Forest Whitaker Expands Peace and Development Initiative in Impoverished Area of Paris

Forest Whitaker is expanding his Whitaker Peace and Development Initiative (WPDI) with a new Community Learning Center (CLC) in the poorest area of metropolitan France.

On Wednesday, the Oscar-winning actor and star of The Butler was in Aubervilliers, a town in Seine-Saint-Denis just north of Paris, for the ribbon-cutting of the WPDI’s latest CLC. The center provides free access to courses for youth, women, and other vulnerable groups that focus on ICT, entrepreneurship, and conflict resolution.

It’s among the 15 locations Whitaker has opened to develop a grassroots Youth Peacemaker Network since the WPDI started in 2012. Other CLCs are located in impoverished areas of South Sudan, Mexico, Uganda, and South Africa.

The centers serve as hubs for learning and information aimed at creating conditions for lasting peace and sustainable development for those in overlooked or misrepresented areas across the globe.

“I would see in some of their eyes this look…a look that I knew from when I remember gang members from my neighborhood,” Whitaker said to a crowd of local officials and members of his French NGO.

“I started trying to figure out how to fix that. I knew that the only way to really find peace was to work together as a society and to work together on the ground.”

The latest location began offering its free classes in late April and already has over 70 students in courses that teach entrepreneurship, communications, computer science, and social mediation. The goal is to have 200 students by the end of the year.

It’s an honor for Whitaker to open the center in an area that has an unemployment rate of 39%, poverty at 34%, and soaring crime rates.

“Sometimes we have to address peace that way, to work as a team on the ground … we have to know that we can make a difference ourselves,” Whitaker said.