Peace Week at Friends Academy isn’t designed to be a time for rest, relaxation, and doing less. Calmness and quiet reflection are integral parts of the annual wintertime experience. But the larger goal, says Director of Student Affairs Ms. Camille S. Edwards, is for students to understand that “peace is not passive and it is never practiced alone.”
With “Peace as Collective Responsibility” set as the week’s theme, she encouraged everyone “to engage peace not as a fixed idea, but as a living practice shaped by listening, reflection, and action.”
The connective issue through all Peace Week events, says Ms. Edwards, was to “listen deeply, discern wisely, act with integrity — and ask how our choices, relationships, and responses contribute to the well-being of others and the health of our community.”
Each day began with a query for the community to consider:
Monday, January 19 (MLK Day)
What does meaningful service look like for our family at this moment in our lives?
— offered by the Office of Student Affairs
Tuesday, January 20
What does peace look like in the way we treat people each day?
— offered by Trevor Dineen ’16, who visited campus and shared his experiences in the Peace Corps as a prelude to Peace Week
Wednesday, January 21
How do I show peace through my actions? How do I show respect through my actions?
— offered by the Lower School
Thursday, January 22
How can slowing down and listening carefully help us respond more peacefully?
— offered by the Middle School
Friday, January 23
How can we, in collective action, grow into a peaceful community? What is the individual’s responsibility to support the work of the larger group?
— offered by the Upper School
Monday, January 19 (MLK Day)
While there was no school on MLK Day, community members were encouraged to put peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship into action. The goal was to practice service, reflection, and community care by choosing an intentional act of service, justice, or community care aligned with an individual’s capacities and values.
Tuesday, January 20
Clerked by the school’s Quaker Spiritual Life Board, community members gathered in the evening at the Matinecock Meeting House across the street from campus for a candle-lit Meeting for Worship.
Wednesday, January 21
During the school day, Community Groups met and discussed symbols that represent peace, people who demonstrate peaceful actions, and places where students feel most at peace. The wrote their answers on strips of paper that were then transformed into snowflakes to be displayed inside the Dolan Center Atrium.
Thursday, January 22
Family Night featured an All-School Multicultural Celebration that included a potluck dinner and six workshops:
• Peace, Love, and Belonging Through Art
• Mindfulness and Movement
• Chinese Musical Performance
• Latin Ballroom Dancing
• Floral Arrangement Creations
• Quakers and Activism
Friday, January 23
School spirit thrived at the 2nd Annual Faculty vs. Students Basketball Game — a doubleheader that featured a competitive game and a friendly game.
With bragging rights on the line, the students won the first game, 52-49, on a buzzer-beater by HBC (senior Henry Brett-Chin).
The varsity dance team then took the floor, energizing the gym with a dynamic performance before a largely new group of students and faculty played a friendly game that essentially lost the plot but not the true spirit by the end. Encouraged by students and faculty in the game, some of the youngest kids in the stands kept joining the action on the fly to take shots. Final score: everyone had fun!
All proceeds from the game were donated to The Book Fairies, a charity that supports under-resourced communities by increasing access to books.
As part of Peace Week 2026, Lower School librarian Kristyn Dorfman curated a list of books that focus on peace.
Friends Academy colleagues who joined the community for the 2025-26 school year curated a Spotify playlist for Peace Week.
Play Group teacher Ms. Sasha Marra curated a YouTube playlist for the younger crowd during Peace Week.
Each building on campus hosted a Peace Place throughout the week. These were quiet, intentional spaces set aside for reflection, rest, and inward listening during the school day. They were created for students and adults alike to pause, breathe, and reconnect with themselves and with what brings them a sense of calm and clarity.
Peace Places were neither classrooms nor destinations for productivity. They were spaces where students could sit quietly, journal, draw, read, breathe, or simply be. Offering these spaces affirmed that tending to one’s inner life is an essential part of learning, growing, and caring for the community.
Students across all divisions of Friends Academy had opportunities to engage in workshops and events within their school during Peace Week.
Here are but a few highlights of those opportunities:
Upper School students from DEI Director Mrs. Nailah Moonsammy’s AP African American Studies class hosted a Lunch & Learn with Middle School students to dig into the difference between banned and challenged books.
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PE Teacher and girls varsity soccer coach Ms. Vincenza DeCrescenzo hosted a Lunch & Learn preview session in Frost Hall focusing on National Girls and Women in Sports Day.
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Students from the Middle School took yoga classes alongside 7-week-old puppies, generously donated by a Friends Academy parent. Want more puppies? Who doesn’t? We have more coverage of puppies and Peace Week 2026 on our Instagram feed.
As a prelude to Peace Week, Friends Academy alum Trevor Dineen ’16 returned to campus for Lunch & Learn sessions and shared his experiences serving in the Peace Corps with Middle School and Upper School students.
Posted in Zambia, a landlocked country in South Central Africa, Trevor wasn’t just new to the Peace Corps, he was also a “trailblazer” — meaning no one from the Peace Corps had ever worked in this village of roughly 25 people before he and six colleagues began their two-year mission to assist with health, education, agriculture, and clean water projects.
“Peace sounds really gentle, but my time in Zambia taught me that it’s demanding,” he said. “It’s upfront, personal, and in your face. You have to live with this practice of peace every day and every moment. It’s not fluffy. It’s not looking through rose-colored glasses. It’s hard. It’s sort of everything you don't expect it to be.”
One of the hardest adjustments?
“Doing less was harder than doing more,” he says. “I spent a lot of time not doing anything, to explain it through a Western lens, that I could put on my résumé. But I was doing the hard work to become a part of the community and be welcomed into it. A big part of my job was just simply existing and talking with my neighbors.
“Peace in the Zambian context means greeting your neighbor three times a day,” he adds. “Those three greetings make your world a lot smaller, a lot more purposeful, and that is something that has really stayed with me — how important it is to just greet people and acknowledge human existence.”
Read the full story about Trevor’s time in Zambia >>>
Photography by Alvin Caal / Friends Academy