Peace Development Fund 30th Anniversay - Passing the Torch to America's Youth

The Peace Development Fund (PDF) celebrates its 30th anniversary of supporting grassroots community organizations on September 25th.
The evening program includes a 7:30pm showing of the documentary PASSING THE TORCH TO AMERICA'S YOUTH at Amherst Cinema.  Noted civil rights leader, Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr., will speak about the film, lessons learned from a lifetime of activism, and how to encourage the next generation of young leaders to be dedicated to social justice.  The evening program will also include PDF awarding its Peace Development Award to the Reverend Andrea Ayvazian.

Peace Development Fund
Founded in Amherst in 1981, PDF is a public foundation that provides grants, training and other vital resources necessary to grassroots communities working on peaceful conflict resolution, human rights, and environmental sustainability in the U.S.

Passing the Torch to America’s Youth
From 1963-65, protests were held in Selma, Alabama to shed light on the lack of voting rights for African-Americans. This documentary is the people of Selma - primarily the youth - telling their own stories.  Their collective conscience could not allow their families to remain second-class citizens.

Throughout the 1960s, students in colleges, high schools, and even elementary grades were boycotting, sitting in, being arrested, beaten and even killed.  Brave children played a dynamic role in the civil rights Movement.

The movement was not about one man but about people who, once having a taste of freedom and equality, refused to be starved of it any longer.  Running time: 60 mins.

Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr.
Dr. LaFayette is a civil rights movement activist, minister, educator, lecturer and authority on the strategy of nonviolent social change. He co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, where he was a leader of the Nashville movement.  In 1961, he was beaten and jailed during the Freedom Rides, and survived an assassination attempt by the Ku Klux Klan in Selma, Alabama.  Dr. LaFayette served on the Executive Staff of Martin Luther King, Jr., and was appointed by Dr. King as National Program Administrator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and National Coordinator for the 1968 Poor Peoples’ Campaign.  He is currently a Distinguished Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Consultant for the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island.

Reverend Andrea Ayvazian
Reverend Ayvazian has been active in movements for social and political change since 1970.  Early in her career, she worked at PDF where she began the Exchange Project which trained over 1,100 groups with such organizational skills as fundraising, strategic planning, and dismantling racism.  Reverend Ayvazian has been living in the Pioneer Valley since 1980. She was Dean of Religious Life and Protestant Chaplain at Mount Holyoke College, and now serves as Senior Pastor of the Haydenville Congregational Church.