Meet Evelyn

Evelyn Voigt was born a prisoner of war, in a camp near Harare, in what is now Zimbabwe. Her parents, settlers in Tanzania, had been imprisoned there during the Second World War - and so the word "war" entered her life before she had the words to understand it. She doesn't remember the camp itself, but she has spent much of her life tracing what it left behind: a child shaped, quietly and permanently, by a conflict that was never hers to begin with.

That early, unchosen closeness to war is, in a way, where everything else began. Evelyn has spent decades working to make peace not just a hope, but a profession - with the same rigor, standards, and respect given to any other field. She is a co-founder and researcher at Civilian Peace Service Canada and more recently The Peace Professionalism Project, where she helped pioneer one of the first values- and competency-based methods for accrediting peace professionals. Her reasoning is simple: if we take peace work seriously - train for it, hold it to standards, recognize it - we give it a real chance against the wars still unfolding around the world. In 2002, her contributions to international development were recognized with the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal.

But Evelyn is not only a peacebuilder. She is a poet and spoken-word artist with two recorded albums and a hand in 150 Canadian Stories of Peace, an anthology she helped compile. She's also the author of Flying Snakes and Green Turtles: Tanzania Up Close, a book that follows the country of her early life through its recent history.

What people tend to notice about Evelyn isn't her list of accomplishments - it's what happens when you're actually in a room with her. She has a way of making you believe in people again, even on days when that feels hard to justify. She listens like it's the only thing she's doing - no waiting for her turn, no half-formed reply already loading. There's a kindness in her that doesn't feel performed, and a gift for helping people find their way back to each other, even after real rupture. She moves through the world with a patience that isn't passive - more like a quiet trust that things unfold as they're meant to, and that worrying over what we can't control rarely changes them. She'll remind you, if you need it, that nothing we do is obligatory - we do it because we choose to - and that it's never too late to start the thing you've been putting off. She thinks getting things wrong is not just forgivable but necessary, and that doing the thing that scares you is one of the braver, quieter forms of courage. Writing, for her, is a way of processing rather than performing - that, and talking to the people who love you, which she considers underrated advice.

This site holds some of that writing: her poems, her books, her recordings. Not a portfolio, exactly. More like a window into how one person has spent a lifetime turning an inherited wound into a quiet, stubborn practice of peace.