The Friends of Adin Ballou hold their sixth annual Peace Essay Contest for Teens to celebrate Adin Ballou’s birthday! First prize winner will receive $100, Second prize – $50, and Honorable mention – $25. The winning essays will be published on the Friends of Adin Ballou website, and winners will be invited to read their essays aloud at Hopedale’s annual Peace Picnic.
Hopedale’s founding father Adin Ballou said, “Times and generations are coming that will justly estimate me and my work. For them I have lived and labored, rather than for my contemporaries. To them I appeal for vindication and approval.”
The essay contest has proven Rev. Ballou’s prediction true! Each spring the Friends of Adin Ballou sponsor an essay contest for students in grades 7 through 12. Students are invited to submit a 250-word original essay on “What does peace mean to me?”, “How can one person help spread peace?”, or “What I will do for peace!”
This contest serves to keep Rev. Ballou’s legacy alive in the modern world by engaging our youth in thinking about how they can spread the message of peace in the world. As part of the next generation of leaders, our youths’ interest in peace, and their eloquence in voicing what peace means to them, can provide great solace to older folk who question our youth’s social activism. It also helps them serve as an example to their own generation, showing that peace is a vital social concern worth time and effort!
Entries must be emailed by April 23, 2017 to: Editor@adinballou.org and please include your name, phone number and date of birth when you submit your essay.
The Friends of Adin Ballou honors the life and legacy of Rev. Adin Ballou, founder of the utopian community at Hopedale, Massachusetts. The goals of Friends of Adin Ballou are to research and study the words and deeds of Adin Ballou and the Hopedale Community, and to find ways to keep that legacy alive in the modern world.
Friends of Adin Ballou sponsor three events per year:
• Peace Essay Contest for 7th to 12th graders in April
• Peace Picnic the first weekend of August
• Fall Lecture in October/November
Visit our Website at www.adinballou.org
Find us on Facebook at Friends of Adin Ballou
Follow us on Twitter @AdinBallou
Follow us on Tumblr at adinballou.tumblr.com
Ballou was a minister and theologian, a tireless reformer, and a leading nineteenth-century exponent of pacifism.
Adin Ballou (1803-1890), the founder of the Hopedale utopian community, was an abolitionist and pioneering theorist of nonviolence, whose teachings influenced such peace-giants as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Ballou created the theory of “Non-Resistance,” a form of nonviolent protest, which he and others in the Hopedale Community used to effect radical social change in the areas of abolitionism, equal rights for women and peace advocacy. Unlike many other abolitionist peace advocates of his time, Ballou did not abandon his nonviolent principles during the Civil War. In later life Ballou trusted that his ideas would be taken up again, perhaps a century or more in the future. Ballou’s ideas on how we can effect change without harming others and thus live together in loving peace and cooperation are as relevant in the 21st century as they were in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Issue Date:
March, 2017
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