How your donation helps
In our first 10 years, Ultimate Peace developed and implemented a groundbreaking program serving over 300-500 youth in the Middle East each year. Self-identified Arabs, Jews, and Palestinians socialize, compete, participate in shared leadership training, and gather in each other’s communities. At overnight summer camp, hundreds of teens live side-by-side and play Ultimate on the same teams. Playing a sport without referees teaches them to resolve differences on the field and strengthen relationships when competition is over. Against all odds, UP participants have become an unlikely and tight-knit community through the years.
We earned some tough but profound lessons in the Middle East. Bringing divided cultures together through the sport and culture of ultimate has been a journey of risk, triumph, discovery, heartbreak, ands miracles.
Today, with the Middle East in turmoil and our communities living in unsafe situations, our program has sadly, by necessity, been curtailed. That said, we are constantly organizing and staying in contact with community organizers, families, and youth so that when a safe and secure condition is reached, we will resume and grow our programs. The call is loud for what we do, as youth have been suffering from having no school and activities in every community. As always, we are ready.
In 2022, Ultimate Peace decided to create a US camp in an attempt to address our own divisions and bring those lessons home. At a time when division and misunderstanding was escalating each day, the moment seemed right. We decided to bring youth from all over North America to our first camp, inviting in multiple dimensions of diversity: geographic, socioeconomic, religious, racial, gender, and more. The result? A magical experience - so similar in spirit to our Middle East camp, such profound impact on youth, even with such different context..
In 2024 we had another breakthrough US camp, this time bringing Middle East campers and staff (since the war made local camp there impossible), Indian staff and Coaches-in-Training, Colombian campers and staff, and Mexican coaches to enhance our camp community in New Jersey. The impact of the global diversity was profound and we now know how meaningful it is for youth from all over the world to develop understandign and relationships today..
This past year we were able to spread the Ultimate Peace methodologies through a partnership with India Ultimate - Project GameChangers. In this program, six UP coaches went to India to help teach a cadre of over 100 female coaches in training, so that they are fully prepared to assume the role of " Coach" and build the sport of Ultimate in their local communities. A first of its kind program in India, this program will increase the national ultimate female coaching capacity by over 400%.
There are more activities planned for this year, including a community access program in Colombia. All of these activities are only possible through the generosity of our donors. Please consider a gift today to help us spread our work where young people need it the most. And please let us know what program you are most interested in supporting and why.
Need to contact us, or want to donate via check? Email info@ultimatepeace.org, or send mail to 74 Eastwood Drive, Deerfield, IL 60015