Mini Global Peace Festival

Shin Young Chang
May 23, 2008

The day began early with an inspiring interfaith prayer breakfast. About 70 middle, high school, and college aged students from the New York area gathered at the Ebenezer Missionary Baptists Church in Flushing New York, to greet representatives from the Islamic, Buddhist, Sikh, Christian and Jewish Faiths. The morning began with a prayer given by each representative and a short video explaining GPF, followed by the GPF song. Breakfast was in the lower level of the church and was prepared and served by various youth groups from the Unification Movement such as BCP, SFP, and NLTP. Everyone made an effort to sit with a guest.

The following is a series of short interviews done with participants of the Mini Global Peace Festival to illustrate the event.

Lombardi Center, Fordham University, Bronx. Hanako Ikeno,
Mom I was really inspired. Having all this come about by a group of middle and high school students who relentlessly pursued this vision is very, very, inspiring. I didn't openly refute them or tell them it was very, very difficult but I thought it. They didn't give up and because of that i think they were able to mobilize nationally. I was part of the planning committee and I helped put Service For Peace (in this are) together. I brought them food for their meetings! That was my job. I am a mom. This winter workshop many came, including Westchester area high schoolers and Hasako. We were able to receive a lot of internal guidance on what it means to be God's ambassadors. During this time, there were two main initiatives that began to form. One was the Student Ambassador for Peace idea. that is the idea of middle and high school students being nominated and posted as Ambassadors for Peace and the other idea was the Global Peace Festival and how it's important to begin to reach out not only to your own small community but to go out and experience rather than just observation. We had a reflection after the meeting and we split up Westchester and New York and the Westchester area began reflecting and saying "We have to do something to build momentum for the Global Peace Festival." One of the reasons we had this Mini-Global Peace Festival is America is so big and if we have many smaller versions of the main event in many different places, we could build partnerships that way and build awareness that way. The idea was brought up in the winter and honestly, I was so overwhelmed with the idea that I just sat on my hands and thought, maybe if I just do nothing then it will just go away! I was overwhelmed because the idea of putting on a festival at this scale, with hundreds of people, well I couldn't see how we could do it. In the end they accomplished what they had set out to do but not at the scale they had hoped it would be. This is an example of how visionary they are: In the beginning, they were like, "Mini, right? So that would be one percent of what they thought would be one million." So they were like, "one percent of one million, hmmm? That's ten thousand, right? So we are going to bring ten thousand to the Mini Global Peace Festival. And this number keeps glaring in my face and I thought, " we work our butts off to get three thousand to an event and they want ten thousand?" But I think even that kind of naivety or idealism is inspiring. They don't see what's impossible, they only see what is possible.

So even though a lot of the older people, such as Rev. Grodner (District Director) and myself, we were scrambling to put this together, we were inspired by this idea. Rev. Grodner jumped on board and he was supportive and enthusiastic, and he was completely inspired by the idea of it. And he brought on a lot of the partners, like Andrew Cane, and the founder of the International Peace Vigil and the executive director of Eco Living, he brought them into the fold and together we started putting this together. Afterwards, Mr. Cane had some kind of world peace initiative and he decided to be one of the main organizers of the entertainment. It was him and Justin Kim calling people, frantically trying to force them to be a part of the entertainment! That's another example of their relentlessness.

Justin Kim had the idea of making this an entertainment festival and I thought, why not have that at the end, make this all a bit smaller, but he just wanted it to be bigger and bigger! He just kept calling people and saying, "You're our entertainment," and they were all like, "Global Peace What?" and Justin would just say, "Okay come here tomorrow! See you tomorrow!" The tables we had set at the festival was a Service for Peace fair idea. We asked these organizations to come out and represent themselves as the support SFP. This helped SFP to mobilize under the theme of One Family Under God, to display how they worked together with other organizations for that vision, and more importantly, to give them the experience of networking, to begin to network. One of my ideas as a follow-up to the Mini GPF is to create a kind of clearing house, a place where organizations that are motivated can post themselves on a website so that volunteers that want to serve God's family can come to this website and find organizations that serve or fit their desire.

The Mini GPF may become an annual thing if we can learn the budgeting and the salary and stuff like that. Abraham Deshotel, NLTP Fund raising Captain I think it's really amazing what's going on here. I'm really inspired that high school students got together and took initiative to create this meaningful peace festival to prepare for the main Global Peace Festival in D. C to come. I think we should have mini Global Peace Festivals in all of America. There's only going to be one major festival in D.C. and we are trying to inspire all regions.

Hyung Son Kim, Director of International Cultural Education Foundation (ICEF)
Today was a beautiful day. The people from the Raban organization interviewed us. We're here talking about peace and how to achieve it so today