Dear Friends,

I wish all of you a good New Year in 2006 with lots of progress toward a culture of peace and non-violence throughout the world.

Looking back at 2005, I think we can see we are making progress. The Civil Society Report to the United Nations for the midpoint of the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World was filled out by over 700 organizations, with over 3,000 pages of text and photos on the Decade Website at http://decade-culture-of-peace.org. All of you who contributed are receiving this bulletin.

Almost all of you reported progress toward a culture of peace and non-violence during the first half of the Decade and indicated by your actions that you expect to make further progress in the years to come.

Your report was recognized by the United Nations General Assembly, thanks to the efforts of the Youth Advocacy Team. In the resolution A/60/3, the 107 sponsoring Member States commended civil society for its activities for a culture of peace and non-violence and took note "of the progress achieved by more than seven hundred organizations in more than one hundred countries."

Where do we go from here?

You are invited to contribute your own ideas on our new website for strategy discussion (see link on right side of the Decade Website). You may register and log in and put your remarks on line directly, or you may send them to me and I will put them on line for you.

One important conclusion from last year's report concerns the mass media, which has so far failed to report on the culture of peace. Therefore, we have set up a monitoring system on the Internet. You are invited to submit any mass media publications (including Internet news systems) on the culture of peace so that we can keep track of media coverage (see link on the Decade Website). As in the case of the strategy discussion, you may register and log in and put the article on line directly, or you may send it to me and I will put it on line.

In future bulletins, I will summarize the strategy as you develop it, and keep you informed of media coverage.

I look forward to working with you in 2006 and throughout the rest of the Culture of Peace Decade.

Peace,