Los Alamos student shares Peace Ambassador experience with Kiwanis Club

At a Kiwanis Club of Los Alamos gathering, Los Alamos High School student Celia Pesiri described how a Santa Fe-based peace program pushed her to listen more closely to stories from Israel and Palestine and then turn that work into action at home.

Pesiri, a 2025 Salaam Shalom U.S. Peace Ambassador, spoke May 11 about her experience with Tomorrow’s Women, the nonprofit founded in 2003 to bring young Israeli and Palestinian women together. The program brings teenagers ages 15 to 18 from Santa Fe, Albuquerque and Northern New Mexico into workshops and trainings in Santa Fe, where the focus is not just on conflict history but on leadership, emotional resiliency, critical thinking, teamwork, public speaking and community action.

Her account stood out because it linked a global conflict to a local science-and-service culture that already values public engagement. Pesiri said she spent time with participants from Israel and Palestine in both structured sessions and informal settings, including benefit events at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, cooking, Arabic lessons and a kitchen dance party set to Israeli pop music. That combination of serious dialogue and everyday connection showed how the program tries to build relationships across political lines rather than simply teach a curriculum.

Pesiri also shared part of a story she wrote after interviewing Rawan, a 26-year-old Palestinian physicist living in Gaza. The interview work underscored one of the program’s central lessons for a community like Los Alamos: careful listening can matter as much as expertise, especially when the subject is war, displacement and the way those forces shape daily life for scientists, students and families.

Tomorrow’s Women says its U.S. Peace Ambassadors program culminates in a community project designed and led by the ambassadors. In Pesiri’s case, that experience fed directly into the creation of the 2026 Rawan Alsaraji Scholarship, a $1,000 award administered by the LAPS Foundation for a college-bound student pursuing STEM studies. That local scholarship ties the peace program back to Los Alamos’ own education pipeline and to the county’s long-running emphasis on science, service and civic responsibility.

The Los Alamos Public Schools Foundation recognized its 2026 scholarship recipients May 18 at Duane Smith Auditorium, and this year’s current and renewal scholarships totaled $93,000. Pesiri was listed as a recipient of a $1,500 Community Service Scholarship, adding another local honor to her peacebuilding work.

Tomorrow’s Women says the program costs $100, with scholarships available, and the 2026 application window remains open until June 1. The organization says more than 750 women have been motivated to lead a different future, with reported gains in confidence coping with stress rising from 29% to 64% and students seeing themselves as leaders rising from 70% to 83%. For Los Alamos, Pesiri’s experience showed how a youth exchange rooted in conflict resolution can return with practical results, from scholarship support to a broader sense of what civic leadership can look like.