Ufra Mir, the first only Kashmiri/South-Asian to be a professional peace-psychologist and the youngest in the world from her field, started Paigaam with the goal of creating a more sustainable peaceful local and global future. Its motto is "Transforming Thinking, Transforming Lives".

Paigaam educates, trains, and empowers youth, children, and adults in the values, principles, and best practices of intercultural peacebuilding skills,based on peace-psychology. These skills include, but are not limited to: conflict reconciliation and transformation, trauma healing, stress management and post-conflict psychological recovery, nonviolent communication, mindfulness, arts therapy, mediation, leadership development and facilitation.

Recent Achievements

• Workshop on Peace-psychology and Paigaam at the World Economic Forum, India (2014),
• Workshop and Presentation on Paigaam; Peace-psychology at the Young Connectors for Future Program, Sweden (2013-2014)
• Establishing Peace-Education programs in schools, Kashmir (2012-present)
• Establishing Youth Empowerment Workshops across India (2012-present)
• Commitment Champion at the Clinton Global Initiative, USA (2013)
• Interview on Doordarshan (Indian National TV Broadcaster), India (2012)
• Outstanding Commitment and Leader Recognition by the Clinton Global Org., USA, (2012)
• Workshop and Presentation at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, USA (2011-2012)

Current Initiatives

• Wellness Initiative: Mental health and Youth Empowerment
• Arts for Peace: for Children and Adults with Violent Pasts
• The Gift Initiative: Women-Empowerment
• Peace-Education: Peace-psychology Workshops
• Ufra Mir at Paigaam's psycho-social youth empowerment workshops.

Paigaam's first of its kind, peace-education course, has been successfully incorporated in a few schools in Kashmir and is mainly taught through experiential activities and simulations including topics on trauma healing, career guidance, general counselling, teenage issues, mental health awareness, and stress management. The initiative empowers students psycho-socially, boosting their self-esteem and equipping them with the skills to cope up with the daily stress of their lives through healthy self-expression. Paigaam aims to create a community peace recreation centre to be used for workshops, mental health counselling, after-school youth programmes, sports facilities and career guidance, to help tackle issues like drug addiction and unemployment in the valley. Paigaam also trains local people in basic counselling skills to help themselves, their families and people around them, as there are very few psychiatrists and psychologists in the valley but many people suffering psychologically from the conflict.

Ufra Mir at Paigaam's psycho-social youth empowerment workshops.

What Makes Paigaam Unique

It is the first and only organisation in Kashmir that offers Peace-education, and has taken the initiative to redefine the educational system by incorporating it in the school-curricular. The first and only organisation in Kashmir/India/South-Asia, and one of the very few organisations. in the world, respectively, that has redefined the ideology of Peace-psychology and functions on its principle. One of the very few organisations in Kashmir working in the mental health sector