By CHASE SQUIRES
DENVER – Ivan Suvanjieff believes the path to the hearts _ and attention _ of the world’s teenagers can be found through a handful of people that includes a 74-year-old archbishop, a Costa Rican president and a 74-year-old Tibetan.
It is a belief Suvanjieff has clung to for 12 years and it is his passion. This month, the movement he helped found, PeaceJam, celebrates its 10th year by bringing 10 Nobel Peace Prize winners to Denver for what organizers say is the largest gathering of its kind in North America.
Beginning Friday, laureates including the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez will call on youths to perform a billion “acts of peace” over the next decade _ anything from mentoring younger children or planting a tree to creating programs that help the less fortunate, building communities and pressing international leaders for peace.
The laureates will exchange ideas and join with some 3,000 teens from 31 countries in a three-day festival of unity and commitment aimed at a new generation of peace.
“It’s a global call for action to the youth of the world,” Suvanjieff said, sitting in the courtyard of PeaceJam’s tiny world headquarters in suburban Denver. “I knew from the beginning I was right about the concept of PeaceJam: young people learning from Nobel Peace laureates, the moral authority of the world.”
“At that age, we all want to change the world and do something worthwhile,” said Mairead Corrigan, one of the two 1976 Nobel Peace laureates from Northern Ireland. “This program actually gives them the opportunity to see that ordinary people can do something … It’s a bit scary if you start out with ‘You’ve got to change the world.’
“It’s just important that they start out in their own community. If their gift is gardening, be a good gardener. If their gift is music, be the best musician. That’s peacemaking.”
PeaceJam’s roots date to 1994 when Suvanjieff, an artist living in a Denver apartment, confronted a group of teens, including one carrying a gun. He learned they did not know who the president was, but they knew Tutu, who won the Peace Prize in 1984 for his fight against South Africa’s apartheid.
“They said, ‘Oh yeah, man, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, him and Mandela. Tutu stood in front of the guns of apartheid, he got thrown in jail, he never carried a gun, he’s all for nonviolent peace action and he got his country back for his people,'” Suvanjieff recalled. “I said, ‘Why aren’t you more like him, and why are you carrying a gun?’ And I busted them.”
Their connection to a holy man on the other side of the globe stuck, he said. For two years, he worked with his future wife, Dawn Engle, as they created PeaceJam. The first rally was held in suburban Arvada in 1996.
Since then, PeaceJam has hosted 125 conferences for laureates to interact with young participants and it anchors outreach programs across the world.
This year’s PeaceJam is a $2.8 million (?2.2 million)undertaking hosted by the University of Denver that will involve the Secret Service and State Department because of the Dalai Lama, the Costa Rican president and Jose Ramos-Horta, now prime minister of East Timor.
Rudy Balles was at the first rally a decade ago. Five years after losing a friend to gang violence and himself a former gang member, Balles said he was filled with frustration and anger when he went to meet 1992 laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum, who campaigned for peace in Guatemala.
“I started seeing the successes of Rigoberta’s people, and how noble it was, and I saw I couldn’t do any less,” said Balles, who lives in Denver. “This is a real leader, she’s not a pop icon. I needed to make no less of a commitment to peace. Violence is easy.”
Balles said he has learned how to channel his energy and said teens’ familiar veneer of indifference or aggression often hides curiosity and a passion to make a difference.
Balles said he attended that first PeaceJam thinking it was a hokey, hippie dream. He left determined to change his life and to reach out to help others. Now 30, he is the full-time program director for the Denver-based gang outreach center GRASP.
If young people need role models, they should aim higher than ball players or rock stars or actors, Suvanjieff said. He points to his willing participants, who happen to be globally recognized ambassadors for peace.
“Kids today are very sophisticated consumers because they’ve been a marketing demographic since the day they were born,” he said. “People have been throwing ads at them since the moment they were sitting upright in front of a television …. We’re not marketing. We’re not selling.
“We put them with the Nobel laureates and they connect as a real person. It’s not like you get a Nobel Prize and you turn into a perfect person. They’re still human. That’s what’s so exciting to kids: You can make a difference, you can have a positive influence on the world, you don’t have to be perfect.”
Suvanjieff and Engle, both 59, plan to expand PeaceJam into a literacy program for younger children, dubbed PeaceJam Jr., and they are excited about the billion acts of peace over the next decade.
“Just like the McDonald’s of peace,” Suvanjieff said.
“The Nobel laureates, our bosses, think big,” Engle added.
