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One Billion Acts of Peace, a global campaign co-chaired by Singaporean and former Google engineer Tan Chade-Meng, was nominated for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize, marking what could be the first time that a Singaporean is part of the coveted international awards.
Created by the PeaceJam Foundation, the campaign aims to inspire one billion acts of peace worldwide by 2019, with 10 key focus areas deemed critical to generating world peace. These include environmental sustainability, poverty, education and human rights.
During his time with Google, Mr Tan made use of the 20% of work time allocated to each employee to pursue their own interest to developed a course called “Search Inside Yourself,” a mindfulness-based training method.
The course gained popularity with thousands of Google employees attending, and Mr Tan eventually “semi-retired” from his engineering job and became Google’s official “Jolly Good Fellow”. As for "Search Inside Yourself", Mr Tan published a book of that same name.
Writing on his blog about the Nobel nomination, Mr Tan said:
"At first, I was a little shell-shocked (in a good way). Then I was over the moon. After that, the weight of the responsibility sunk in. Wow. I work with a wonderful team of more than 100 committed individuals doing amazing, Nobel-Prize-worthy work, and I get to pretend to be their leader. I'm immensely humbled by the team. I will try my best not to mess this one up (more than usual, I mean).
One Billion Acts of Peace needs you, my friends. At this time, our biggest need is for corporate partners. If you would like to consider being one of our corporate partners, we'll so love to hear from you."
The nomination letter for One Billion Acts of Peace was signed by six Nobel Peace Laureates, to which Mr Tan wrote, presumably with some engineering humour, "I'm told that this counts as being nominated 6 times for the Nobel Peace Prize, which I'm guessing is 6 times cooler than being nominated only once, assuming that coolness scales linearly."
The winners for the Nobel Peace Prize will be selected in October this year, and the aware ceremony to take place on 10 December in Oslo, Norway.
Tan Chade-Meng on "Search Inside Yourself"