Betsy Sawyer and the Groton-Dunstable Middle School Peace Club
– Project Website –
Groton, Massachusetts
From Dennis Trainor, Jr., Acronym TV:
Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-general of The United Nations, told Betsy Sawyer, her students and 250 guests at the JFK Presidential Library on October 11 that their after school “peace club is an inspiration to the world.”
The occasion was the launch of world tour of the Big Book: Pages for Peace Project. A decade in the making, the book started when middle school students solicited and received original messages of peace from the likes of the Dali Llama, Maya Anelgou, Nelson Mandela, President Jimmy Carter, the late Senator Ted Kennedy and thousands of others from all over the world. It is these letters, poems, and artwork that populate the Big Book: Pages for Peace.
“It has taken you ten years to create this extraordinary book,” Ban Ki-moon said in his video address, “at twelve feet high and (twenty feet wide, when open) it truly lives up to its name. You have 3,500 messages of peace from all over the world, and now with mine you have 3,501. What an amazing achievement, and what a fantastic commitment.”