My Nonprofit Reviews

I volunteered with Jerusalem Peace Builders for the first time last summer, and it was an extraordinary experience! The students who came over from the Holy Land were genuine, fun, and willing to do the hard work of dialogue. I know that it was a transformative experience for them, and it certainly was for me. I worked with trained dialogue leaders and program directors, so I had the opportunity to learn about the actual process of creating true dialogues. The critical foundation of dialogue is helping the participants feel safe to share their authentic feelings and experiences with each other. The only way that this could happen was to create an environment of mutual trust and respect. This was not easy for them since we had Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Holy Land- each with their own perspectives and connections to the issues there. We also had a Christian participant from here who contributed a lot to the dialogues. He mentioned that it was his first time to have the opportunity to get to know people of other faith traditions and from another part of the world . We all learned that building peace is not only hard, slow work, but that this generation of students will be the future leaders who will be committed to making a change towards justice and peace.