Svetlana Kosenko didn’t set out to join a movement. She set out to study, first Lithuanian Philology, then Applied Photography, then a teacher training programme in Denmark, the country that became her second home. Looking back, those paths might seem unrelated, but she sees the thread running through all of them: a curiosity about people, stories, creativity, and how we learn to connect with one another.
Today Svetlana works as an educator, and she’s one of MasterPeace’s members, officially part of the network since 2017, though her connection to the movement started even earlier.
“I have always been fascinated by how people grow, and how creativity, education, and dialogue can help us build more peaceful ways of living together.”
Her first brush with MasterPeace wasn’t at a peace conference. It was a small student fundraiser she ran with classmates for a tree-planting project in Guinea-Bissau, raising money for seeds and the local communities who’d care for them. Around the same time, she came across MasterPeace, then exploring early ideas for a Global Concert for Peace. The projects were different, but the spirit was the same: bring people together, create something positive.
That thread kept pulling her in. While studying in Denmark, she met the MasterPeace Club in Croatia and joined their Peace Concert in Ludbreg, where she watched people of different generations come together through art and dialogue and thought, simply, this is where I belong. After graduating, she co-founded MasterPeace Denmark with two friends, choosing Quality Education as their focus, the foundation, they believed, that makes every other Sustainable Development Goal possible.
She still remembers her first MasterPeace Bootcamp clearly: a room full of people from different countries, full of ideas and a genuine belief that communities can make a difference, at a time when the world already felt heavy with conflict and division.
“It felt like finding a culture I wanted to be part of. Not because everyone thought the same, but because we shared a belief that positive change begins with people coming together, listening to one another, and taking action — however small it may seem.”
From there came years of involvement — Walls of Connection, bringing young people, refugees, and local communities together through art and sport; educational work tied to the annual Peace and Justice Conference; and a growing conviction that peacebuilding and education were never really two separate things. In her own classroom, she tries to create spaces where creativity, courage, and a sense of belonging matter just as much as the subject being taught.
“Every lesson is also an opportunity to practice peace: learning how to listen, collaborate, navigate differences, and recognize the value in one another.”
She’ll tell you she wasn’t inspired by one mentor, but by many, educators, artists, activists, and what she calls “hopeful romantics” from all over the world, united by a belief that dialogue and creativity matter. Her growth alongside them wasn’t one defining moment so much as a gradual shift, classroom by classroom, conversation by conversation.
“I began to understand that every classroom, workshop, or conversation can become a place where peace is practiced through curiosity, creativity, dialogue, and belonging.”
Her most honest story, though, isn’t about a triumph. It’s about a season of exhaustion, when MasterPeace Denmark sometimes felt like it was just her alone, as members came and went and the local club changed shape.
“Yet even then, I never felt that the ideas or the community had been abandoned. Instead, I was encouraged to remember what had already been created, reflect on the journey, and keep imagining what could come next. That, for me, is peace in practice.”
What carried her through wasn’t pressure to do more, it was a community that stayed connected, reminding her that belonging isn’t measured by constant productivity, and that ideas sometimes just need time to grow. It’s a lesson she now passes on to the people she teaches and works with.
Svetlana describes the wider MasterPeace network the way she might describe a forest: different countries, different professions, different lives, yet quietly connected underneath.
“I think of it like the roots of trees in a forest. Above the ground, every tree grows differently, but beneath the surface the roots are connected, quietly supporting the whole ecosystem. That is what the MasterPeace network feels like to me.”
That sense of connection shows up in her work now in quiet ways, in safe spaces for hard questions, in curiosity replacing fear, in the belief that courage grows where people feel they belong.
When she describes MasterPeace to someone new, she keeps it simple: a global community of people who choose hope over helplessness, connected by a shared belief that creativity, dialogue, and small everyday actions can build a more peaceful world. And to anyone just starting their own journey with MasterPeace, her advice is just as simple.
“Stay curious. You don’t have to say yes to everything. No one carries the movement alone, we each bring our own perspective, and together those different contributions create something much bigger than any individual project.”
Asked for one line to sum it all up, Svetlana didn’t hesitate:
“Every lesson, every conversation, every community is an opportunity to create a brave place.”
MasterPeace Champions Edition celebrates the people who’ve grown alongside the movement, and helped it grow in return.
