NEW YORK, Feb. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- For the first time in history, eight Nobel Peace Prize winner, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Dalai Lama, President Oscar Arias Sanchez, Aung San Suu Kyi, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, President Nelson Mandela, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan Maguire have joined together in PeaceJam, an international five-year program to reach out to young people via the internet and a series of international youth conferences.

Young people from around the globe can reach PeaceJam, learn about the lives of the Nobel Peace Prize winners, participate in the youth conferences, and discuss their efforts via the PeaceJam World Wide Web site at http://www.peacejam.org. PeaceJam also will reach out to young people via free educational materials, television programming, a PeaceJam book series, rock concerts to be held at various sites worldwide, and PeaceJam CD-ROMs.

Funds raised by the various elements of PeaceJam will be used to fund youth-oriented, peace-related projects run by the Nobel Laureates (e.g., the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund). The Board of Advisors for the PeaceJam Fund (which includes the eight participating Nobel Laureates) also will present a PeaceJam Prize to young people around the world who are already working to make their communities better places to live. The PeaceJam Fund is a special project of the Philanthropic Collaborative, a 501(c)(3) public charity located at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10112. The first PeaceJam Youth Conference has been set for Regis University in Denver, Colorado on March 23-24, 1996. It will feature 1977 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Betty Williams, of Ireland as host. The focus of the event will be violence, using Northern Ireland and Ms. Williams' efforts which earned her the Nobel Prize as examples for study. High schools throughout Colorado will be selected to participate in a video and print-based educational c

urriculum created specifically for the conference. As part of their studies, students will be asked to develop a project proposal to deal with violence in their own communities, which will be presented at the conference by elected representatives from each school or community group.

The inaugural PeaceJam Youth Conference will be followed by dozens more. The first three will be hosted at Regis University during 1996. They will be followed by additional conferences at sites across the country and, eventually, around the world. Over the next five years, this series will focus on issues ranging from violence to racism to human rights to the environment. Each conference will feature a personal appearance by one of the Nobel Peace Prize winners and real interaction and mentoring for the students who attend.

PeaceJam is the Nobel Laureate's broad-based effort designed to reach out to the estimated two billion teenagers who will be alive on the planet by the year 2000. The purpose of the program is to build future peace today in three ways: 1) by inspiring hope, 2) by showing kids how to be peacemakers in their own communities, and 3) by demonstrating that, with courage, one person really can make a difference in the world.

PeaceJam was conceived by Coloradans, Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff. The pair originally met while working together on a high- profile literary conference in 1994. Engle, co-founder and chair of Colorado Friends of Tibet, and Suvanjieff, publisher/editor of The New Censorship, a Denver-based national literary monthly, discovered that they shared mutual backgrounds as well as an abiding concern over the prevailing atmosphere of disaffection, apathy and hopelessness among young people. In their discussions, they sought a means to help young people regain a sense of meaning and integrity in the world. From those beginnings, the concept of PeaceJam emerged and the pair began the process of gaining the support and commitment of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. By the end of 1995, Engle and Suvanjieff had the elements of their concept in place and were prepared to launch the program with the inaugural PeaceJam Youth Conference in Denver, Colorado.

CONTACT: Michael Jensen, Jensen Communications, Inc., 818-585-9575, or Susan Stewart, Jensen Communications, Inc., 916-823-5962/ CO: PeaceJam ST: New York IN: ENT SU: