​St Mungos is a UK homeless persons charity. Homeless Diamonds is an arts magazine published three times a year by people living or working in St Mungos hostels in London. Gennoria Miles, an attendee of the Peace Education Programme course hosted by the charity's Recovery College, contributed this article to the summer 2019 edition of the magazine:

It was so exciting, and such a big step forward in recognition for Peace Partners, to receive the news in March of the award of a grant of £10,000 from the National Lottery Community Fund. This grant continues to enable Peace Partners to extend its support of community and youth projects and for the facilitation of Peace Education Programmes.

Coincidently this year is also the 25th anniversary of the National Lottery and a UK-wide series of celebratory and awareness raising events is planned, leading up to the actual Lottery birthday on 19th November.  Since 1994 more than £40 billion has been raised by the Lottery Fund and used to support an enormously diverse range of community activities throughout the UK.

It is a great opportunity to remind everyone of our grant and what it is being used for. Ways in which Peace Partners is becoming involved in the celebrations include:

• Contacting local media, newspapers and radio and explaining what we have been able to do with the funding
• Informing Peace Partners’ participants and beneficiaries and encouraging them to share their personal stories on social media #NationalLottery25 
• Using 25th logo (above) on our website and in all our communications with other organisations and individuals                                                           
• We wish to thank all the people who play the National Lottery, without which there would be no Lottery funds to donate to good causes. 

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As grateful recipients of lottery funding we are very happy to join in with the National Lottery 25th birthday celebrations and to raise awareness of the National Lottery.

​In early March 2019, Peace Partners charity received almost £10K of National Lottery funding to help work with community and youth organisations to enable them to organise and facilitate the TPRF Peace Education Programme (PEP), throughout the UK.  As a result, we are making the PEP workshops more widely available to the community irrespective of religion, age, gender, race, or any issues they may be experiencing such as poor mental health or homelessness. This is in collaboration with our partners and organisations who have a similar purpose; for them to share across their networks and social media; on the Peace Partners’ website and through e-bulletins and mailings.

Peace Partners has been working closely with communities affected by gang violence in South London and this is an area where we have recently concentrated our efforts to facilitate and run the Peace Education Programme. We have appealed to members of the wider community, youth leaders and organisations working with vulnerable people and community projects, to talk to us about becoming involved and for them to find out more about setting up this programme in their own organisations.  To this end, in April we ran an event in Croydon with three different workshops, of which an introduction to the PEP was one. Several representatives were invited to attend and some spoke about their own efforts in their communities, including the Tutu Foundation, Ubuntu Round Table Project and Shanika Benjamin’s Young People Insight. There was a lot of enthusiastic interest in the PEP presentation from these people and from many other representatives and attendees.
Called a Conflict Resolution Workshop, this event led on to a five-week Training PEP, held specifically for those organisations who had shown interest.  Several attendees from these organisations signed up and two completed the course after attending most of the ten workshops.  This training PEP was also attended by participants who were familiar with the material and wanted to be clear about how to facilitate a PEP.  We are very pleased to be able to expand our PEP teams to cope with the expected demand.