School/Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award
FRANK ROBINSON Visionary and founder of Camp Arrowhead and Camp Warren for working with the Amputee Veteran’s Association to create America’s first day camp for children with physical disabilities and creating camping opportunities for children and young adults for over a half a century.
The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award was created as part of the Gratitude Project of the Life Experience School. All awards are bestowed with the love of the students, without whom the Award would not exist.
MISSION STATEMENT: It is out of a desire to promote the causes of peace, justice, nonviolence, and love that The Peace Abbey bestows the Courage of Conscience Award on its recipients.
Throughout history, peace awards have served to bring attention to humanitarian causes and great works that otherwise go unnoticed. The increased visibility that awards provide translates into increased public attention and awareness. And from “awareness” springs movements — the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the animal rights movement, and the movement to save the planet.
Mother Teresa and Muhammad Ali visited The Life Experience School to receive the Courage of Conscience Award.
Recipients of awards represent the means by which the public is able to personally relate to a given cause. They become the lens through which a cause is experienced and embraced — the persona or face with which the public can readily identify.
Awards serve to magnify and educate. They celebrate, energize and “authenticate,” not individuals, but causes in ways mere press coverage cannot. More than any other form of documentation, peace awards record humankind’s highest ideals and aspirations — serving as guideposts on the pathway to peacemaking.
The Life Experience School/Peace Abbey honors individuals and organizations who are recognized internationally for their humanitarian and peace activism, along with local, grassroots, unsung heroes of social change. The Peace Abbey supports and encourages the noble work of individuals and groups who are, all too often, too little known, by bestowing on them the Courage of Conscience Award that Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Rosa Parks, Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Dan Berrigan, Pete Seeger, Desmond Tutu, Maya Angelou, Nelson Mandela and many other extraordinary individuals have received at LES/ Peace Abbey ceremonies.
There is no monetary value that accompanies this award, only the blessing that comes from receiving this prestigious recognition from a place whose mission is linking insufficiently recognized practitioners of nonviolent social action with the extraordinary work of high profile humanitarians. It is our wish that this humble gesture of appreciation brings recipients together in ways that inspire further service and creativity leading to world peace, social justice and nonviolence.
