Your Donations Matter

For more than a decade, the Peace Crane Project has connected millions of children in more than 150 countries, empowering them to build empathy, literacy, and global friendship through the simple act of folding and exchanging origami peace cranes.

This entire global movement has been created on an extremely small budget — and yet classrooms around the world continue to ask for more resources, translations, and support.

To prepare for increased demand from teachers and schools in 2026, we are raising vital funds to strengthen our foundation and build a sustainable future.

⭐️ Your Gift Makes a Direct, Immediate Difference

The Peace Crane Project is a hands-on, human-to-human program that helps students build empathy, cultural understanding, and real-world communication by folding origami cranes and exchanging them with peers across borders (and sometimes across generations).

1. Human skill-building in a screen-heavy world
 Cranes are made by hands, not algorithms. Students develop hand-eye coordination, patience, focus, and perseverance, one fold at a time. Crane folding has a quietly powerful, meditative quality. Children who master it gain a practical way to calm and center themselves. And show off their skills to their friends and family.

2.  Authentic language learning and cultural exchange
 We connect children studying a new language with native speakers who want to learn the other student’s language. Students don’t just “study” a language; they use it with real humans, learning about each other’s lives, countries, and interests firsthand.

3. Global literacy and geography that becomes personal
 Students learn to read maps and connect with peers in the very places they’re studying. Geography stops being abstract and becomes a relationship.

4. Teachers building networks that last
 We connect educators who share lesson plans across borders and build international networks of communication, some of whom have been friends for years through these exchanges.

5. Real-world learning and community impact
 Teachers regularly tell us the project becomes a springboard for wider learning and leadership.

• In Spain, one teacher took her class of six-year-olds to the post office to mail their cranes, tour the facility, and learn how the postal system works.
• In Mexico, a group chose not to trade their cranes; instead, students sold them locally as a fundraiser, raising enough money to install an indoor bathroom at their school for the first time. These are small paper cranes creating outsized confidence and tangible results.

6. Peace education through relationship (not lectures)
 We help students practice peace by building direct peer-to-peer connections. Children learn that people all around the world are… just people. That relationship can become a lifelong, broader, more thoughtful view of the world.

Sometimes we connect the young and old, too, with students folding cranes for nursing home residents, and seniors sending cranes back, opening dialogue between generations.

Recently, in the U.S., we’ve promoted blue-state and red-state exchanges to help students step outside divisive rhetoric and discover how much they share in common with peers in other parts of their own country.

7. We’re nimble and responsive to where connection is needed most.
 We invited students to fold cranes for Ukrainian refugees, which Direct Relief delivered. We’ve also supported teachers in Poland with refugees in their classrooms, and sent volunteers into other refugee camps around the world, offering cranes, teaching folding, and giving displaced children a way to send a message out into the world.

❤️ Why Donate Now?

We are at a pivotal moment:

• Global participation is increasing

• Schools are requesting more materials than we can currently supply

• 2026 will bring major public attention

• We need the infrastructure to grow responsibly and sustainably

Your gift today becomes the catalyst for everything that comes next.