Join the Movement for Peace
The Cook Peace Park is a nonprofit organization that relies on supporters like you to help further our mission of peace and international cooperation.
With every contribution to the Rodney Cook Sr. Peace Park,
the park comes closer to its goal of serving as a global center for peace.
Join the Peace Movement — give today!
The Impact of Your Donation
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High-quality construction materials needed for
the 115 ft. column -
10,000 volume C.T. Vivian Library that needs to be catalogued, appraised, and digitized
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World-class designs (already funded)
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Rooms in the museum are available for naming rights and a dedication wall of funders will be located in the museum lobby.
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Amount needed – $9,015,532
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Raised to date – over $7,000,000
Cook Peace Park Development phases
The park itself, after approximately a $50,000,000 initial investment by the city and Trust for Public Land, is finished. This initial phase includes a 10,000,000 gallon underground cistern beneath the park’s lake that addresses one third of the stormwater retention needed in Downtown Atlanta to mitigate the area’s historic flooding problems. The final phase is the National Monuments Foundation’s component, which includes building (a) the Peace Column, (b) the Georgia Nobel Peace Pantheon, (c) the Ambassador Andrew Young Peace Institute, and (d) 18 statues to Georgia peacemakers within the park. Several statues have been completed including
The Honorable John Lewis.
This project will impact 5,000 mostly abandoned acres of the Westside of the city of Atlanta. It is anticipated that three times more than the $3,000,000,000 in new investment around Atlanta’s new Fourth Ward Park will be achieved here. Not since the McMillan Plan of Washington D.C. at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, which restored the French L’Enfant Plan of 1791, has a city of this scale had such an opportunity to rebuild itself.
Upon completion of approved monuments, the Peace Park will serve as a symbol of Georgia’s unique 300-year tradition of peace providing a place for people from around the world to reflect on the work it takes to achieve true peace and how to preserve it for future generations.
Phase 1
Peace Park – CompletedThe initial park rebuild has been completed with fountains, plazas, bridges, lakes, and major watershed control and cistern infrastructure. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms officially opened the park on June 29, 2021.
Phase 2
- Peace Column – $9,015,532
- Raised to date – over $7,000,000
The 115-foot tall Peace Column is topped by a statue of Chief Tomochichi of the Yamacraw/Creek Tribe, considered Georgia’s co-founder with General James Oglethorpe. Tomochichi chose peace rather than massacre the British colonists, thereby beginning Georgia’s 300-year tradition of peace.
The base of the Peace Column will house a museum dedicated to global peace, The Atlanta Way, and the Civil Rights Movement, which came from this community.The 8,000 volume C.T. Vivian Library, which contains one of the largest collections of works by African American authors going back to the 18th century, as well as the Martin Luther King, Jr. family 3,000 volume library, will be archived within the Peace Column.
Phase 3
- Georgia Nobel Peace Pantheon – $10,168,108
The Georgia Nobel Peace Pantheon will be constructed on the park’s highest point and will include 5 statues of Georgia’s Nobel Peace Laureates. The base of the Peace Pantheon will be a two-story plinth with 20,000 square feet of office space inside. The building will operate as a peace think-tank incubator.
There are already several international organizations committed to peace initiatives that have signed letters of intent to take space in the Peace Pantheon, including The Shin Dae-yong Global Peace Institute, Seoul; the ‘Jeux Mondiaux de la Paix’, Geneva; Olivier Giscard d’Estaing’s ‘Centre Mondial de la Paix’, and INSEAD, Paris; St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University, Moscow; and Soongsil University, Seoul.
These partners will develop innovative projects and education initiatives within a kindergarten through post-graduate education platform being developed as a new
peace university, currently being programmed by INSEAD and the University System
of Georgia/Georgia Gwinnett College offering Master’s and PhD programs in Peace Affairs/Peace Tech, the first of its kind.
Phase 4
- Ambassador Andrew Young Peace Institute – $55,000,000
The Ambassador Andrew Young Peace Institute will be housed in the city-approved museum building that will include the Arnett Tinwood art collection. This collection contains important works by artists such as Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Joe Minter, and the Gee’s Bend Quilters. The museum will also contain Xernona Clayton’s Civil Rights Hall of Fame collection.
The Andrew Young Peace Institute will contain classrooms and offices as well as apartments for the Nobel Peace Laureates and other global peace advocates when they visit Atlanta. It will connect to the Shin Dae-yong Global Peace Institute in the Peace Pantheon through an underground tunnel.
The Andrew Young Peace Institute will also provide over two hundred parking spaces in a four-story, underground parking garage. Not only will these parking spots be beneficial to visitors of the Rodney Cook Sr. Park, but they will also be beneficial to visitors of the adjacent Martin Luther King Jr. Life Home, which was recently purchased by the National Park Service with the help of the National Monuments Foundation.
Support the Mission of the Peace Park
With a donation of any amount, you bring the Peace Park closer to completion and contribute toward the mission of creating a world of peace and harmony.