The Hope Project is an agency founded by Diana and John Lampen which used to offer consultancy and training in peace building skills and the creative handling of conflict. We also offered yoga training and materials to help with relaxation and inner peacefulness, including a range of 41 CDs to meet different needs.   You can click on this link hear Diana’s 

‍    Our first jobs, in an experimental school for “maladjusted” boys prepared us for later work in peace education with teenagers and children, and conflict handling more generally.  John was a founder member of the Ulster Quaker Peace Education Project during the years of violence.

‍    We began our own Project in 1994. We have worked mainly in our own area, the West Midlands of England, but we also had the privilege of developing programmes in other parts of the UK and supporting colleagues in other areas of the world, including Ireland, Denmark, South Africa (during apartheid) and USA.

‍     In Belarus, Ukraine, and Uganda, we helped to introduce and develop peace education in schools between 1990 and 2006. Our visits to Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia and Makedonia in support of local peace and education groups ran from 1996 to 2013.  We had the opportunity in April 2019 to visit a church in Kosovo, which works with Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic young people, including many Roma children, and share peace education skills with them. In the same year John led a weeklong Summer Gathering for workers with the Alternatives to Violence Programme (AVP) in Ukraine.   

‍    We have also produced several books on conflict handling and Quaker themes, some of which are described on the publications page of this site.

‍    John has also been involved with anti-landmines work and community peacebuilding in Western Uganda including a three-year programme from 2014-2016 to develop a culture of peace. Our partners there have have continued to implement their programmes during covid lockdown, as  described on the Uganda page.

Now we have both passed the age of eighty, we are no longer involved in ongoing projects, apart from John’s continuing links with Uganda. We are still happy to speak about our experiences, to meet people developing new initiatives which they would like to discuss with us, and to offer occasional trainings.