Founders of the Children’s Football Alliance (CFA) placed a plaque at the Southland football pitch as part of the Peace Field Project last week.
CFA co-founder Paul Cooper said the aim of the project was to teach children peace education through sport, music and the arts.
There are 75 peace pitches in six continents and the idea was based around the Christmas truce in Belgium.
During World War 1, on Christmas Eve, there were several Christmas truces where the fighting stopped for a time.
In 1914, Allied soldiers met German soldiers in no-man’s land.
They buried their dead, exchanged gifts, showed pictures of their loved ones and, in some cases, took their jackets and helmets off, and had a game of football, Cooper said.
Last week, Cooper and fellow co-founder Ernie Brennan, along with Iain Walker from Football Southland, placed a plaque at the football pitch at Turnbull Thompson Park, acknowledging the International Day of Peace which was on September 21.
"If you can have a game of football against your enemy during a world war, maybe anything is possible," Brennan said.
"So what we do is that when a pitch is twinned, a plaque goes on to their pitch, like what we’ve just done with Southland Football.
"The other plaque goes on the Peace Pitch in Flanders, Belgium, which is the most important football pitch in the world, in terms of its significance.
"Once you’ve twinned a pitch, children from your community can go to the Flanders Peace Pitch for a week in September," Brennan said.
Last month, about 60 children from 20 countries. including Northern Ireland, Scotland, Croatia and India, attended the Peace Field Project for a week of peace education through play in Belgium.
Among them were tamariki who were from war-torn countries and refugees.
"There were children who came from Delhi in India who lived in the slums and who’d never been out of Delhi, let alone a different continent.
"And then there were refugee children that were based in Belgium from a number of different countries who had come for a week of peace," he said.
The charitable trust encouraged equity and diversity and ensured there were an equal share of genders, abilities and backgrounds playing all types of sports and taking part in the programme.
"They come from different communities, and that’s how they connect. so they can contextualise today with the historic of what happened over a hundred years ago.
"It’s pretty hard to turn against different communities when you’ve grown up playing together."
The trust’s founders hope the placing of plaques at peace pitches in Aotearoa, Australia, Samoa, Fiji and Tonga will spur children to ask the question: "What is a peace pitch?"
