Mike Yarrow Peace Fellowship
"Get Trained. Get Paid. Get Active."
Application Deadline for 2020 was July 1, 2020.
The WWFOR runs the Mike Yarrow Peace Fellowship (MYPF), a year-long Fellowship that includes a Fellowship Grant of at least $300 to work on a nonviolent social change project of your choice, plus receive training and support. In 2020 we have moved the training online due to COVID-19. The online training will replicate what we have done previously in a multi-day intensive training in nonviolent direct action for high school and college age youth, ages 14-23. The program starts this summer with Online Core Training, followed by elective training opportunities through out the year.
2017 Mike Yarrow Peace Fellow, Jamie Margolin, inspired by the MYPF Intensive Training program, focused her project and funds on starting a youth-led climate justice organization, “This is Zero Hour” with a Youth March on Washington in summer 2018. Greta Thunberg, then 15 years old, “read about Zero Hour’s day of action online. Then, a month later, she began her Fridays for Future strike campaign, protesting outside Sweden’s parliament every week. The strike movement spread across Europe and the world, becoming a key part of today’s wave of youth climate activism.”
You(th) Can Make a Difference!
The Mike Yarrow Peace Fellowship (MYPF) was founded to honor Mike Yarrow, WWFOR’s previous Organizer who died at the age of 74 from cancer on June 2, 2014. Mike founded this youth organizers training program in 2000 with his wife Ruth, and provided key leadership to it for its 14 years of existence, offering training in nonviolent direct action and community organizing to nearly 100 graduates.
The MYPF endeavors to recruit and train high school and college age youth in the theory and practice of active nonviolence on issues of peace and environmental and social justice in the traditions of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. The MYPF program includes an Intensive Training program to “kick-start” an effort by each Yarrow Peace Fellow in the subsequent year to engage in a nonviolent campaign or project of their choice with mentors and further resources. Applicants may choose their topic of interest and then receive support and guidance in how to take action on that issue during the intensive training program and throughout the program year.
This year the Intensive Training will take place online with a core training of required online workshops followed the rest of the year with elective webinars on various topics useful for nonviolent activists. The MYPF is run by the Western Washington Fellowship of Reconciliation (WWFOR).
Fellows learn about peace and justice issues, nonviolent movement building, and gain skills such as public speaking, group leadership, communications strategy, digital organizing, conducting surveys, public relations, outreach, and lobbying. The Fellows meet individual activists, visit organizations, are introduced to current hot issues, and are mentored by experienced activists, public figures, and community organizers from the Seattle area and beyond. Applicants are accepted from all over the country and are especially encouraged to apply from Washington State.
“Our work is simply to learn from our elders, tend to our portion of the bridge, and pass on the knowledge to the next generation. Our work is to bridge our ancestors with our descendants, meet intergenerational trauma with intergenerational wisdom, and heal the trauma and transform it into the resiliency that we will pass onto our children so that they can cross wider and wider divides.”
Kazu Haga, from the concluding lines in his book “Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm- My Life and Training in the Nonviolent Legacy of Dr. King” (2020).