Pillar 03 · Community Building

Strengthening the networks that hold peace.

Movements are people in relationship. Community building at the Gandhi-King Center is the slow, durable work of keeping those relationships in good repair.

Scott Before King

Scott Before King is the center's women's empowerment program, led by Carolyn and Gregory Foster. The name comes from the way Coretta Scott King insisted on her own identity, work, and voice independent of her marriage. The program supports women whose work risks being told as someone else's story.

About the program →

Peace Camp 2026

June 22
to June 26, 2026

Peace Camp

Dayton International Peace Museum · Youth

A week of workshops in peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and empathy development for young people. The aim is simple: give the next generation the tools the rest of us had to learn the hard way.

Registration via the Peace Museum →

Season for Nonviolence kickoffs

Each January 30, the center hosts or co-hosts a public gathering to kick off the Season for Nonviolence. Recent kickoffs:

The founding panel at the inaugural 2024 Season for Nonviolence kickoff in The International Peace Museum library. Left to right: Gregory Foster, Rev. Joel King, Dr. Brian Polkinghorn, Tushar Gandhi (speaking, in light green kurta), Felicia Chappelle Jones, and Alice Young-Basora.
The founding 2024 Season for Nonviolence kickoff at The International Peace Museum. Left to right: Gregory Foster (cousin of Coretta Scott King), Rev. Joel King (first cousin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), Dr. Brian Polkinghorn (Ambassador), Tushar Gandhi (great-grandson of Mahatma, speaking), Felicia Chappelle Jones (co-master of ceremonies), and Alice Young-Basora (co-master of ceremonies). The panel brought members of the Gandhi and King families together in Dayton for the first time and marked the public beginning of the Gandhi-King Center's work.

The 2024 kickoff did not come together easily. The museum's then-director was skeptical that members of the Gandhi and King families would actually appear in Dayton and resisted hosting the event. Alice Young-Basora, then the museum's Director of Education, advocated for the event over that resistance and put her position at risk to do so. The families came. The kickoff happened. Alice was right. She now serves as the first woman to hold the role of Executive Director in The International Peace Museum's history, and was recently named a Dayton Democracy Fellow with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.

Three years of kickoffs, three different cities, one steady invitation. If you would like to host the kickoff in your community, write to us.

About the Season Host a Kickoff