Thanks for joining our anniversary!

Thanks to everyone who joined our 10th Anniversary Relaunch last week 🎉

On Weds 26th Feb 2025 over 35 people gathered at Priory Rooms, Birmingham to celebrate 10 years of encouraging action for peace, and to share ideas about building peace together as Peace Hub begins our new way of working.

Tea, cake, reflections and chat

Over tea and birthday cake, we caught up with familiar faces (including a few who had attended our original launch in 2015) and networked with new people who care about peace and social justice. A slideshow of photos from the past 10 years brought back memories and inspiration (even if our coordinator had to watch themselves age by 10 years every 15 minutes 🫣). Creating a relaxed atmosphere where conversations can happen over a cuppa is one of the key parts of Peace Hub, which we’ll definitely be carrying forward into our new work.

James Bradbury reflected on the beginnings of Peace Hub – from Johnson’s dry cleaners deciding to move out of 41 Bull St to deciding to use the building to share our Quaker concerns for peace and justcie, to having the Hub open in the space of 18 months (lightning fast in Quaker terms!)

Our coordinator Pete looked back at the range of themes and actions we’ve taken over the years. Many of the seeds we planted in the early years around resisting the arms trade, economic equality, solidarity with refugees, and climate action have grown into the heart of our work, and the basis for our strongest partnerships.

We enjoyed some reminiscing about the props and creative activities that caught people’s imagination over the years, such as the chicken in the window, or the map of peaceful places in Brum. A highlight of our work with Peacemakers was seeing peace posters created by children on real-life Birmingham buses!

When you you experienced Peace?

Participants shared their ideas about when they have experienced peace, and what keeps them hopeful. Themes in people’s responses included:

• connecting with nature,
• friendships and working alongside others,
• creativity, especially music,
• nurturing activities such as cooking and gardening,
• spiritual practices such as meditation and worship,
• being inspired by the positive work of others.

Partnership, participation, empowerment

Finally, we shared some of the changes that Peace Hub has gone through in the post-pandemic world. And we set out our vision for our work from this year: particular our three strategic priorities around partnership, participation and empowerment.

We’re so grateful to all our partner organisations, and are keen to build on these and make new connections. If you’re interested in working together around peace and social justice, please do get in touch.

We want to take people on an activist journey from disempowered to empowered. Panu Pihkala’s ‘process model of eco-anxiety‘ is a helpful way to think about this journey.

It gives an idea of the stages we go through when confronted with the violence and injustice in the world – looking away, feeling overwhelmed, throwing ourselves into action with risk of burnout. Panu describes reaching a state of balance between Action, Emotional Engagement and Self Care (we might say community care).

The best of the drop-in work we’ve done helped guide people though these stages, towards being a confident and effective activist. That’s something we’ll be carrying into our future events and activities, keep in touch if you’d like to hear more:

An opportunity coming up to share how we can work together across social movements is our Changemakers Forum on 3rd April. This is a chance to explore how we can become more effective changemakers, with the Ella Baker School of Organising.