Meet 2024 Rick Love Young Innovator Award Recipient Thanh Nguyen

Sep 13

Dr. Rick Love, the late Founder and President of Peace Catalyst International, dreamed of mobilizing people around the globe into a peacebuilding movement. Everyone who knew him knew this was his passion and that he worked tirelessly toward it. He founded Peace Catalyst because of that dream and dedicated the last ten years of his life to peacebuilding, courageously crossing social, political, and ideological divides and inviting others to do the same. He did so because of his Jesus-centered approach to all of life.

To honor Rick’s legacy, to further his vision, and to raise up more peacebuilders like him, Peace Catalyst presented the 3rd annual Rick Love Peace Awards at Alliance for Peacebuilding’s annual gathering, PeaceCon, on September 11, 2024 in Washington, D.C. These awards honor those who creatively cross divides to build peace, exhibiting the same character and courage displayed by Rick.

Three awards were given: one Rick Love Peace Award and two Rick Love Young Innovators Awards.

The Rick Love Young Innovator Awards are for peacebuilders under the age of 30 who are up-and-coming leaders and who have recently started or will soon be starting innovative peacebuilding efforts that promise to be transformative in their context. Each includes a $1,000 cash award to support the recipient in their peacebuilding efforts.

Meet one of this year’s Rick Love Young Innovator Award recipients, Thanh Nguyen…

At 23, Thanh Nguyen is a peacebuilder and researcher working at the intersection of religion and development. Currently a Project Coordinator at Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in East Jerusalem, she leads strategic partnerships, hosts educational programs, and supports peacebuilding delegations to Palestine/Israel. Her role at Sabeel follows her work as a board member of Friends of Sabeel North America, reflecting her long-standing commitment to the region.

As a first-generation Vietnamese American whose own history is situated in colonial war, Thanh’s peace work prioritizes subaltern knowledge, resistance to historical amnesia, and indigenous political perspectives. While pursuing a B.A. in political science and international peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, she explored issues of religion, secularity, and coloniality with organizations like the Al Amana Centre, the Institute for Global Engagement, the Telos Group, and the Ansari Institute. In 2022, she was a student leader on a joint Peace Catalyst and Notre Dame trip focused on religious peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Independently, she also organized her own academic panels to initiate critical conversations on religion to students and conducted her own fieldwork to expand decolonial frameworks in peace studies literature. Her research, commitment, and leadership earned her the Kroc Institute’s 2023 Peter Yarrow Award in Peace Studies.

Beyond her academic and advocacy work, Thanh is also a poet and writer, with work on colonial displacement and belonging featured in Re:Visions Magazine, Silk Road Review, Decolonial Passages, and independent film/art productions. Moving forward, she aims to continue merging scholarship, activism, and storytelling in her pursuit of collective liberation.