Overview

Color Up Peace is a peacebuilding startup that works at the intersection of art-making and technology to leverage artistic innovation as a peacebuilding tool. Color Up Peace was founded by Lisa Glybchenko in 2016 as her response to external aggression against her home country Ukraine. From a student initiative at the American University in Bulgaria, Color Up Peace has grown to have projects/programs in Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, and Kenya, as well as a special support program for Ukrainians who relocated to Finland during russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The idea behind Color Up Peace is to encourage participants to think about peace and what peace means to them; to create opportunities for sharing visions of peace through artistic and digital means; to foster dialogue through collective art-making; to challenge the abundance of violence-centered visuals in the media and popular culture; and to employ digital visual art-making as a peacebuilding tool. Color Up Peace invites people from all over the world to submit photos of what peace is to them which Lisa turns into coloring pages (by drawing each one by hand digitally) for others to engage with and transform the original vision of peace. This digital-artistic transformation is at the core of such Color Up Peace activities as international trainings, context-specific workshops, virtual exhibitions, 8 coloring books, and a newly developed virtual workshop series to support people affected by war – especially Ukrainians.