Mike Yarrow Peace Fellowship- Home Page
"Get Trained. Get Paid. Get Active."
The WWFOR runs the Mike Yarrow Peace Fellowship (MYPF), a year-long Fellowship that includes a Grant of $500 to work on a nonviolent social change project of your choice, plus receive training and support. In 2023 we have kept the training online due to COVID-19. High school and college-age youth, ages 14-23 are eligible to receive training in nonviolent direct action.
2017 Mike Yarrow Peace Fellow, Jamie Margolin, inspired by the MYPF Intensive Training program, focused her project and funds on starting a youth-led climate justice organization, “This is Zero Hour” with a Youth March on Washington in summer 2018. Greta Thunberg, then 15 years old, “read about Zero Hour’s day of action online. Then, a month later, she began her Fridays for Future strike campaign, protesting outside Sweden’s parliament every week. The strike movement spread across Europe and the world, becoming a key part of today’s wave of youth climate activism.” Source link.
You(th) Can Make a Difference!
The Mike Yarrow Peace Fellowship (MYPF) was founded to honor Mike Yarrow, WWFOR’s previous Organizer who died at the age of 74 from cancer on June 2, 2014. Mike founded this youth organizers training program in 2000 with his wife Ruth, and provided key leadership to it for its 14 years of existence. The program has provided training to more than 150 graduates in the theory and practice of active nonviolence on issues of peace and environmental and social justice in the traditions of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. The MYPF program includes an Intensive Training program to “kick-start” an effort by each Yarrow Peace Fellow in the subsequent year to engage in a nonviolent campaign or project of their choice. Applicants may choose their topic of interest and then receive support and guidance in how to take action on that issue during the intensive training program and throughout the program year.
Fellows learn about peace and justice issues, nonviolent movement building, and gain skills such as public speaking, group leadership, communications strategy, digital organizing, conducting surveys, public relations, outreach, and lobbying. Applicants are accepted from all over the country and are especially encouraged to apply from Washington State.
“Our work is simply to learn from our elders, tend to our portion of the bridge, and pass on the knowledge to the next generation. Our work is to bridge our ancestors with our descendants, meet intergenerational trauma with intergenerational wisdom, and heal the trauma and transform it into the resiliency that we will pass onto our children so that they can cross wider and wider divides.”
Kazu Haga, from the concluding lines in his book “Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm- My Life and Training in the Nonviolent Legacy of Dr. King” (2020).