International Day of Living Together in Peace
May 16, 2024
Guest post by Asheesh Advani, CEO, JA Worldwide
In 2017, the United Nations General Assembly declared May 16 “International Day of Living Together in Peace,” a day to promote peace, tolerance, inclusion, understanding, and solidarity.
For more than a century, JA Worldwide—the global headquarters of JA locations in over 100 countries, where we’re known as Junior Achievement, INJAZ, Young Enterprise, Ungt Entreprenørskap, and dozens of other locally recognized names—has been helping youth and adults alike cross borders, understand each other’s lives, and unite in spite of differences.
Each year, we serve millions of young people, who not only meet and deepen friendships through entrepreneurship competitions, but also work side-by-side—overcoming language and cultural barriers—to hone their business and entrepreneurship skills. Through the FedEx Express JA Asia Pacific International Trade Challenge, for example, two students from different countries, who have never met before, are paired together, given a business challenge, and work for two solid days to conceive of a product or service, develop a detailed business plan, and jointly present the plan on stage. What begins as two strangers blossoms into an inspired team that transcends borders. In the MENA region, INJAZ Al-Arab this year launched INJAZaTHON, a hackathon that requires collaboration across 13 MENA countries to find a solution to a business challenge in seven hours or less. Similar cross-border collaborations in our other JA regions are rapidly breaking down barriers between countries.
Opportunities to live, act, and work together in peace aren’t limited to JA students. Our alumni showcase their cross-national fellowship at youthvoices.org, which gathers the recorded conversations of hundreds of JA youth as they discuss how to build thriving communities, empower youth, and live their values. Alumni from Jamaica and Sweden were recently on stage at COP28 (the UN Climate Conference) to discuss the climate initiatives they’re leading, while JA youth leaders from more than 20 countries in Africa and Asia Pacific met last year for intensive, three-day cross-border leadership training. This August, our Emerge Alumni Summit will gather hundreds more former JA students in Porto, Portugal, where they’ll share knowledge, unite with purpose, and connect across generations.
Our 3,500+ staff members are also a living embodiment of International Day of Living Together in Peace, whether they’re traveling to our biennial staff leadership conference to meet their colleagues in both large and small groups; applying for the JA Worldwide Fellows Program, through which they not only deepen their leadership skills but also join a small cohort of geographically and culturally diverse colleagues that forge lifelong friendships; participating in our JA Worldwide Global Orientation for new employees, who are thrilled to discover like-minded colleagues working halfway around the world; or presenting and celebrating best practices at national, regional, and global gatherings of peers. Our 16-person Senior Leadership Team, which represents more than a dozen nationalities, meets annually at a host country to ensure alignment toward our shared strategic priorities, deepen our knowledge of each other’s cultures, and learn from our peers.
Even our global and regional boards are modeling living together in peace, as they plan board meetings in every part of the world, meet to learn from each other through our virtual GLC special board member sessions, and work with us to develop a JA Global Orientation for new board members, so that they can develop additional—and critically important—cross-border connections.
International Day of Living Together in Peace, which aims to unite us in our differences and diversity in order to build a sustainable world of peace, solidarity, and harmony, may come only once a year. But it’s a daily endeavor here at JA.
Until next time,
Asheesh