The Peace Education Institute is a Finnish, politically non-aligned peace organization for educators who work in formal and non-formal education settings. In practice, this means teachers, youth workers or activists who are interested in creating safer, more inclusive and equal spaces in their work and in wider society. Our work is guided by three themes that are anti-racism, equality, and global citizenship.
For educators and activists, we offer education, methods, materials, and support in their daily work. We also develop new methods and approaches on more inclusive, equal, antiracist, safer, and sustainable work cultures in schools or non-formal education settings. A large part of our work is international, as we are closely linked to our colleagues, especially in Europe, who work with similar themes in their own contexts and a big part of our funding comes from the European Union.
For us, peace education in practice means strengthening and building resilience and trust in society, encouraging active and participatory citizenship, as well as solving everyday life’s conflicts in a nonviolent manner. It is also about making power structures and privileges more visible and recognising, managing, and transforming hate speech, racism, and exclusion in educators’ work.
On these pages, you can find our future and past trainings, projects, and actions. You are most welcome to join us!
Currently, we are conducting several projects to increase equity, equality, inclusion, and anti-racism in schools and non-formal educational settings. Annually, we implement teachers in-service training projects nationally reaching in total several thousand teachers every year. In Helsinki municipality, we are currently organizing a set of more than 150 anti-racism workshops for kindergarten and pre-school staff members, teachers, and school principals.
We have trained more than 2,000 teachers and youth workers on participatory equality planning in 2015–2020. One of our new approaches to peace education is to use documentary films to create creative spaces for transformative learning moments where sensitive and difficult issues can be tackled together. Yearly, we publish various toolkits, manuals, and training materials for teachers and youth workers – most of them being outcomes from international projects. Our international work is mainly funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union. See below some of our current and recent international projects.
How to Create a Transformative Dialogue Process?
You’ll find three different stories on how to design and conduct a process that aims to tackle difficult and crucial questions, such as segregation, youth invovement in organized crime and climate crisis – and in the end, change the society through dialogue and stories.
You can also find The Connect Guide, a practical tool on how to support different groups in creating transformative dialogue.
Creative space for dialogue is an Erasmus+ project which brought together almost one hundred experts in the fields of culture, media, art education, youth work, and non-formal education from Finland, Serbia, Slovenia, and Poland.
The Peace Education Institute was one of the seven GENE Global Education Award 2020/2021 winners.
The project provides teachers and other professionals with tools and skills to tackle hate speech, discriminatory bullying, and excluding practices in schools.
Global Learning for Sense of Belonging The GloBe (2021 – 2023) brings together the notions
Anatomy of Ostracism Controlling discrimination and increasing inclusion and equality in education settings. In the summer
Our projects are mainly funded by the Finnish government. The most important funding partners are the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs as well as the Finnish National Agency for Education and the European Union.
An official partnership with consultative status has been established between UNESCO and the Peace Education Institute.
