David Woollcombe

David Woollcombe - is the founder and President, Peace Child International (PCI) and life-long advocate for the education and empowerment of young people to act on the priority issues that will face them in their lifetimes.

David founded Peace Child in 1981, initially to create US-Soviet Youth Exchanges to help end Cold War tensions. He arranged the 1st US-Soviet youth / cultural exchange in 1986 to tour performances of his musical play, Peace Child across the USA and USSR with a cast of Soviet and American singers and dancers. PCI capitalised on this success and used the period of glasnost to accelerate US-Soviet raprochement with dozens of reciprocal exchanges and tours.

With the end of the Cold War 3 years later, David turned PCI's attention to the Hot War being waged

by humanity against the environment, making PCI a market leader in the field of Education for Sustainable Development. PCI’s youth-created version of the Rio Earth Summit Agenda 21, Rescue Mission : Planet Earth - was translated into 23 languages and sold over 500,000 copies.

David went on to organize the Young People's Earth Summit in Hawaii in 1999 and five follow-up World Youth Congresses which brought together youth from 100+ countries to explore solutions to what they considered to be the world’s most pressing problems. Recently, that has led PCI to focus on youth job creation programmes - a massive youth problem as the demographic youth bulge and disappearance of many traditional jobs to automation and digitization requires the world to create 6 million new jobs a month, just to keep pace.

David stood down as CEO of PCI in 2014 and now serves as its Chair of Trustees. His faith in young people, and the value of their participation in decision-making, remains undimmed. As Kofi Annan writes in his introduction to David's book, Youth-led Development: “Young people are the most precious resource our planet possesses. Providing for youth is not just a moral obligation, it is a compelling economic necessity.” David writes: “I believe that our world would benefit immensely from a more muscular inclusion of young people in our decision-making process and in the execution of those decisions. Youth-led development(YLD) is born in the faith that young people can contribute constructively to the good of society in the years before their 18^th birthdays. I have spent my adult life operationalizing that faith - devolving insane amounts of responsibility on to young shoulders. Very, very rarely have they let me down. Young people are equal to any task!”

You can see videos of David talking about his work at Peace Child at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APh2VYqDNxA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGWUjtmUHng