Delia Mamon - Biography and motivation

Delia Mamon set up Graines de Paix in 2005, convinced of the need for an organization to foster peace through education. Starting with an in-depth study on the internet of what didn't yet exist, especially for children, her vision took form: to promote a positive and dynamic understanding of peace, to focus on children's education, to awaken people to their human values and their peace reflexes (ability to appease on the moment) as effective means to overcome violence, to contribute to intercultural understanding and to create stimulating learning environments.

From the onset, she invested herself in the creation and enrichment of a resource-rich website to offer free learning resources to teachers, educators, students and the general public. As of 2006, she developed training modules for preventing violence through focusing on one's human values and competencies, including the ability to react with peace reflexes, i.e. to appease others that are filled with anger or violence, the first of which she gave in Switzerland, France and the Middle-East (young lawyer training, Palestine, student debate society training, Israel) in 2007. With young volunteers, she began organising children's activity workshops for community centres in the Geneva area.

Starting in 2008, following a key Board decision to provide peace education resources to schools, she focused the organization on producing a Peace Education Manual for teachers and students that merged experiential peace skills learning into the school subjects. This major project received its first financial support from the Swiss Confederation and became the basis for the Growing up in peace collection (2010-2017) that has since been formally recognised by the largest French-speaking canton in Switzerland (Vaud). In parallel, she organised multicultural encounters to overcome cultural incomprehension.

In 2012, in response to the National agreement signed with Côte d'Ivoire's Ministry of Education, she designed and provided a major training programme for peace culture education (ECP) for the nation's schools, bringing together the many contributions of the organization's education staff. For this, she developed a systemic approach structured around UNESCO's 4 pillars of education, and bringing together active and experiential learning approaches, specific teaching methods for addressing violence prevention and positive teaching postures for developing strong self-esteem in learners.

Since then, she has been steering Graines de Paix to develop strong convergence between peace culture education and mainstream education as a key means to attain three UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals:

• Inclusive school success (success for all children), including the weakest or most distraught (SDG 4)
• Gender equality (SDG 5)
• Violence and radicalisation prevention - and more generally, societal peace (SDG 16).

Today, with this thrust, Graines de Paix's work has been recognised by UNESCO and UNICEF and the team has signed agreements with several Education Ministries and Development Agencies.

Previously, Delia Mamon had founded and presided iNFOMEDIS, a Swiss foundation set up to establish a national "Explorapark on biosciences and health" (Vevey, 1995-2002), with the help of the National Engineering Schools (EPFL, ETH), the Lausanne Medical Faculty and the Canton of Vaud.

Before arriving in Switzerland, she led an international career in strategic marketing for high-technology companies, receiving several prestigious prizes for her accomplishments, foremost of which the Honeywell Worldwide President's Award. She started her career as an Economist at the OECD. More info...

Education is in full transition : progressively, around the world, education authorities are choosing to go beyond passive instruction and to bring about active participation, knowledge of self, the ability to develop relationships with others and critical thinking.

Education will need to do yet more to reverse the growing rifts in society. It will need to value each student, including those labeled as weak, so that they can reveal and give the best of themselves. It will need to make the leap to encompass psychosocial skills and emotional learning, not least because fear and anger kindle violence.

Furthermore, the world is becoming aware of the necessity to propose a culture based on values, values that can federate between cultures - human values, values leading to a culture of peace. Education is the only means to reach virtually all children of a country, and it is the most effective means for tackling the challenge of wide-spreading multiculturalism. Education will need to inspire."