West End Resident Hosts Campaigner for Peace

When Marie Mainil was a girl, she attended a school that had students from 55 nationalities and made friends with refugees from Rwanda, Burundi and the former Yugoslavia.

“I was put in that environment when I was still pretty little, and I got very touched by their stories,” Mainil told Patch. “I got interested in international affairs, and I always wanted to do this.”

Today, at age 29, Mainil has taken the job as director of the Student Peace Alliance, an affiliate of Washington’s The Peace Alliance, which partners with local community organizations that effect change in the areas of violence prevention and conflict resolution. The Peace Alliance houses its workers for free through a network of more than 72,000 supporters nationwide.

Mainil and her dog, Atlas, live with alliance supporter Rebecca Hierholzer in Alexandria’s Seminary Heights.

Hierholzer has hosted alliance supporters from Nepal and Japan in the past year. When she received an email that Mainil needed a place to stay, she agreed on one condition — that Atlas and her cat got along. So far, it’s worked out beautifully, she said.

“It expands and enriches my world,” Hierholzer said. “And it’s also the way that I can support The Peace Alliance. I can’t give them a $10,000 check, and I’m not one to be out knocking on doors, but this is one way I can contribute to their mission, and I do have a passion for peace, so that’s my underlying motivation supporting their work.”

Mainil, a native of Belgium who recently became a U.S. citizen, worked on the Obama campaign in Chicago before moving to Alexandria. She first came to the United States to learn English at age 16 in Pennsylvania and received a tennis scholarship to attend Drake University in Iowa, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in international relations. She also earned her master’s degree in political science from The New School in New York City.

Mainil said she enjoys listening to people to create programs that fit their needs. 

“I work with good people, both in the office and there is a big community of organizers and community workers here in Washington, so we get to collaborate with all of them, and there are people with big ideas and big brains, and they might sound crazy, but it actually makes all the sense in the world,” she said.

A small operation, the Student Peace Alliance was created about six years ago on the campus of Brandeis University. Bob Baskin, president of The Peace Alliance and The Peace Alliance Educational Institute, said the Student Peace Alliance works on building chapters at colleges throughout the country.

The organization, which, like most nonprofits, has been hit hard by the recession, once had about 30 chapters and focuses on foreign policy only. In recent years the group has reorganized itself to include domestic conflict issues, decreased the number of student chapters to about 10. Now, Mainil is re-energizing those chapters and again expanding the student network.

“We expect to build back up to the 30 level,” Baskin said. “What Marie has been doing is working on developing the protocols to re-establish and expand and to set up a series of criteria by which we could judge whether or not a campus really has the interest and passion and consistency with what we’re doing.”

Mainil also recently conducted the organization’s Third Annual Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Peace Day Celebration on Capitol Hill, which educated Hill staffers and legislators about peace issues.

Members of the Student Peace Alliance work to create an environment on campuses and in local communities that promotes education and discussion about peacebuilding on both the domestic and international levels. For more information, visit the Student Peace Alliance’s website.

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