Help build world peace, goodwill and understanding
- Servas Australia Inc. is an incorporated Association and is affiliated with Servas International, a non-profit, worldwide, cooperative, cultural exchange network bringing people together to build understanding, tolerance, mutual respect, and world peace. It promotes world peace by encouraging individual person-to-person contacts.
- Servas International was founded in 1949 as a peace movement by a young American, Bob Luitweiler, who with his friends and fellow-students, set up a network of people at a grass-roots level. They had in common a desire for world peace, built on a better understanding and tolerance between peoples.
- Over time Servas has evolved into an international, non-political, non-religious, inter-ethnic co-operative system which uses hosting and travelling, as a way of connecting people with diverse cultures and backgrounds and providing opportunities for deeper, personal contacts with the aim to promote peace, goodwill and understanding.
- Travellers are invited to experience and share the home and community life of their hosts, share their social and international concerns and interests, and become more aware of our mutual responsibility to make a better and more sustainable world.
- In addition to hosting and travelling Servas Groups run Peace Schools and Camps looking for ways in which we can achieve a more sustainable and peaceful future.
- Servas is dedicated to the understanding of perceived differences, mutual tolerance, and universal peace.
Servas is committed to the belief that people can be bound in the spirit of love and reverence for life, to social responsibility, and to the recognition of human rights everywhere. - Servas means “to serve”, in the sense of “serve peace”, in the Esperanto language.