Learn more about Peace Tree Lights by clicking here or visiting https://peacetreelights.com/ . Please share this link with your friends and colleagues.

Here’s a live feed from the Peace Tree located at our shop in San Carlos, CA… Click play to see our Peace Tree in action.

Reach and Teach’s Peace Tree

The idea for the Peace Tree came from a dinner conversation with dear friends Paul George and Steffy Reader. Over the years Paul has organized hundreds of protests, vigils, and other gatherings to promote a more peaceful and healthy world through his work as director of the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center. During dinner Steffy, Paul’s significant other, was pondering the idea of virtual candlelight vigils with Reach and Teach’s Derrick Kikuchi. 

Public witness has always been a tried and true way to create social change and candlelight vigils have often gone hand in hand with such events. Votive candles are also often lit to remember someone who has passed on or is sick. Even before the Covid pandemic had forced most gatherings to become virtual, Steffy and Derrick were animatedly discussing the benefits of being able to gather people from around the corner and around the world together and do what so many people have done over the centuries, light candles of mourning and solidarity. Derrick wondered if his former career life experience as an engineering manager of Hewlett-Packard’s Media Applications Learning Lab and his work with collaborative “any-time, any-place” technologies could have any applicability to this challenge.

Could a virtual candlelight vigil through the Internet be created?  Derrick had no doubt after that dinner chat with Steffy that it would and could be done. He wondered if his challenge from that conversation might be how to measure and report how many people were thinking about and acting on peace in the world. A few months later (with the support and urging of other friends and colleagues) the Peace Tree was born and today there are a dozen of the trees out in the world. The goal is to eventually have a Peace Tree at the United Nations Headquarters! 

What is a Peace Tree? It is a string of LED lights, wrapped around a tree (or anything else), flashing in response to Twitter* posts with the hashtag #peace. It has a simple single-board computer around the size of a silver dollar that connects to the Internet via WiFi. When people come to our shop and notice the tree and we tell them why it is blinking they always stand there for a minute or two and then slowly smile realizing that people somewhere out in the world are tweeting about peace at that very moment. We also have a web page where folks are invited to share one way in which they plan to do something for peace. Moments after they press “enter”, the Peace Tree in our shop and all the others out in the world put on a special light show. It is a fun way that Peace Tree owners and others who visit the Peace Tree page can signal each other that they, too, are visualizing a more peaceful world.

It’s been important from the beginning to make the design for the Peace Tree freely available to anyone who wants to build one. But we also realized that many might want a pre-built Peace Tree so that anyone can get one or receive one as a gift, easily set it up, and begin to enjoy what we get to experience all day long in our store: A vision and hope for a more peaceful world. Just about any time we look up, the lights are flashing. Someone, somewhere is thinking about and sharing thoughts about peace. 

You can learn more about Reach and Teach’s Peace Tree and get information about purchasing a turnkey assembled set at: 

https://shop.reachandteach.com/reach-and-teach-peace-tree

You can find free plans for how to build your own from scratch at:

https://www.instructables.com/member/reachandteach/instructables

If you have a WLED controller and lights, you can use this very easy instructable to use these lights as a Reach and Teach Peace Tree:

https://www.instructables.com/Easy-Peace-Tree-Visualizing-Peace-With-WLED

*Since this article was originally published, the Peace Tree has been modified to respond to posts on Instagram rather than Twitter. In addition, a version of the Peace Tree has been adapted to work with open source WLED controllers that are more readily available, thus eliminating obstacles to widely deploying Peace Trees out into the world. You can find instructions on how to do this at the Instructables link above.

PLEASE SHARE https://peacetreelights.com/ which redirects to this website.

The Reach and Teach Peace Tree was designed to ask and hopefully answer the question: “Can a holiday decoration change the world?”

Peter Drucker, a guru of business management, is quoted to have said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.” The lights on this tree are connected to the Internet and blink in response to people posting photos on Instagram with the hashtag #peace. The lights will twinkle in a special way when anyone tags an Instagram post with the combined hashtags of #peace #peaceaction. So whenever you are feeling a bit down about the state of the world, you can look at a peace tree and be reminded that there are many people working to make the world a better place. You can find a story about how the Reach and Teach Peace Tree came into existence at: https://reachandteach.com/peacetree/?p=22

The hope is to have as many Peace Trees out in the world as possible. We also hope to eventually have a peace tree at the United Nations. Click here to get a Peace Tree of your very own! (If you would rather try building one completely from scratch, we have posted an instructable here)

NOTE: In May, 2023, we changed the peace tree response logic to respond to Instagram posts about peace instead of Twitter posts. We have done this for a variety of reasons including Twitter’s termination of a free API.

Light up the Peace Tree with your own visions of peace…

If you want to publicly share your meditation for peace and light up the Peace Tree, post an image on instagram with a description that includes “#peace  [your personal peace meditation] #peaceaction“. 

You can also post a meditation and see a LIVE VIEW of the Peace Tree at Reach and Teach in San Carlos, CA here!

If you would like a Peace Tree…

You can now get a Peace Tree of your very own and be part of our initial launch of 200 Peace Trees out in the world. Each of the assembled hardware kits are made to order so allow a couple of weeks for us to assemble and ship. Peace Tree hardware is currently designed for indoor use only. We are working on an outdoor/waterproof version. You will need a WiFi connection and a power outlet or a place to plug in the provided USB power cable. You will also need a plant, indoor tree, or other object to string your lights on. The LEDs are low power and temperature but like for all electrical items, be careful and mindful not to mount your lights near any flammable objects.

Click on this link to purchase your Peace Tree today.

Click on this link for a Live View of the Peace Tree in our shop and send a message to it.