Nobel Laureates Issue Historic Call to Action
Ten Nobel Peace Prize winners have called on young people everywhere to make the world a better place. 
DU students have already started.
This weekend, DU is the scene of PeaceJam’s 10th Anniversary Celebration, a conference bringing 3,000 high school students to campus for the largest gathering of Nobel Peace Prize winners ever on U.S. soil. While here, teens from 31 countries will devise community service plans and learn about conflict resolution.
DU students have done just that for years, traveling across the globe on international service learning projects to experience distant cultures and improve the global community.
Right now, DU students in India, Bosnia and South Africa are providing health education, working with refugees and tutoring children and adults. 
These students exude the kind of energy the Peace Prize winners hope to harness for their 10-year plan to alleviate the suffering in the world.
“Young people are wonderful,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu said during the unveiling of the plan. “They are idealistic. We don’t say enough about them. And we don’t say that about the young people who go all over the world and work anonymously. I want to take my hat off to young people because they make this world a better place.”
The Nobel Peace Prize winners identified 10 problems that need to be solved in order to improve the human condition and achieve peace.
They include:
- Unequal access to water and other natural resources
- Racism and hate
- The spread of global disease
- Extreme poverty
- Social justice and human rights for all
- Rights for women and children, and their roles as leaders
- Environmental degradation
- Nuclear weapons and the international arms trade
- Disarming our “armed consciousness”
- Focus on human security to create true security
DU students are mentoring the high school students during PeaceJam. Together, the mentors and the conference attendees will heed the call-to-action and take the next steps toward improving the world.
Published on Sept. 9, 2006 on www.du.edu