Building peaceful communities.

No easy answers exist to the problems of youth violence, poverty and hopelessness, but as United States Secretary of State Colin Powell once stated, "sometimes the best single thing you can do for an inner-city kid is to show him or her that there's a whole different world beyond the neighbourhoods where they live, and that he or she can achieve a rewarding career in that other world." It is precisely this sense of empowerment that the Peacemaker Corps strives to instill not only in the youths who participate in the training programme but also in the adults who lead the peacemaking workshops.

It is the goal of PCA to recruit trainers from the local community, primarily women from low-income backgrounds, people who know first-hand the issues of violence and conflict that young people have to face every day. Volunteers complete a comprehensive two-day interactive programme and have the opportunity to hone their new-found peacemaking skills by participating as junior facilitators in the youth training. As graduates of the facilitation-training programme, they become consultants for the Peacemaker Corps and are compensated for each youth training session they conduct.

Most recently, PCA has formed alliances with organizations such as Jim Brown's Amer-I-Can/Unity One, Small Kindness, Parents of Watts, Chrysalis and Younglife Urban to find adults who are eager to be trained and help the Peacemaker Corps accomplish its mission of empowering the young in the art of making peace. Explains Darryl Jones of Younglife Urban: "The Peacemaker Corps gives tools and resources to the adults who know what the problems in their community are and inspires them, as well as the kids, to encourage others to focus on those problems. And by honouring them with a Peacemaker graduation certificate, proving they are a qualified facilitator, it gives the trainers not just a skill to include on their resume but also validates their ability to cultivate a movement toward peace and harmony in their own community."

By employing an often overlooked portion of the adult workforce, PCA has the opportunity to act as a stimulus for self- and economic regeneration--a vital boost that can aid in the revitalization of communities and regions, whether in urban Los Angeles, the war-torn Balkans or any region of the world that has been ripped apart by strife, civil disorder and economic devastation.

As Mohammed Khan, a UN representative for Small Kindness, describes: "The Peacemaker Corps, like Small Kindness, has the goal of training women from the local area, empowering them with job skills and enabling them to spread peace throughout their communities. The work that the Peacemaker Corps is doing is so important and needs to be instituted internationally, because the peace processes that work in the inner city can and will also work in places like the Balkans, Africa and Asia."

Leslie L. Baker is Director of Development and Administration of PCA and worked as a marketing manager in corporate health care, and as Office Manager for an equities- and derivatives-trading firm in Frankfurt, Germany.