The first sign that all may not be well in PeaceJam world is the “For Sale” sign outside the house in Arvada that’s been the nonprofit’s headquarters the past six years. The second is the “price reduced” placard attached to the For Sale sign. The third is PeaceJam’s founder, Ivan Suvanjieff, standing on the porch, pushing his long hair back from his face, saying, “My biggest mistake was thinking, ‘Who could turn down funding Nobel laureates working with kids?’ ”
The regular staff meeting is about to start, and upstairs, Suvanjieff’s wife, PeaceJam co-founder Dawn Engle, waits. A poster of Archbishop Desmond Tutu hangs on the wall. Tutu is one of 12 Nobel Peace Prize laureates PeaceJam has recruited to inspire, educate and challenge young people to make their communities better places to live. He also married the couple eight years ago.
The local staff gathers around the table. They are in their 20s and 30s, and many are volunteers. The layoffs started Sept. 15, 2008. Suvanjieff and Engle began with themselves, giving up their combined $120,000 a year salaries. “We thought that’d be enough,” Engle tells me. It wasn’t.
The couple laid off four others, leaving the organization with six paid staffers. Engle and Suvanjieff, nominated last year for the Nobel Peace Prize, are collecting unemployment. They’re searching for paid work, but they have not given up on PeaceJam. Or as Engle would tell the staff: “We have no money, but we haven’t abandoned our plan for world domination.”
“It’s like a bad movie where the hero has his back against the wall,” Suvanjieff tells me. Then he tells the staff: “Everyone is doing a great job. I don’t want you freaking out over money. That’s my job. . . . Keep going forward. ”
I ran into Suvanjieff in April. Suvanjieff told me then PeaceJam was broke. He was matter-of-fact about it. Many nonprofits are scrambling for cash. Foundations and corporations that fund them saw their investments take a dive along with the market. Private individual donations are down.
Things have been bad enough that the Colorado Nonprofit Association published a survey of nonprofits in March, added survival advice, and called it “Weathering the Storm.” It’s online and worth reading. Nonprofits serving youth and those with an arts and culture mission have been particularly hard-hit.
“We sat down face-to-face with all of our funders, and they all said: ‘You do fantastic work, but we cannot give you any money this year. Maybe next year. Maybe the year after,’ ” Engle says.
She says she saw hard times coming a year ago when the organization was planning its International PeaceJam in Los Angeles. Seven Nobel laureates were attending along with 3,000 young people. It’s a major fundraiser for the group. In 2006 in Denver, PeaceJam brought together 10 laureates and 3,000 young people and raised $500,000.
“In L.A., all these kids were calling saying, ‘I can’t go anymore. My school can’t pay. My parents can’t pay.’ We provided scholarships for two-thirds of them and lost $200,000.”
They ransacked their reserve fund and put the rest on their personal credit cards.
Engle said something to me once I’ve never forgotten because it nailed a truth about young people. “Their hearts and souls are right there,” she said. “They want so badly to connect with something that is real; they want to belong; they want people to care about them. They have goodness in them. They have greatness in them. The transformation that can happen is magic.”
Giving up is simply not an option. PeaceJam has helped hundreds of thousands of young people launch community service projects around the world. These hard times have taught Engle and Suvanjieff that they have relied too heavily on grants. So they talk of charging for what they once offered for free: an award-winning literacy curriculum and an award-winning service learning model. They talk of being in the right place at the right time for President Barack Obama’s push for national service, for the expansion of AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps Vista. They talk of working with juvenile justice diversion programs. They’re still fundraising, of course. They have a $10,000 matching grant, a luncheon, a house for sale. The details are at .
“The nonprofits that survive this are the ones that have to be really creative, really scrappy,” Engle says.
This couple is from Detroit. They are the children of automobile factory workers. They do scrappy well.
Postscript. As Engle and I finished an interview Thursday, a frantic staff member told her Suvanjieff was in the hospital. He’d gone to run an errand, apparently suffered a seizure, blacked out and ran into two parked cars. He’s bruised and cut and was scheduled to meet with neurologists Friday afternoon. Or, as he put it in an e-mail to me Friday morning: “I’m going in for something long overdue — to get my head examined.”
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
