Businessman establishes award, builds web site to promote peace

Mennonite Central Committee
Friday, 23 March 2001

WINNIPEG, Man. -- Robert Stewart is on a crusade for peace.

When the Calgary-area businessman first went looking for peace material at his local bookstore a few years ago, he came up empty-handed. With more digging, however, he suddenly found himself swamped with an unmanageable amount of information.

"I decided what was needed was a web site to solve this problem," Stewart writes from Yellowknife, N.W.T., where he works part of the year as a chartered accountant.

He tried to interest Rotary International (a service organization of business and professional leaders to which he belongs) since it has a mandate to advance peace, but he could tell it would move slowly. "So I decided to do it myself," he writes.

Canadian Centres for Teaching Peace (CCTP) went online in May, 1998. It serves as a clearing house for information on peace, articles, upcoming events, a who's who of peace organizations and more. "The feedback we get from around the world is that we are definitely filling a void," he writes.

Stewart has also established an annual Canadian Peace Award, presented in a number of categories for Canadian achievements in building a culture of peace and non-violence, at home and abroad.

He said in his extensive research on peace, Mennonite contributions have come up regularly. So he presented Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) with the 2000 Canadian Peace Award in the civil society category. "Often unsung heroes, members [of MCC] are committed to non-violence and peace-making," he wrote in his award announcement.

Stewart's personal epiphany came in 1996 when he attended the Rotary International Convention in Calgary and listened to Nobel Peace Prize laureates speak about advancing peace in the world. "I left that conference thinking that I was at the stage of my life where I had spent the first half of my life being successful and now maybe I should be trying to make a difference--and what could be a more worthwhile cause than peace," he writes.

The 49-year-old still works as a self-employed chartered accountant and management consultant in public practice for about six months of the year. His main office is in Yellowknife and he travels extensively throughout the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The other six months he devotes to CCTP as his "hobby."

He's the main driver behind CCTP, but his wife Marion also contributes time and money. "My three teenage children have been the source of our inspiration--we hope to set a good example, and hope to build a better world for them and future generations," Stewart writes.

He said he's concerned about the level of violence in their world. When his family lived in Yellowknife from 1982-95, they saw how violence can tear apart a community. A vicious labour dispute at the Giant gold mine ended in an underground bombing that killed nine workers in 1992. During the same time, the Stewart home was broken into, and their son mugged.

Stewart said his vision of peace is to significantly reduce the human cost of violence at home and abroad. "Often people only think of peace at a world level. I stress the links of peace at the individual level, family level, community level and world level," he writes.

He hopes his web site will become just one of similar virtual Centres for Teaching Peace in other countries, tailored to local needs, as well as actual "bricks and mortar" Centres for Teaching Peace.

Canadian Centres for Teaching Peace can be reached at www.peace.ca

For more information, or to contact Mennonite Central Committee, see their website at: www.mcc.org