether to focus on local or international programs, but somehow to find a way to develop them both parallely and have them benefit from each other. For example have JB and Mosaic help out with camps being hosted or running trainings for traveling participants... and recruiting participants when they are back to work in JB or Mosaic.
I agree with Lars that the motivation to join CISV as a volunteer is manifold in the various levels from "CISV-moms" that enjoy a local network whilst catering for kids all the way to the "professional volunteers", building a career on CISV involvement.
Rous comment hits in a similar direction, claiming that CISV is such a diverse organisation having something to offer for everyone. This is great, but sometimes I wonder if a more specific profile wouldn't hurt.
I'd love to see CISV recognized as the "experts in peace education" or if you like "the experts in intercultural competence". Our development from Vilage to 7 diffenet programmes has left us standing more like "the experts in everything and nothing".
Nick, how much is it going to cost me for signed picture of you in a tie-dye Tshirt?
Out of curiosity (and also in the marketing point of view) a profiling of the typical participant to camps, national events, international meetings etc. would be really interesting...