About the
Toronto Peace Academy

Vision

The Toronto Peace Academy envisions a world where people across all identities, cultures, and generations have the knowledge, skills, and courage to transform conflict constructively and to build communities rooted in justice, dignity, and compassion. We imagine societies where violence is replaced by understanding, and where individuals are empowered to respond to conflict with creativity, empathy, and accountability. Through accessible peace education and practical tools for conflict analysis and transformation, we seek to nurture a culture of peace that strengthens relationships, heals divisions, and inspires positive change locally and globally.

Mission

The Toronto Peace Academy, an initiative of the Toronto Chinese Mennonite Church, is dedicated to expanding access to peace education, conflict analysis, and conflict transformation skills for youth and adults from all backgrounds and identities.

We equip individuals, communities, and organizations with practical tools and reflective practices that help us understand the roots of conflict, imagine an inclusive peace, and engage constructively toward the transformation of conflict and realization of peace.

Through summer camps, workshops, dialogue design, group facilitation, intern mentorship, and community-based learning, we foster leadership for peace and support people becoming agents of transformation in their families, workplaces, schools, and faith communities. By building inclusive spaces for learning and collaboration, the Toronto Peace Academy contributes to a more just and compassionate world.

Territorial Acknowledgement

We acknowledge this land we inhabit is the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. We honour their history, the treaties that guide us, and the Sewatokwa’tshera’t (Dish With One Spoon) covenant, which teaches us to share resources and care for the earth and one another.

We acknowledge that the land we are on today was purportedly sold by the Mississaugas of the Credit to the British Crown in 1787, that a deed documenting the sale was found years later without description of the land “purchased”, and that the deed did not have the marks of the chiefs who had supposedly agreed to the sale, rather, their marks had been written on separate pieces of paper and then affixed to the blank deed.1 We acknowledge the efforts of our Mississaugas of the Credit neighbors over the centuries to right this territorial wrong and those subjects of the Crown and others who recognized this wrong and themselves worked toward its righting in their own ways. We acknowledge the Toronto Purchase Claim, which was filed by our Mississaugas of the Credit neighbors and eventually settled by the Government of Canada in the year 2010.

We commit to remembering history: the history of our heritage and the history we inherit when in a new land. We commit to remembering the deeper truth of good relations before war, before treachery, deceit, and selfishness. We commit to remembering the deeper truth of good relations that persist and are possible during war, during times of treachery, deceit, and selfishness. We commit to remembering the deeper truth of good relations after war, when repair, restoration, and reconciliation are the duties of us all. We commit, at all times, to being in good relation with each other, with our neighbors, and with our supposed enemies, such that peace may be our guide and justice our companion.

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1. “The Toronto Purchase Treaty, No. 13 (1805) – Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation,” Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, November 3, 2020, https://mncfn.ca/the-toronto-purchase-treaty-no-13-1805/.