Youth Advisory Council Members Train on Achievement Gap at PeaceJam

Youth Advisory Council members Eva Gallegos Perez, Pajnucci Vue, David Wehrwein, Annie Wood, and Cheng Leng Xiong offered training on the achievement gap during the PeaceJam event at the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis, May 1. Their session illustrated Nobel laureate Oscar Arias Sanchez’s message that “Security lies in human development.”  

The former president of Costa Rica made his case by enumerating what a range of percentage decreases in military spending could do for global health, education, and welfare.

Vue found parallels in Sanchez’s message to the YAC’s mission to close the achievement gap. Quoting Sanchez, she said: “If our government would just invest 25 percent of military spending on our education system, every student in the developing world would have access to a computer. In doing this, we would have equity in technology and be one step closer to closing the gap.”

One of a dozen workshops the several hundred attendees participated in over the weekend, the session focused on helping students understand environmental factors that contribute to performing poorly in school, often along lines of race or socio-economics.

The annual event is sponsored by the local nonprofit youthrive, part of a larger network of organizations linked through the PeaceJam Foundation based in Denver, Colo. Each year students across the country and around the globe study the life of one of a dozen Nobel laureates, gather for a fall weekend to plan local peace and social-justice oriented service and service-learning projects, then implement them over the course of the school year. In the spring they gather again to meet the Nobelist whose life they’ve studied, participate in more projects, and present their findings to the laureate.

Each peace prize winner has a “global call to action.” For Sanchez, it is human security. As a leader from the first country in the world to demilitarize in 1948, he later developed the Arias Plan which encouraged other Central American countries also to demilitarize.

“We must use the dividends of peace to feed, educate, and provide health for people,” said the physician-trained politician.

“Imagine if we could reduce the military budget by five percent, we could provide enough mosquito nets to prevent malaria three times over . . . At one-fifth of one percent, we could build a home for every homeless person in Haiti.”

Saying that we risk much more by putting “profits over peace” he rallied the adults in the audience to find their voice, noting that the youth have found theirs. He added that he hopes Minnesota-born Bob Dylan is right, that “The times they are a’changing.”

“Peace is not only an idealist’s dream,” he said, “It is a practical necessity.”

For Wehrwein, Sanchez’s message was that “Peace does not happen instantaneously, but rather it's a process,” much like the YAC’s efforts to close the achievement gap.