30 January 2009
The Student Peace Prize
For ten years the Student Peace Prize has supported young people around the world making extraordinary efforts to promote peace, democracy and human rights.
Every second year the Student Peace Prize is awarded to a student or student's organization on behalf of all Norwegian students. The idea of a peace prize for students was set into life during ISFIT in 1999. Before that festival Norwegian students experienced that students fighting for positive changes in conflict areas, never seemed to get any needed attention by politicians or the media. This in spite of the fact, that students often play important roles in struggles against anti-democratic regimes. The Student Peace Prize is today the only peace prize given both from and to students. Thorvald Stoltenberg, former President of the Norwegian Red Cross, and member of the Student Peace Prize Committee in 2003 said, when awarding the Student Peace Prize: “This is an award to students who work for freedom and democracy everywhere”.
The Student Peace Prize aims to be a trustworthy partner for support. The goal is to give the laureates opportunities to create attention around their cause, intermediate valuable contacts, as well as grant support for their further work. The vision is to build a worldwide student solidarity network.
Today much of the work within the Student Peace Prize consists of financing and following-up on former laureates. The people behind the work and organizing of the Prize are all students. So far there has been a new leader with a new group of functionaries every second year, and much work has been put on ice between every ISFiT festival. Today one goal is for the work to go on during the whole period of the two years between the prizes are awarded. This way it will be easier to follow-up on and stay in touch with earlier laureates, which will make the vision more realistic as a goal. Dialogue Network is an important part of this work, and will function as a linkage between the organization, the laureates and also others who work with similar aims. It will ease the terms for future cooperation.
The work to establish a fund began in 2000. The goal was to gain more independence from ISFiT, and also to secure the future of the prize. The aim today is for the fund to grow even bigger, so that it alone can support the prize and the laureates – both former and future. A big step in the process of becoming an independent organization will be made in 2011, when the Student Peace Prize and ISFiT have decided to separate. The Student Peace Prize will then be standing on its own feet, even though it will be using ISFiT as an arena for building student solidarity and as a collaborating partner.
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