Peace Quest is an organization that started with one thing: an idea. When Jessie came to me with his idea for Peace Quest, I was immediately on board; the idea of Peace Quest spoke to an overwhelming desire that I’ve always had to help people who were born into harsher environments and have to deal with more difficult circumstances than myself. While I was blessed to be born into a middle class home in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet (Canada), I’ve always been keenly aware than there are billions of other human beings who aren’t as lucky as me in this regard. One of the harsh facts of our world is that the quality of the life of any given human being is determined in large part by the geographical location on the map in which they happen to be born. Peace Quests exists to create a world where the impact of this fact is diminished, if not completely abolished.

As a young child, I remember watching World Vision infomercials on TV about children and families starving in Africa, living in huts with dirt floors and suffering from various diseases; I remember thinking that I needed to do something about it in my lifetime. I’ve always sought creative self-expression (e.g. writing poetry, making music, hip hop, etc.) as a way to “wake people up” to the realities our planet and to help grow a unified social consciousness between human beings. One of the things I stand for in my life is to foster a sense of responsibility in each human being for the rest of the human race. This may seem like an extreme or even ludicrous extension of personal responsibility, and taken from a strictly moral standpoint I would have to agree. However, I don’t think it’s empowering for people to feel obliged into a sense of responsibility for others based simple on the reason that it’s the “right thing to do.” Rather, simply stated, if we want to have a world that works for every single person on the earth, than each of us needs to care about everybody else with whom we share the planet.

Peace Quest is about much more than elevating the quality of life for people in developing nations. The mission of Peace Quest is exactly what we explicitly state it as: “To inspire, educate, and empower life in hostile environments” all over the world. It has been widely acknowledged that the sources of much violence and war in this world are poverty and inequalities in wealth. So by reducing and eventually eliminating poverty and wealth inequalities (not just alleviating the symptoms of these issues, but by getting at the source of them), we can actually start to create peace in the world.