The National Peace Academy serves as both clearinghouse and developer of best practices, curricular materials, positive peace perspectives, and other resources for capacitating people and organizations for building communities of right relationship. We do this in the following ways:
Peace Perspective on Issues, Policies, and Current Events. NPA, on its own and in collaboration with its partners, invites and publishes analyses and evaluations of pertinent news and policy issues of the day, as seen through the lens of the Five Spheres of Peace. NPA helps to create and bring forth a new way of looking at our world. In this way, as government, business, and civil society seek solutions to emerging social and economic crises and problems, NPA illuminates options that are consistent with growing the culture of peace. For example, in 2014, with the United States caught up in the unfolding police-violence-related events in Ferguson, MO, New York City, and elsewhere, and protestors taking to the streets, NPA published several opinion pieces about possible healing steps, and a different, pro-peace perspective on the events themselves.
Learning Resources for Peacebuilding. The National Peace Academy, by itself and in partnership with others, actively commissions and produces – for distribution and inclusion in the Clearinghouse – stories, guidebooks, films, educational modules, and curricular materials to support teaching and building peace. For example, NPA’s Peacebuilding Peacelearning Intensive (PPI) program offers a weeklong introduction to and experience with the Five Spheres of Peace and how to apply them in one’s own life and community. The program has been a huge success, producing lasting ripples of peace across the country. An adaptation of the PPI program for high school girls is being offered at and in collaboration with Cottey College in June 2015. NPA works with partners to adapt the program to other demographic and community-of-practice audiences, including making it available, through its Clearinghouse, in modular form along with teacher guides so that others may offer it in their own communities and contexts, thus multiplying the ripples many-fold.
Teleconference Dialogues. NPA’s series of teleconference dialogues are an avenue for disseminating collectively exploring issue-oriented Peace Perspectives through dialogue and conversation. Through these dialogues, distinguished peacebuilders and peace educators are invited into dialogue with the National Peace Academy community of students and supporters. Each teleconference introduces important and emergent issues and efforts of concern to peacebuilders and invites participants to actively engage with speakers, thus exploring new ideas with a focus on positive-peace.