Dear NPA friends, family, supporters and students,

Thank you again for helping us celebrate NPA's third birthday!  With the boost of your tremendous generosity, the National Peace Academy took a major stride toward sustainability in March and April.  In just a few short weeks we signed up more than 50 new sustaining supporters, all pledging monthly donations.   While we may still have a long way to go to securing an endowment that will keep us going for perpetuity, knowing that we have incoming monthly funds brings us peace of mind and allows us to shift our energy from fundraising to our peacelearning and educational work that is at the heart of the NPA. 

At the NPA, our most important measures of success are the "ripples of peace" we observe emanating from the peacebuilders who attend our peacelearning programs.  Our programs are designed to capacitate students to create meaningful and sustainable change in their personal, family, professional and community lives. Thanks to the generous spirit of our alumni, we are now able to share the stories of our students' applied peacebuilding efforts.  We will be featuring new stories each month of the "ripples of peace" the NPA is supporting on the special alumni stories section of our website.  This month we feature the story of Jeffrey Weisberg, a 2010 PPI alumni who has been a key developer of the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding.    We hope you'll take the time to celebrate the many other stories our alumni have already posted, including efforts to create university peace education programs, community peace centers, and efforts to rebuild Detroit. 

While our students are active building peace, our edulearner faculty are also prolifically productive, generating news courses, writing, and engaging the public about issues that concern us all.  To keep you apprised of the new visions of our edulearners we've also launched a new faculty blog.  This site is dedicated to sharing new ideas and practices in peacebuilding as well as crosscutting issues from the perspective of our contributing faculty.  This month we feature an article from Dr. Betty A. Reardon on Slavery and War  - this article is a companion to the upcoming May 12 NPA workshop on Teaching About Sex Trafficking: Gender Crimes, War and Law. Please be sure to check out past posts, including articles from Mary Lee Morrison, Michael Nagler, and Stephanie Van Hook.

Our new website proclaims, "peacebuilding vocations, just like careers in science, business or technology, are built upon foundations of knowledge and skills that are pursued through lifelong learning." Learning with and from our peers is essential to our ongoing learning. While you may not be able to join us in the classroom each month, we hope these new educational features of our website will help keep you engaged and motivated in the pursuit of your own peacelearning goals. 

Yours in peace,

Tony Jenkins, Vice President for Academic Affairs