Schools Across Borders is a non-governmental development education organisation, registered in Ireland with charitable status.

We work within secondary schools in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine in order to provide for direct exchanges and encounters between all the participant school groups.

Our schools programme promotes awareness, reflection and actions on the issues and realities of conflict, as experienced and expressed directly by young people.

Our mission is to empower students to recognise and articulate the themes of local and global interdependence, based on our individual and collective responsibilities and roles as citizens committed to promoting universal values and rights.

Now in our seventh school year, we are presently working in 19 schools in Ireland, north and south: 13 in Dublin, 1 in Dundalk and 5 in Belfast (representing both Nationalist and Unionist communities). We also work in 7 public Palestinian schools in Hebron in the West Bank and 3 public Israeli schools in Jerusalem.

That's almost a thousand students in total!

Our programme is appraised by secondary school support services in Ireland, north and south, as well as a number of Development Education practitioners.

In Palestine, we liaise with the Palestinian Ministry of Education and coordinate our project in Hebron through the International Palestinian Youth League, a Palestinian NGO.

We are grant-aided by the Development Education Unit of Irish Aid, the Government of Ireland's programme of assistance to developing countries.

We also receive additional funding from Trocaire, the official overseas development agency of the Catholic Church in Ireland, as well as the Association of School Teachers in Ireland (ASTI), The Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union (SIPTU), and the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC).