Global Children's Organization

Participation in an international conference

Globalchild — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:03:06 +0000

GCO participants from BiH with Dr Venkat Pulla

Members of the GCO community participated in an international conference held in Sarajevo in September 2011. Fedja Kulenovic, Jasmin Elezovic, Tomislav Antunovic, Edi Stipcevic, Alma Elezovic and Karen Fagerstrom were invited to provide a panel discussion at the conference entitled “Sarajevo Conversations”, which took place at the law school at University of Sarajevo. All of these GCO participants were active in planning and implementing the 2011 program. The title of the panel dicussion they presented was LEADERSHIP NARRATIVES: PARTICIPATION IN COMMUNITY BUILDING AND CONFLICT TRANSFORMATIONAL PROGRAMS AND PROJECTS DURING POST CONFLICT RECOVERY.

Conference themes included:

-Role of youth in national development
-Entrepreneurship development
-Corporate Social Responsibility
-Governance and people strengthening practices
-Volunteers for development

Here is a link to the conference:

http://strengthsbasedpractice.com.au/Sarajevo_Conversations_Conference_2011.htm

Globalchild — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:32:12 +0000

MISSION

Global Children’s Organization (GCO) nurtures children and youth traumatized by intolerance, terrorism, or war by providing summer camps and on-going programs which help them and those who work with them regain hope for the future and prepare to be active participants in building a more peaceful world.

WHO WE ARE

Since 1993, the Global Children’s Organization has provided summer programs to children who have suffered as innocent victims of regional violence. Our programs are planned, developed and implemented in collaboration and partnership with members of the communities we serve. Staffed by volunteers from around the world, GCO programs for children have been inspired by the vision that peace is a possibility, that hope is powerful and that what we do now does indeed matter.

WHAT WE DO

GCO enables children living in daily proximity to war, intolerance or community violence to reclaim a part of their childhood as they experience the safe and healing environment of our summer programs. GCO creates a safe haven and provides opportunities for play, creative self-expression and friendship. Children who may hold polarized and antagonistic views toward one another participate in a community at camp that respects differences, values collaborative effort and models non-violent resolution of conflict. As participants live and learn alongside one another in a safe, nurturing environment, hearts, minds and souls are opened to understanding, trust and hope.

Global Children’s Organization

3580 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 1800
Los Angeles, California 90010
Phone: (213) 368-8385

GCO 2006 Summer Camps recently featured in OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina Newsletter.

Globalchild — Sat, 07 May 2011 23:51:59 +0000

“In the 15 acre-wide European Centre for Therapy, Leisure and Memory, with comfortable housing, horse stables and play areas, surrounded by lush hills, 120 kids enjoyed each other’s company at the Global Children’s Camp in the sunny July and August of 2006. The camp, located near Rakavica, 20 kilometers from Sarajevo, was organized by the non-profit Global Children’s Organization. . .During a visit to the camp in July 2006, Ambassador Douglas Davidson, Head of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina noted that the camp was a very worthwhile venture. . . .”

Read the full story

An Enduring Crop

Globalchild — Sat, 07 May 2011 23:50:39 +0000

By Wendy Johnson

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Reprinted by permission of the author.

I remember that late spring morning about seven years ago, working in the lower fields of Green Gulch Farm, harvesting rainbow chard for our local food bank with a group of elementary school students from San Francisco. The kids were fanned out in a rainbow arc themselves, spanning the field, chattering as they harvested crates of greens. One child, a pale and strangely mute boy of about ten, wandered away from his classmates to stand alone at the edge of the field, where farm irrigation sprinklers were watering the next line of crops. The May morning was warm, without a breath of wind. I watched as the child took his place in the back-mist of the irrigation jets, holding his thin, white hands out to the soft hiss of water. “He’s a new boy,” the classroom teacher whispered, following my gaze. “From Bosnia. He never says a word.”

I often thought of that Bosnian child in the seasons that followed and of his new life in the same Western culture that was dismantling his Old World. So when about a year later a close farmer friend entrusted me with a handful of speckled soup beans that had been passed on to her from a refugee Kosovar family forced to flee their garden, I eagerly sowed those seeds and grew them out over the next five years with the help of hundreds of Bay Area children. We told the story of the Kosovo beans every time we planted them, always with the firm conviction that someday these beans would go home to their original Balkan gardens.

The Kosovo beans grew like wildfire, and no wonder. Beans are an enduring crop, dating back some eight thousand years, native not only to South America but also to Africa, China, India, and Europe. The fertility of land and culture has long depended on the humble legume for its ability to consolidate free atmospheric nitrogen on its strong roots, helping, in active association with clouds of soil bacteria, to bring wasted land back to life. Some six hundred genera and twelve thousand species compose the legume family, and many members are thoroughly integrated with land and people. Yet the domestication of the tiny, hard-skinned wild bean of antiquity to the plump, thin-coated bean of modern gardens has bred dependency as well as increased harvest; for in order for the protein-rich beans of today to survive they require their gardeners. We had inherited a gift not only of Kosovo beans but also of Balkan culture.

Last summer those Kosovo beans returned home, carried by Suzy Stewart, a veteran science teacher of twenty years from our local middle school, to Badija Island on the Adriatic Sea, just off the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. Suzy and her husband were serving as volunteers in a camp sponsored by Global Children’s Organization for war-traumatized children from the Balkans. My farmer friend wove a bag of richly patterned silk ribbon for the homecoming of the beans, and in the old monastery on Badija Island where the GCO camp was held, 108 Muslim, Croat, Serbian, and Bosnian children received the well-tended gift of their native beans. Suzy and the children tore strips of an old blue sheet and wrapped tiny packages of a few seeds each tied with bright red yarn for the children to take home. With the remaining yarn the children wove friendship bracelets on each others’ wrists.

This summer’s GCO camp, known as Friendship Without Borders, will be held on a new fifteen-acre mountain retreat near Sarajevo, in Bosnia. The retreat center may not yet have a garden, but just in case it does, we’ll send along an extra handful of Kosovo beans to plant for next year’s soup. We also sowed a line of the same beans in the kids’ garden at Green Gulch on July 3, in honor of Interdependence Day. One of the older children at the planting read these words from

thirteen-year-old Zelijka, of the Balkans: “Maybe some people destroyed this world but in our hearts it is forever lovely.”

Balkan Spring Bean Soup

From the kitchen of Alma Elezovic

1 lb of new soup beans, rinsed

2 tomatoes, diced

1 bunch of spring onions, chopped

1 bunch of garden parsley, chopped

2 carrots, peeled and chopped

3 large soup spoons of vegetable oil

6-8 cups of broth or vegetable stock

2 tablespoons of paprika

salt and pepper to taste

Sauté vegetables in oil for twenty minutes. Simmer in broth with beans and seasoning for about a half hour.

Wendy Johnson has been gardening and practicing meditation at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in northern California since 1975.

GCO on the Today Show

Globalchild — Sat, 07 May 2011 23:49:31 +0000

On January 22, 2004, GCO was featured on NBC’s top-rated morning news program, the Today Show. Special correspondent Summer Sanders who visited the 2003 camp on Badija, introduced the five minute segment on Children Caught in the Crossfire of War.

GCO Planning new programs in the Balkans for July 2011

Globalchild — Sat, 07 May 2011 23:47:26 +0000

Global Children’s Organization is planning two new programs for this summer in cooperation with our partner organization Abraham’s Vision.

Senator John Glenn appeared on behalf of GCO

Globalchild — Sat, 07 May 2011 23:45:56 +0000

Senator John Glenn appeared on behalf of GCO at the Chabot Space and Science Center on March 2, 2003. View slide show of the event.

A variety of news media worldwide have also covered GCO

Globalchild — Sat, 07 May 2011 23:32:26 +0000

The June 10, 2002 issue of Time Magazine ran the article Getting an Early Start on Peace.

GCO was featured in the Los Angeles Times Westside Weekly of September 9, 2001 in Summer of Peace. Additional articles appeared in the November/December 2000 issue of Modern Maturity, the September 11, 2000 issue of People Magazine, and the June/July 2000 issue ofOffspring magazine.

GCO’s Balkans camp is poignantly depicted in the award-winning documentary, Memories Do Not Burn. This film, directed by Paul Dukochitz and Marianne McCune, and narrated compassionately by Sarah Jessica Parker, illustrates the GCO experience with insight and honesty.

The GCO volunteer experience in Ireland has also been documented in the recently completed film,Beyond the Troubles: Turning Neighbors Into Friends by Gabriel Diamond. Gabriel, a volunteer himself, captured many of the thoughts and hopes that made GCO’s first camp in Ireland so dramatic and special.

GCO has been reported on by the Los Angeles Times, New York Post, People Magazine, San Diego Tribune, Ireland Sunday People, Palisades Post, The Irish News, The Oakland Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph, The San Francisco Chronicle and Sacramento Bee, as well as many Bosnian and Croatian papers. We have also been featured on the Roseanne Show, NPR, FOX News, ABC and CBS affiliates in Honolulu. GCO’s story has run in North Carolina, San Francisco, Aspen, Minneapolis, New York, Florida, Hawaii and New Mexico. Judith Jenya, GCO Founder, has been interviewed hundreds of times, from CNN to KPFK local LA radio, and has spoken at numerous conferences.