Thanks to an outpouring of support from the community, The Peace Center in Langhorne will continue operations, rescinding earlier plans to close. Barbara Simmons, who previously served as Executive Director until her retirement five years ago, volunteered to step back into that role effective October 1, 2025.
Simmons was devastated when she heard it was closing. “It seemed to be the worst time in our country to have a Peace Center close, so I decided to make myself available,” said Simmons in an exclusive interview. “I spent 30 years running the Peace Center in the past and I retired only begrudgingly. I wasn’t ready to retire, but my husband needed a bone marrow transplant, and I needed to be present for him.”
Her husband has multiple myeloma but is doing well now so Simmons feels like she’s in a good position to be able to come back and resurrect it.
In an August 14 letter to supporters, the Peace Center’s board of directors wrote they decided to close it. Simmons said the board looked at the financial situation and didn’t see a way out. The Peace Center always had contracts with schools and that is part of their budget.
“We have four different ways of raising funds, but one of them is fee for service,” said Simmons. “The schools have been under a lot of pressure from the federal government cutting budgets, and what do you cut out of a budget? The things that aren’t absolutely necessary. Giving kids peace building skills just seemed like one of those budget line items that they could probably eliminate and not have serious consequences (about).”
LISTEN: Peace Activism from Bucks County to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with Barbara Simmons
If the Peace Center doesn’t have fees for service, then that has to be made up for in grants.
The Gene and Marlene Epstein Humanitarian Fund has offered a challenge to the community in support of its reboot: to match every donation to The Peace Center up to a total of $10,000.
Simmons has been meeting with people and talking about fundraising. Her biggest goal at this point is to make sure the rent and the insurance are paid. They had to create a new board of directors, which needed to be appointed by the outgoing board.
Simmons was on a call last night with her former students from Arcadia University’s International Peace and Conflict Resolution Master’s program where she previously taught. The alumni want to hold a fundraiser for the Peace Center.
In the early 1980s, there was a real concern about nuclear disarmament and the threat of nuclear weapons and that’s when Simmons first got involved with The Peace Center.
“I just kept thinking, I’m raising children in a world where we could all be annihilated in nanoseconds because of the patriarchy of our world and this need for weaponry,” said Simmons. “At the same time, there was a group of people at the Peace Center working on lessons that would help us help children think beyond war. That really resonated with me having children of that age and thinking where will they get their peace building skills?”
The Peace Center was doing conflict resolution curriculum and educating people about the dangers of nuclear war. “And at some point, they started to run counter to one another because there would be demonstrations, rallies and anti-nuclear vigils,” said Simmons.
Then, the Berlin Wall came down and across the nation, the anti-nuclear movement across the nation started to go away. Simmons said that time was a natural pivot for the Peace Center to increase the number of schools they were in, working with students, teachers, and parents.
In 2017, it started doing more bullying prevention work.
“In 2017, the white supremacy actions and activities started to increase, antisemitism went up,” said Simmons. “A lot of anti-immigration sentiments started and a lot of them were happening in schools. We were trying to help the victims who were part of a vulnerable group – a young woman wearing a hijab to school or a young boy who had disabilities. No one felt emotionally or physically safe.”
Dr. Sandra Bloom was one of Simmons’ mentors. She wrote a book Creating Sanctuary, a guide to a more civilized society because she was looking at post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam Vets.
“She said in a home, a classroom, a school, a community, you need to have physical safety, emotional safety, social safety, and moral safety,” said Simmons. “All four of those are really important. We have a leader that is fomenting violence, fomenting bullying hate speech. And what kind of example is that setting? Our kids are being exposed to that on a regular basis as if that’s normal behavior.”
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Simmons said we couldn’t be at a more challenging time. “We have kids that are so scared that their parents are going to disappear after leaving for work because their skin is brown,” she said. “When did we ever have to encourage people to walk around with their papers on them? It’s beyond disturbing to me that ICE agents would be masked. You can’t see their faces. It reminds me of the brown shirts during the Nazi time in Germany.”
The leader of the free world is bullying everyone who doesn’t agree with him, she added.
The Anti-Defamation League Pyramid of Hate has several layers of hate; at the top is genocide, and at the bottom is discrimination.
“We are just below genocide,” said Simmons. “Whether that looks like some kind of civil war – we as neighbors, as colleagues, as parents – we need to be talking to each other again and not listening to what the president is wanting from us because he wants us turning against each other.”
Simmons worked in Rwanda for two summers and knows what it looks like when a neighbor turns against a neighbor.
“We’re going to be holding dialogues and having people at roundtables telling their stories,” she concluded. “We’re not going to try to convince anyone of what to believe, but if we don’t start talking to each other again we will never forgive ourselves if extreme violence breaks out.”
To donate to The Peace Center visit: https://thepeacecenter.org/donate/
