EMU Peace Fellowship
Concern for creating a just world runs deep at EMU. The club has been a part of EMU’s campus since the late 70’s and continues today with a core group of committed students. Students learn about current conflicts and environmental crises, both in the U.S. and around the world, in classrooms, through chapels, service and mission work in the field, and visiting scholars and graduates.
Peace Fellowship coordinates events within EMU’s community to further the student body’s knowledge and engagement around social justice issues. We seek to address issues involving unconcealed, structural, and/or latent violence. Violence in any form holds each of us back from living in just, open, and healing communities that strive to embody Jesus’s character and ministry. We connect with groups outside of EMU’s community to allow students opportunities to further learn about and engage with the issues effecting our larger society.
Events include:
- hosting documentary showings, author appearances and group discussions;
- facilitating campus community “response and action” spaces about police brutality and racial injustice, gun violence;
- representing the EMU community at the Harrisonburg International Festival;
- hosting memorials for victims of gun violence and vigils for victims of gun violence, the Colombia peace process, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other events.
- sponsoring the “Conflict-free”resolution-In 2013 EMU became the 15th university to pass a formal “conflict-free” resolution, which states that EMU will support companies that seek to use conflict-free minerals in their electronic products.
Learning in the field
Year after year, Peace Fellowship members are networking and making change on and off campus.
- Students represent EMU at the Mennonite Central Committee-UN conference in New York City, putting their college skills to use and gaining real-world experience from peace workers in the field.
- Collaborated with other student groups in 2011 to bring together a faculty panel with experience in the Middle East to discuss the Arab Spring and our response as Americans, students, and peacebuilders.
- Organized and hosted the Inter-Collegiate Peace Conference in 2010 and 2014. The 2014 conference wrote the Shenandoah Confession, drafted in the style and spirit of the Schleitheim Confession of 1527
- Responded to the violent conflict in Gaza by leading an interfaith prayer service, candlelight vigil, and a coffeehouse discussion.
International peace presence
EMU students from all backgrounds are enriched by hundreds of international peacebuilders joining the campus community each year.
Many are students in the masters of conflict transformation program. Others come for short periods of study through the trauma-healing program or Summer Peacebuilding Institute of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.
All EMU students have the opportunity to hear the stories of these people and learn from their experiences.
