Rennweg 45/12
1030 Vienna
Vienna
Austria
- Human rights
- International/Cultural relations
Service For Peace means establishing peace through service. We provide service and learning opportunities through community projects in order to cross barriers of race, religion, class, creed, or national origin, and address urgent social needs. We believe that peace begins with the inner peace fostered by service to others and that active cooperation provides the foundation and the real hope for peace. Our projects also aim at the eight Millenium Development Goals.
Our focus is breaking prejudices against the Arab communities in Austria. We do this in three ways: 1. By bringing youth from Austria and other European countries to the Middle East, especially Palestine and Israel and 2. by organizing local volunteer projects or camps for Austrian youth, local refugees and visitors from Arab countries and 3. by educating youth in schools through the Middle East Suitcase program.
Since the first youth exchange in the summer of 2006, "Building Bridges to Bethlehem", SFP Austria has given the possibility to 120 young people from the Middle East and 4 other countries of the world either to come in contact with the Austrian culture or to participate in an exchange in Israel and Palestine. As a result of the youth exchange "Europe Meets Middle East" in February 2008 we created the Middle East Suitcase. This workshop project about the Middle East expands the intercultural and interreligious competences and understanding of the participants and promotes lively ways of education. The target audience is Austrian youth from youth centres, schools and organisations. To bring together the residents from young refugees homes in Steyr and Vienna and youth from Austria we organize various activities like the theater project “Let’s play together”, crafts, cooking, hiking and many more.