TEMPLE – Women from towns across southern New Hampshire have come together, each willing to use her unique talents to help bring peace to America.

"We're at a critical juncture," said Kathy Boyer of Milford. "There's an escalation of violence throughout our culture, and we need to do something about it."

Boyer, Jan Grossman of Amherst, Debra Stoddard of Hudson, and Barbara Thorngren are the New Hampshire roots of a movement to bring peace into the forefront of political debate in America called the New Hampshire Peace Alliance.

The overarching goal of the Peace Alliance, an international coalition of self-proclaimed peace mongers, is to encourage the powers that be in Washington to sign on to a proposal to create the United States Department of Peace, an agency devoted to using negotiation and strategy to encourage a peaceful world both in a America and abroad.

►NH Peace Alliance Web site

By learning to deal with conflict, from the bully on the playground to the guy cutting off others in traffic to the dictator in a developing nation, the culture worldwide can be changed to become more peaceful, the women say.

"As educators, we know there are skills that can be learned to take peace out of the abstract and make it a function of life," Grossman said.

"It's not about suppressing violence," said Thorngren. "It's about learning new ways to deal with conflict without having to resort to violence." "Our example to our children has been to act in violent ways in order to 'make the world a better place,'" said Boyer. "We give permission to our children to use violence to solve problems, and that's a horrible example to set for them." With the election season in full swing, the women have been making use of visits to New Hampshire from Presidential candidates and seeking their support for the Department of Peace.

Unfortunately, politics appears to be trumping the push for peace. Because Democratic hopeful Congressman Dennis Kucinich sponsored a bill in Congress to form the Department of Peace, his Democratic rivals including Senators Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama have been reluctant to support the movement, Thorngren said.

"We've been told that supporting this idea is politically risky," said Thorngren. "But we realize that peace is not a candidate in an election. It's a movement that's going take time to develop."

"We have to remember that the Suffragists, the civil rights activists, the abolitionists probably never thought their issues would be resolved," Grossman said. "It took time and persistence, but they did it." Like all grassroots movements, what's happening at the top of the political chain is less important than what's going on down at ground level, and that's where the women are focusing most of their attention.

"Once the number of people who support this idea becomes great enough," said Grossman, "the politicians will sign on." Small steps, like the planned production of a play called "The Gift of Peace," which will open this fall in New Hampshire, and the rapidly increasing enrollment of high school and college kids in the Student Peace Alliance are beginning to bolster the movement from the bottom up.

On Friday, October 19 at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., the Student Peace Alliance will hold a three-day conference featuring Mohandas Gandhi's grandson, Arun Gandhi, and Nobel Laureate Betty Williams.