Founded 25 years ago, Peace First is a global youth movement, unleashing young peopleÕs compassionate creativity to counter the rising culture of exclusion, violence, and disconnection that affects us all. Across the globe there is a frightening rise in extremism, isolation, and despair. We have lost our basic capacity to come together to solve problems, to view other peopleÕs needs as our own, and to cross lines of difference to build community. Meanwhile, there are 1.6 billion young people across the globe, many with ideas on how to solve the worldÕs most entrenched problems, but only a very few have access to tools, mentors, and capital to turn their insights into reality. Peace First is changing this.

Although 25 years old, we are essentially a start-up social venture, moving from a school-based curriculum to a direct-to-youth digital platform for social change. Peace First invites young people (13 Ð 24) to identify a critical issue in their community and then puts project design tools, caring adult mentors, and small start-up grants into their hands to imagine and implement compassionate solutions to our globeÕs most urgent problems. From thousands of initial projects we choose top innovations for support, amplification, and further investment, creating the worldÕs largest marketplace of youth-led, youth-created social change initiatives. Not only will millions of young people develop the skills and commitment for social change, but we will source and amplify powerful solutions from those closest to the problem through a variety of earned and owned media.