The First Peace Walk

This is going to be the fourth year that KCIYA is hosting a peace walk to raise money for a charitable organization (this year, it is UNICEF-check out our Peace Walk page). While helping to plan this year's walk, I started think about the first year that we decided to plan a peace walk.

After going through old emails, I found that the idea of hosting a peace walk was brought up in September 2009, as an idea to be a mini event to help support the organization, Let the Children Play for Peace, which is a grassroots initiative seeking toys for children of Gaza and Sderot, Israel. But it wasn't until a youth council in December after Eboo Patel came to Kansas City when the idea started to solidify. Back then, it seemed like an impossible task, planning a whole walk, especially for an organization that was barely a year old. But, the idea to walk from the Islamic Center of Johnson County to Beth Shalom to Church of the Resurrection was an exciting idea, so we ran with it.

And it almost seemed to be an impossible task. The original plan was for it to hold the peace walk on Mother's Day, however, there were so many things that we needed to do, like contacting sponsors, confirming with the route stop locations and making sure our beneficiary could attend. About two months before, we ran into some planning problems that caused us to push the walk back until August, which gave us plenty of time to plan again. Then before we knew it, we were halfway through summer with less planned than we needed to have at that time. Luckily for us, our beneficiary asked us to push the walk back to October, which once again, gave us more time to plan. And somehow, we planned a fairly successful peace walk, in which we had 150 people attend, and made a profit for Let the Children Play for Peace. I remember the feeling of success after the peace walk had ended, I couldn't believe that we had pulled it off.

Looking back, I realize that the only reason we were able to pull of the peace walk was because of two things: luck and the persistence of one of our mentors. There is no way we could have had a successful peace walk without her pushing us to plan the first peace walk, which is how we've been able to plan the peace walks ever since. Of course, every year, planning the peace walk involves a certain amount of luck, but because of our mentor's help that first walk (and subsequent walks afterwards), we have been more prepared and more ready to plan successful peace walks.