Mission and Vision

Mission
The Voluntown Peace Trust is a nonprofit education center dedicated to social change and sustainable living. We offer programs, workshops, and retreats, as well as hospitality and resources, to people constructing alternatives to the violence of our age.
Vision
At the Voluntown Peace Trust (Peace Trust, VPT), we are committed to those who benefit least from the current structure of society—especially people struggling against racial, sexual, gender, environmental, and economic injustice. These struggles guide all Peace Trust activities, which include retreats, workshops, summer camps, agricultural projects, community organizing, and campaign building. Our work emerges from three aspects of social transformation: personal change to find healthier ways of being and relating; political action to challenge oppressive structures; and constructive programs to foster alternatives to those structures.
Individuals pursuing a just society frequently face isolation and exhaustion. They lack space for reflection. Groups seeking social change also lack facilities in which to gather to exchange ideas and experience. In addition to these needs for place, people need the tools and preparation essential to sustain them as they engage in personal change, political action, and constructive programs. The Voluntown Peace Trust is a context for conversation, a staging ground for action, and a network of resources to equip people working for social transformation.
The Peace Trust rests on 54.75 acres in Voluntown, Connecticut, centrally located between New York, Hartford, Boston, and Providence. For nearly 50 years this land has been the site of nonviolence training and action, cooperative living, and equity-based economics. With this history, along with wooded trails and streams, gardens, and retreat and conference facilities, VPT is poised to strengthen movements and build coalitions across issues. Our experiments in sustainable living, organic agriculture, and community building invite people to explore practical responses to global and bioregional concerns, both on site at the Peace Trust and in their own lives. Our aim is to work alongside people in movements that can persist apart from VPT.
VPT understands that “building a new society within the shell of the old” starts here—in our garden and our community, in our actions and our rest, in our work and our relationships. Trusting the power that arises when people gather to share their lives and labors, the Voluntown Peace Trust invites into collaboration those who long for a just and peaceful world.
VPT Structure: Core Programs
Nonviolence Education
This program is made up of organizations, not individuals, who are part of the Co-operative for Non-Violent Action (“CNVA”). Currently, War Resisters League and Westerly Friends have made a commitment to organize this cooperative. Read more...
Land Stewardship
This program is currently the Garden Committee, together with a broader collection of interested individuals and organizations (for example, schools, CSAs, other “entities” or groups). Read more...
Urban Youth Program Core Program
This program consists of Hartford Catholic Worker and its amazing summer camp. Read more...
Membership
You are just the kind of person we'd love to have on board! For a small annual donation of $25, due each year on or before May 1st, you will be contributing crucial moral support to the Vision and financial support to the Mission. Whether you choose to participate actively by working, voting, and enjoying events on the farm, or by membership only, we hope you will join our community of commitment to social change, sustainable living, and alternatives to the violence of our age. Scroll down to see all the ways you can choose to become involved in our programs!
Download a membership form in MS Word!