High Country Peace Village highlights our common humanity.

High Country Peace Village teaches our children how we are all connected to one another. Our programs build relationship skills, strengthen communal bonds, develop media literacy, and broaden languages of faith. Our connection with nature grounds us in our resilience and creativity.

About High Country Peace Village

Through a weeklong day camp (August 14-18, 2023) and monthly village gatherings using experiences of play, singing, music, hikes, art, role play, games, yoga, and more, we engage your child in foundations of creating, being, and living peacefully across culture and faith traditions.

We intentionally seek a diverse set of teachers, facilitators, and mentors across faith traditions, cultural backgrounds, and age groups, and we seek a diverse makeup of participants.

Understanding Our Community Needs

The High Country of Western North Carolina is a great place to live and raise children. Our tight knit local community is just over 54,000 people, with just over 7,000 residents who are under the age of 18. As wonderful as our community is, parents across congregations have expressed similar needs:

  • Something for kids to do after summer camps and before the school year begins

  • Ways for kids to experience more diversity

  • More opportunities for kids to gain emotional and relational resilience

  • More chances for our High Country kids (from eight local elementary schools, charter schools and homeschools) to interact before they all converge to start high school

If you’d like to support High Country Peace Village, we take donations.

Who We Are

Our main planning team is made up of representatives from Blackburn’s Chapel in Todd, Boone Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, High Country United Church of Christ, and the Watauga Bahai Community.

Our friends helping from time to time include persons of the Hindu, Islam, and Jewish faith traditions, plus business owners and local non-profit organizations. We seek wide collaborations for deepening our mission of peacemaking here in the High Country.

Our Guiding Principles

  • We expect to make new friends that may not look like us or believe the same things we believe.

  • We will be outdoors more than we're inside moving our bodies to connect with our whole selves as much as we can.

  • We expect each of us to learn and grow — children and adults — as we learn about the practices of peace within our different ways of understanding our own versions of life.

  • We expect to have questions that may not have straightforward answers.

  • We experience different types of music, meal time prayers, and large circle dances together.

  • We teach that our formation of faith is communal, collaborative and relational, and we are curious about how different realities exist simultaneously.

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