2025 Urdd Gobaith Cymru Peace and Goodwill Message released and granted Patronage by the UK National Commission for UNESCO
May 15th 2025
Seventy years after the death of one of its founders, Wales’ annual Peace and Goodwill Message, led by Wales’ largest youth organisation, Urdd Gobaith Cymru, has been released today (15 May 2025) making a plea for change to tackle youth poverty across the world.
For the first time in 2025, the Peace and Goodwill Message has been granted Patronage through the UK National Commission for UNESCO, recognising the message's alignment with the global values of UNESCO.
This year’s Peace and Goodwill Message was written by some of the Urdd’s members and students from higher education college Coleg y Cymoedd, with the help of Katie Hall from the band Chroma, graphic designer Steffan Dafydd and global charity Save the Children.
It makes an urgent call for change, with the message concluding:
“It takes a village to raise a child… Be our village.”
Global importance of the Peace and Goodwill Message
The Peace and Goodwill Message, now in its 103rd year, is created every year by the young people of Wales. The aim of the message is to unite children and young people to reduce prejudice and ignorance, emphasising what is common to all the young people of the world.
The Message is shared with every school in Wales empowering a common purpose amongst young people, to increase awareness and understanding. The message and the accompanying education pack is a seedling for further discussions and conversations that grows a wider and broader interest in peace and goodwill.
The message is also shared with an ever-growing number of people around the world; in 2024 it was shared in more than 50 languages and in 47 countries. Its reach on social media alone exceeded 10 million. It’s the only message of its kind that has been sent by young people to the world continuously every year for over a century.
Responses are welcomed and celebrated from across the world and in a range of languages, including acknowledgements from officers of state and royalty to young people, schools and youth groups expressing their hopes for the future.
History of the Peace and Goodwill Message
Urdd Gobaith Cymru, Wales’s largest youth organisation, was established in 1922, the same year as the first transmission of the Peace and Goodwill message from the youth of Wales to the world.
The founder of the Urdd, Sir Ifan Ab Owen Edwards and Gwilym Davies, the founder of the message, worked together until Gwilym Davies’s death in 1955 for the youth of Wales to create and share a Peace and Goodwill message to the world. Sir Ifan’s experience of the first world war shaped his conviction that ‘waging war was not a way to achieve peace’ and involvement with the Peace and Goodwill message provided the young people of Wales a ‘spirit of understanding and tolerance towards people of other races and other ideals.’
For more than ten decades the youth of Wales have highlighted the dangers of oppression, violence, persecution, poverty, and global warming. The process of writing and sending the message by the young people of Wales to young people around the world has inspired further humanitarian and international activity.
Overcoming wars and major changes in methods of communication, by sharing the message in Morse Code to the BBC World Service and the postal service, to the digital networks of today the Peace and Goodwill message continues to address challenging issues affecting the lives and hopes of young people.
Gwilym Davies (1879 - 1955) - A Visionary for Peace and UNESCO
2025 is the 70th anniversary of the death of Gwilym Davies and a time to celebrate his achievements, notably his commitment to world peace. Davies was a Welsh Baptist minister who grew up in a mining community in the south Wales valleys and later became an influential figure in the creation of the Welsh League of Nations Union. Davies developed of a draft model constitution of an international education organisation which greatly influenced the creation of UNESCO and initiated the first the peace message of the youth of Wales to the youth of the world.
Seventy years since his death, the Peace and Goodwill message from the youth of Wales continues to further peace and international education and understanding.
