Nicosia’s Home for Cooperation will spend Sunday, September 20 marking International Day of Peace with a full afternoon and evening of talks, a city walk, an NGO fair and live music, organisers said.
The event, jointly run by the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR), the Home for Cooperation itself and The Home Cafe, is built around this year’s message: “Invest in Peace – For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day.” Organisers say the aim is to get people and organisations from across Cyprus talking about peace, tackling racism and discrimination, and finding common ground through shared activities in the city.
Proceedings start at 4pm with a roundtable, “Voices Against Racism,” where civil society groups will discuss racism, discrimination and collective action. An educational walk through the city, “Streets to Peace: Peacebuilding and the Urban Space,” runs from 5.30pm to 7.30pm, while children can join a hands-on session, “Painting Peace Together,” from 6.30pm to 7.30pm.
The day’s centrepiece comes at 7.30pm, when AHDR launches the Imagine Peace Academy, a new framework for its peace education work that grows out of its earlier Imagine project. AHDR says the Academy is designed to bring educators, children, young people, parents and communities together for ongoing learning, dialogue and cooperation across Cyprus’s divides, strengthening peace education both locally and further afield. The launch runs until 8.15pm.
An NGO Fair runs alongside the main programme from 5pm to 11pm, giving civil society organisations a chance to showcase their work to the public. As the sessions wind down, the evening turns social, with food from Pastadelic e più, drinks from The Home Cafe and music from DJ Patsa keeping things going.
AHDR, an inter-communal, non-profit organisation founded in Nicosia in 2003, set up the Home for Cooperation in 2011 as an educational and cultural centre inside the UN buffer zone, near Ledra Palace, one of the few spaces in the city that sits directly on the dividing line between communities.
