The Peace Act

The Peace Act was an initiative created to Prevent Youth Violence, (#PYV) using International Peace Day 21st September as a focus to bring organisations and individuals together to inspire, engage and organise, events, programmes and workshops to help deter, and tackle the issue of youth violence within our communities. To create a safer and more peaceful environment for our children and young people to grow up in.

“Youth violence has an impact on our whole community, therefore we all have a duty to take ACTion and be apart of the solution!”

The Peace Act Week in fact takes place over a 9 day period, starting from 12th September where communities work together to organise activities, events and workshops for young people, which ends on International  Peace Day, the 21st September.

2015 main event focused on the young victims of Knife Crime, where we commemorated the lives of Joshua Ribera, Kyle Sheehan & Joe Walker who all tragically lost their lives to knife crime ironically on Peace Day 21st September.

2014 Peace Act enabled around 2,000 people to carry out individual and collective “Peace Actions” or “Peace Acts”, it also allowed us to tell over 300,000 people about our mission to prevent youth violence via our successful media campaign.

2015 we took to Sheffield second annual event, alongside Sharing Kams Cuddles On the 20th March.  main event will spotlights Sarah Rose, founder of Sharing Kams Cuddles, the mother of 18 month old Kamran, who was killed by a 21 year old, young person, who was caring for him, but after falling into a fit of rage, beat Kamran to death.

2014 Peace Act raised awareness of the different forms of youth violence within the community, including bullying, domestic violence, sexual exploitation, gang culture and knife crime etc, so as a community we can learn how to prevent other tragic events like this from happening.

During the 9 days we had many events taking place to engage young people and young families in a wide range of events to help raise awareness and prevent youth violence, such as:

  • Peace Act 5 A-side Cup
  • Open mic sessions
  • Panel discussion and debate
  • Film screenings
  • Non School uniform Days
  • Knife Awareness Assemblies
  • School Workshops
  • T-shirt design Workshops
  • Graffiti Art Workshops
  • Knife bin Launch
  • Project/ Launches.
  • Book launches
  • Art Galleries
  • Awards Evenings