Building International Friendships for Peace
Monday, December 3rd, 6 PM-7:15 PM
UNH Manchester
88 Commercial Street, Manchester, NH 03101
WACNH + Fulbright Members, UNH Students and Staff- Free
General Admission- $10
Join us on Monday evening to learn more about the Friends Forever International program. Hear from their Executive Director, Steve Martineau, about this amazing program that brings young adults to New Hampshire to learn how they can work together and build peace in their communities. Working in high conflict areas (Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Northern Cyprus, etc), they take these students out of tense situations and bring them to idyllic NH. You will have the opportunity to hear about, and see, how this program functions, why it is important, and how it came to be located in New Hampshire.
About Friends Forever International
Friends Forever International is an organization that believes we can all help build a better world by empowering our most underutilized asset: youth. FFI works with communities around the globe to build the leadership abilities of their youth from diverse backgrounds to tackle local and global issues. Through their programs in Europe, the UK, and the Middle East young adults participate in a program designed to promote cross-cultural awareness, education, leadership development, friendship, and respect between different groups of people.
Their mission as an organization is for Friends Forever International to empower youth leaders to connect, strengthen, and serve communities around the globe by combining their passion to make the world a better place with the skills, experiences, and resources required to do so.
Rotarian and YMCA director Bob Raiche founded Friends Forever in 1986. Bob believed there was a need for a program like Friends Forever after reading countless newspaper articles covering the conflict in Northern Ireland. Our first delegation of youth leaders was made up of five Catholic and five Protestant young men from Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, who traveled to Portsmouth, NH in the fall of 1986.
Bob’s experience with group work led him to create the “Life Raft Formula”, now known as the Skill Building Phase. Since our founding, we have applied this simple, yet innovative group work theory to more than 1,500 youth around the world.
About Stephen Martineau
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Stephen joined Friends Forever International as its Executive Director in November 2005, after having spent time working with Habitat for Humanity in South Carolina, the Children’s Museum of Boston, and MYTOWN, an innovative inner-city youth organization in Boston, MA. Over the last twelve years, Stephen's tenure has seen FFI expand to multiple sites across the continental United States, the establishment of Friends Forever Europe in Belfast, Northern Ireland and the formation of partnerships and FFI programs in the Middle East, and the acquisition and renovation of the Friends Forever International Campus in Durham, NH, a 2.6 acre space devoted to peace and leadership development.
In addition to nearly two decades of high-level expertise in the field of NGO's, Stephen brings to Friends Forever International a genuine passion for building active leaders through service on the local and global levels by empowering the most underutilized asset in the world today: youth.
