As Spiritual beings living a human experience we often feel the need to make a difference in this world, increasingly more so as the world continues to find itself in more and more turmoil.   Well, one group of young people have, not only set out to do just that, but have found a way to help others make a difference as well.

                 Loving Kindness Peaceful Youth or LKPY for short, is an  international peace organisation for young people. Launched in June 2007 as a non-religious, non-profit, charity organisation with its focus on creating space for young people to develop peace within themselves, their communities and the world at large. LKPY say "we believe that peace isn't just the absence of war... We believe that peace lies naturally within us all and is our primary reason for existence..."

What was it that inspired the team of Shyla, Freeman, Poh Lin, Mike, Matt to create LKPY?

The current situation of the world inspired us all. Just watching the television news and reading newspapers, you hear so much negativity all the time and rarely hear about the inspiring stories. Its no wonder that depression, suicide and loneliness are huge problems for young people when we don't have many positive role models to inspire us. We wanted to create an organisation that recognises that we all have the potential inside us to be amazing    people, and we can all make a difference in a positive way, if we have the right environment and people around us to nurture. We created LKPY to become that nurturing  environment.

The original concept of LKPY was first created by a Nepalese Buddhist Lama - Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who   travels the world creating peace. I was volunteering in   Mongolia at the time (2004) and I met with Lama Zopa. He told me about this organisation that he thought would be a fantastic idea and he thought to call it loving kindness peaceful youth - he said the idea is all in the name - you teach young people the basic principle of loving kindness, the good heart (everyone has a good heart he kept saying) and the result is peaceful youth, youth are the next  generation, so the big result is a peaceful world. That was our original inspiration, Lama Zopa is our founder and key advisor. I then gathered together some friends who I knew would be inspired as well Mike, Poh Lin, Freman and Matt and we decided to create an organisation by young people for young people, so we spent a year or so meeting up, workshopping and exploring different ideas for projects, visions, mission statements etc and finally on June 7^th 2007 we launched. 

Tell us about some of your success stories so far, and how LKPY is changing lives.

It's a hard one to say, I think when most people think about 'changing lives' we think about success stories or saving lives, I don't really have any of them. But I do receive emails most days of the week from different young people all over the world, who have read an article about LKPY, found us while playing on the web or heard about us through a friend and expressed how excited they are to learn about LKPY and how instant they felt at home and part of a community just by reading through our website and learning what we believe in. I find that pretty amazing. I even received a letter from a young guy in prison the other day, wondering how he could get involved.

From a more tangable side, I guess our success is measured in our projects, we have thousands of people involved annually in our different projects. From Coordinating HABITs (monthly catch ups in local cafes), to creating artwork related to peace for our POP (Pieces of Peace) project or by viewing our documentary we created. I spent 3 months last year travelling through over 10  countries launching LKPY in universities, schools, community centres and other events. And this year we were a finalist in the Pride of Australia Peace category medal. So since we are only just over a year old and a purely non profit volunteer organisation, we are slowly creating change.