Global Peace Ambassadors

30 years, 60 countries, 1 community.
Launching soon in Sarajevo - the next generation begins.

We're not building a program. We're building a movement.

Our story

Built across generations

Thirty years ago, an international youth choir and peacebuilding program brought hundreds of young people together from around the world for a formative, immersive experience. The friendships didn't fade when it ended. They deepened - across sixty countries and a lifetime of experience - into something as close as family.

Today those same people, now mid-career professionals, parents, and mentors themselves, are launching a new experience for a new generation - like the medieval stonemasons who carved cathedrals of beauty, part by part, generation by generation, for a future beyond their own lifetimes.

Most youth development programs deliver an experience and send everyone home. This is something different.

The Global Peace Ambassadors are a growing international network. Each new cohort is the next chapter of the story, the next group of the movement who will carry the work into the future for a world of sustained peace and flourishing communities.

Papa and Mama Chang, the program's founders, together outdoors.

A year of the international youth choir — dozens of young people from around the world in traditional dress.

Alumni of the program reunited years later, dressed in white at a gathering in Colombia.

Launching soon

The Sarajevo Peace Lab

Coming soon, the first cohort of a new generation will gather in Sarajevo for an immersive month of peacebuilding. Up to 20 young people or more from 20 different countries. They'll form close friendships and explore together what everyday peacebuilding looks like in their own communities.

Sarajevo as a living classroom.

Most leadership programs situate themselves in comfortable, photogenic Western cities. We chose a location where civil war is a living memory and where reconciliation is still being actively lived out. Known as the Jerusalem of Europe, Sarajevo has been a meeting place of faiths and cultures for centuries - and it endured the longest wartime siege of a capital city in modern history. Here, no one has to argue that peace matters. The city itself teaches it.

An elevated view over Sarajevo's old town, with the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque and the Sahat Kula clock tower among the rooftops.

Pedestrians cross the Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures compass line in the Old Town, where the city's Eastern and Western halves meet.

A Sarajevo Rose: a mortar-shell scar in the pavement filled with red resin, beside a wall still pocked with shrapnel from the siege.

Sharing cultures, building community.

Participants in the Peace Lab all come from different countries and become part of a global community of hundreds of alumni from more than 60 nations. Through field trips, local tours, and evening times of social bonding, culture exchange, and creative activities, participants build deep friendships as they experience shared expressions of music, dance, arts, food, games, and more.

Hands from many nations holding their passports together in a circle.

A group drumming together on djembes during a culture-exchange session.

Hands reaching together over a shared table of food.

More than talk, a toolkit for change.

Participants won't just study about peacebuilding. They'll go beyond dialogue and learn practical tools that turn talk to action. They'll learn about leadership & cross-cultural communication, group facilitation & collaboration, and hands-on work with modern media tools for telling powerful stories - digital photography, video storytelling & production, and audio podcasting.

A smartphone on a gimbal stabilizer filming a city street.

Hand-drawn storyboard panels for planning a video shoot.

A studio podcast microphone with two people in conversation.

If you want to change a society, you have to tell an alternative story.
— Ivan Illich

A program like no other

Distinctives

Built by alumni.

The Global Peace Ambassadors Foundation is alumni-launched, alumni-led, alumni-sustained. This is the kind of program so impactful that participants come back to run it.

An integrated toolkit for changemakers.

In a world saturated with propaganda and conflict-driven narratives, the Peace Lab equips participants with the knowledge and skills to go beyond the cultural stereotypes, build authentic trust, and become changemakers in their own communities.

Real-world engagement.

Each cohort learns practical skills and makes concrete peacebuilding pledges in their own communities, supported and encouraged by the global alumni network for years to come.

A living classroom.

The learning doesn't just take place in a conference room. It takes place in the living classroom of Sarajevo itself - its history, its people, its hard-won lessons.

Our learning model

The Trellis: A practical framework for everyday peacebuilding

Participants in the Peace Lab study peacebuilding through the Trellis Framework - our research-based, community-oriented peacebuilding education model. They won't just study abstract ideas about peace. They'll learn principles and practices they can apply in their own communities, at the scale where young people have real credibility and influence.

They'll go beyond conflict resolution to learn what it takes to build real trust, because peace is more than the absence of conflict. Peace is the presence of enough trust to survive conflict. Peace requires the everyday relationships, conditions, and practices that make trust possible.

Be a part of what comes next

The program in Sarajevo is just the beginning. Subscribe to follow our peacebuilding journey and the road ahead. We'll send you updates and resources you can use or email us at info@gpa.foundation.