Director of World Scout Foundation thanks King Salman for ‘Messengers of Peace’ initiative

JEDDAH: The Director of the World Scout Foundation John Geoghegan has thanked King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on behalf of the World Scout Foundation’s honorary chairman King Carl XVI Gustaf and 50 million scouts for an initiative that saw the completion of more than one billion hours of community service carried out by boy and girl scouts across the world.
The hours of community service were carried out by scouts as part of the “Messengers of Peace” initiative that was launched by the Kingdom in 2011 and supported by it. A quarter of the hours of the community service were carried out after the King of Sweden met King Salman in November 2016.
Geoghegan said that 28 million people worked on peace initiatives in Congo and Northern Ireland, assisted Syrian refugees with integration in Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, Sweden and Austria, and helped disaster-stricken families in Haiti, Nepal, Sudan, Indonesia and the Philippines. They also helped to put an end to bullying in schools in the UK, Costa Rica, Ethiopia and the US.
Geoghegan added that the “Messengers of Peace” initiative is now considered the world’s largest community service project and contributes to the achievement of UN goals for sustainable development and communities around the world. He continued by saying that hundreds of millions of people see Saudi Arabia as a source of peace and stability.
The Director of the World Scout Foundation also said that the project is in line with the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 because it inspires young people to become globally active citizens who are pushed to do better because they want to live up to to the high standards of organization and effectiveness demanded by local scout organizations.
The Director of the World Scout Fund said that the spirit of dialogue rooted in the “Messengers of Peace” initiative has become dominant, especially with the help of the King Abdul Aziz Center for National Dialogue and the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Center for Inter-Religious Inter-Cultural Dialogue (KAICIID). The scouts have been instilled with the idea that they must be messengers of peace within their communities to find solutions to problems and engage with people who hold different viewpoints.