Given the polarised and difficult political and emotional climate we have been working in in recent months, I’ve been reflecting on how I would answer if someone asked me: “Sharon, how would you prove, in one sentence, that SNS does what it says it does — what would you say?”

I wouldn’t have a one-sentence answer — I have something better. I have 768 students who filled in a survey before and after sitting in a room with a Palestinian and an Israeli peacebuilder this year. I have dozens of teachers who wrote to us about what they watched happen in their classrooms. And I have our 2024–25 Annual Report, which lays all of it out — the numbers, the testimonials, the accounts — for anyone willing to read it.

This post is for the people who haven’t read it yet. I want to talk honestly about why things are so challenging at the moment, why I understand it, and why I still think young people deserve the chance to explore this issue in depth and think for themselves.

The world we’re working in

I founded SNS because I believed — and still believe — that young people deserve better than two shouting matches passing each other in the dark. Not because both “sides” are equally right, or because there’s nothing to feel strongly about. Precisely the opposite. Because it’s serious enough, and painful enough, and personal enough for so many people, that the worst things we could do are hand it to teenagers without any tools for holding complexity, disagreement, anger and grief at the same time — or even to shut the topic down completely and ban them from talking about it.

Our mission has never been harder to carry out than it has been over the past couple of years. The conflict itself has deepened. Online discourse about it has become, frankly, vicious. And SNS — an organisation that has spent over fifteen years trying to occupy the difficult, unglamorous ground of impartiality and uphold the values of non-violence, equality and rejection of hate — has taken fire from multiple directions for refusing to pit one side against the other and for advocating for human rights and a win-win approach.

I won’t pretend that’s been easy to deal with. When you’ve built something around the idea that dialogue, non-violence and equal humanity are not weaknesses, watching people decide that your commitment to quality education and freedom of thought for young people is itself a kind of betrayal — of either side — is painful. But what I want to do is show people what actually happened in our classrooms last year and let them draw their own conclusions.

What actually happened last year

In 2024–25, our speakers delivered 139 sessions to over 8,500 young people, in classrooms stretching from South Wales to West Yorkshire, Birmingham to Bristol. More than 2,500 adults — teachers, community leaders, media sector employees and diplomats at the Foreign Office among them — undertook our training. Fifteen new schools joined our Olive Branch Community and went on, of their own accord, to run 186 independent peace education activities. We ran our second annual study trip to Northern Ireland, our Student Leadership Conference, and our Bridge Builders Programme, plus our speakers briefed cross-party MPs at the House of Commons and met the Prime Minister.

I could keep listing numbers, and the full report does. But numbers, on their own, prove almost nothing about whether what we do is good. A charity can be busy and wrong. Reach is not the same as impact, and impact is not the same as legitimacy. So here is the part that I think actually matters.

The part that matters: what students and teachers said

We surveyed 768 students this year. We asked them before and after their sessions what they believed, how they felt, and whether anything had shifted.

Before their session, students were scattered across the spectrum on questions like whether they understood multiple perspectives on the conflict’s history, or whether they actively tried to imagine how things looked from someone else’s point of view. After the session, that picture moved — consistently, and in one direction: towards more understanding; more willingness to seek out diverse sources rather than rely on whatever their feed had served them; and a clearer-eyed view that a win-lose outcome means more death and suffering for ordinary Palestinians and Israelis, which is not a victory for anyone.

These outcomes show up the same way, survey after survey, term after term, year after year.

But it’s the words behind the numbers that I keep coming back to. A student wrote:

“I now understand that both Israel and Palestine both have different wants and needs for their nations, and that the best outcome would be for both sides to come to an agreement that would allow them to live in peace and harmony.”

Another:

“It made me realise that being a bystander is being a part of the problem and I should aim to take part in the solution.”

Another, comparing what they’d just experienced to what they normally see online and on the news:

“Incredibly humanising compared to the polarised impression the media imparts. Even other news sources dedicated to solving the conflict fail to so completely emphasise the importance of unity in peace for all.”

And one that I think cuts right to the heart of what people misunderstand about our model and that shows this is not a simple situation of “two sides”:

“This programme has helped me to develop my own view and see that it is not helpful to be pro/against a side and that both sides are rich in a variety of people and opinions.”

That last one is, in a sentence, the entire theory of change behind SNS. We are not trying to talk young people out of caring. We are trying to give them somewhere to put that care that has a solutions-focused lens and encourages active citizenship through democratic channels.

Teachers noticed it too. One, from Wolverhampton, told us:

“Students have really benefited from the session, and are still talking about it now. Seeing people work together rather than against each other has had a huge impact on them.”

Across our full teacher feedback sample, the format, the speakers’ presentations, the clarity of the conflict-resolution message, and the appropriateness of the content were all rated overwhelmingly positively. 

Why I think this is the right way to judge us

The most honest thing I can offer you is this: don’t take my word for it, and don’t take anyone else’s secondhand account either. Read what the 768 students said. Read what the teachers wrote, unprompted, in the days after a session. These people are the fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds filling in an anonymous form, and the adults responsible for their education writing down what they watched with their own eyes.

Where we go from here

We’re aiming to reach up to 10,000 young people in 2025–26 — roughly 1,500 more than this year. We want to bring ten more schools into the Olive Branch Community. We’re preparing to pilot a new Future Diplomats Programme for university-age students and a new study trip to Bosnia. And we’re pushing, alongside partners across the education sector, for conflict resolution skills to be embedded in the National Curriculum as it’s rolled out nationally from 2028.

The young people who sat in those rooms told us what they experienced. I think their words are the best case we have.

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Read the full 2024–25 Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statements [here].

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Ask the leadership team your questions and SNS [here].

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