Shanthi Muthu, of the Center for Yoga, Dance, Cooking, Sanskrit and Child Servitude Eradication, performs at Burnside Park in Providence Sunday.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

PROVIDENCE –– Pam Steager wants a U.S. Department of Peace.

Student Mila Tsikhotskiy, of the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, wants fellow young people to put into action their cares for peace.

And Samuel Koroma wants war survivors to have help in finding inner peace. He thought of those like his sister-in-law, who fears the sound of Fourth of July fireworks because they remind her of planes dropping bombs in the Sierra Leone from which she fled.

At Burnside Park in Kennedy Plaza, Steager, Tsikhotskiy and about 200 other people gathered Sunday to hear music, words and peace advocacy, whether it’s worldwide or on a scale of simply between neighbors or between students.

About an hour after that event got underway, another began at the Roger Williams National Memorial. Koroma and eight other people stood in a prayer circle as their nascent nonprofit organization, Higher Ground International, seeks to help people affected by civil wars in places such as Liberia and Sierra Leone in West Africa –– and need for assistance for those who witnessed or were victims of the atrocities.

The peace events coincide with the United Nations’ sixth annual International Day of Peace, which is on Monday. In 2002, the U.N. decreed Sept. 21 would be the annual date for the commemoration.

In Burnside Park, “RPM Voices,” a group of about 16 people, took the stage and sang in harmony, with a different soloist taking up a different line from “Amazing Grace.” There was Deborah Spears Morehead, who, in American Indian dress, offered “good day” in Algonquin to the crowd and led them in song. One song was from a time when some of six Indian nations were not at peace –– and the message was to set aside differences. Her daughters, in the audience, had about 45 people join in a circle and dance as Morehead sang and kept a beat with a hand-held drum.

“The drumbeat I’m going to play? It’s the heartbeat,” she told those gathered. “It’s the first rhythm you hear when you are in your mother’s womb.”

People worked at more than 15 tables, offering a piece of peace. Family members could sign a “family pledge of nonviolence” and a student could ink a “school pledge of nonviolence.” Each included a series of promises to respect, communicate and listen better, among other things.

At her table, Steager, the Rhode Island coordinator for the Peace Alliance, had brochures urging support for a bill that is before Congress that would establish a Department of Peace. Among things the department would do are: Research and help with nonviolent solutions to conflicts domestic and international; teach violence prevention and mediation to school children; effectively “treat and dismantle gang psychology”; and create and oversee a U.S. Peace Academy, which would be a sister organization to the U.S. Military Academy.

Steager said “we old peaceniks” are happy that a generation that knows how to use social-networking sites and other tools of technology has helped the Peace Alliance in spreading its message.

“We have Web sites. We’re on Twitter. We’re doing all of that, and reaching hundreds of thousands of people,” Steager said.

mmckinne@projo.com