Peace posters make lasting impression

WILLOW — When Willow Lions member Tom Phillips came to Willow Elementary School to invite participation in the Lions International Peace Poster contest, fifth/sixth-grade teacher Skip Davenport thought it was a great idea. Davenport made the art project into a class assignment, and the students embraced it.

“They got right on board,” Davenport said. “They researched what different people had to say about peace. They printed out famous quotes and posted them around the classroom.”

When the class discovered there were no books about peace in their library, the librarian found them some good titles and the class purchased them, then donated the books back to the library.

“We shared the stories from the books and we discussed what peace meant to us as individuals,” Davenport said.

One of the rules of the contest was that no lettering could be included on the posters.

“This made it more difficult for the kids to express peace,” Davenport said. “We looked at the universal symbols for peace, like the olive laurel and the dove, and the kids discussed different things that symbolized peace for them.”

The class also looked at past poster entries on the Lions International Web site, and got ideas from there.

The Lions International Peace Poster Contest began in 1988 as a way to give young people an opportunity to creatively express their feelings for world peace. About 350,000 children ages 11 to 13 from more than 65 countries participate in the contest annually. The 2008 contest theme was “Peace Begins with Me.”

Local Lions members received the artwork and selected the top three posters. The winner was Michaela Miller. She was humble in discussing her work.

“I drew the poster, but it really was a group effort,” Miller said. “Mr. D helped with ideas for the background, and other students gave me different suggestions. It really was all of us working together.”

Phillips and his wife, Lynn, took Miller’s entry to the Lions mid-winter conference in Homer, where it took a close second.

Twenty-two Willow students submitted posters, each of them recently recognized during a school assembly where the Lions awarded medallions to Miller, Everest Haynes and Coree Bean for the top three entries. Next year, the Lions hope to include students from Talkeetna and Trapper Creek in the contest.

Davenport said he hopes his students will participate in the effort again in the future.

“It’s a valuable project,” he said. “The kids have to come up with what peace looks like to them, and then figure out how to display that to the world. They put a lot of thought into creative ways to represent peace without using words.”