Submit a Nobel Peace Prize nomination

In 1947, the American Friends Service Committee and Friends Service Council in Britain accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of all Quakers. As a Nobel laureate, AFSC is able to nominate a candidate for the peace prize to the Oslo committee. Each year AFSC takes advantage of this opportunity through a careful deliberative process of discernment, and we appreciate input from Quakers and other supporters. We invite you to participate in our quest for nominees for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.

In choosing its nominee, the AFSC Nobel Committee considers the following criteria:

• The candidate’s commitment to nonviolent methods.
• The quality of the candidate as a person and of her/his sustained contribution to peace.
• The candidate’s work on issues of peace, justice, human dignity, and the integrity of the environment.
• The candidate’s possession of a world view and/or global impact as opposed to a parochial concern.

We also consider:

• Giving attention to candidates from all parts of the world.
• Noting crisis areas and considering candidates related to them only as a Nobel Prize may, by its timeliness and visibility, offer valuable support to a solution to the crisis.
• The relevance of a candidate's work to the work of AFSC or other Quaker experience.

To suggest a nomination online, please carefully review the information on this page, then submit your candidate. Suggested nominations will be accepted until May 1 of each calendar year. Please note that some browsers are incompatible with this form, including Chrome. If you have any trouble, please follow this link to fill out the form.

If you prefer to make a submission on paper, please mail it to the address below. For timely review and preparation of a recommendation to the AFSC Board in November, nominations should be received by May 1.  Please send the name of your candidate along with answers to the questions above and any references to recommended published material by or about the candidate, and your contact information to:  

American Friends Service Committee

Attn: Nobel Peace Prize Nominating Committee

1501 Cherry Street

Philadelphia, PA  19102

Important Reminders:

• The Nobel is not awarded posthumously. Please only submit names of organizations or individuals who are currently active.  
• The deliberations of the Committee are confidential, and we ask that nominators hold confidential the names of those they submit to the committee.

• If you have submitted a possible nominee in the past, there is no need to resubmit them; the Committee maintains an active file of possible nominees from year to year and reviews names from previous years held over for further consideration.

• Please do not submit volumes of data in support of your candidate.  References to publications and websites are sufficient. 

• We appreciate the enthusiasm with which names are put forward, but mounting a lobbying campaign on behalf of a candidate weighs on the staff of AFSC and does not improve the likelihood that the candidate will be selected.
• It has been our practice not to put forward the names of Friends or programs initiated by Friends unless their worthiness as a candidate is so exemplary that to do so would overcome any appearance of being self-serving.
• Nominations made before May of a given calendar year are for the following year's Nobel. After our year-long careful deliberations, we submit our nomination to Oslo by the end of January, and they engage in their own deliberations for several months, announcing the Prize late in the year, around the same time we are usually settling on our nomination for the following year.
• View the list of the AFSC's previous nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.

What will happen to your nomination?

Your nomination will be acknowledged by the clerk of the Committee.  The nomination and supporting information will be provided to the committee members.  It will be discussed at a subsequent telephone conference of the Committee, and taken forward as appropriate.  All nominations receive prayerful consideration. The Committee will meet in October 2013 to make its final determination, which is presented to the AFSC Board for approval in early November.  The Executive Secretary of AFSC sends a letter with supporting documentation to the Nobel Committee in Oslo before February 1.  Once our nomination has been received in Oslo, we will notify all who have sent us candidates of the Quaker nominee for the year.

Thank you for your participation in this important process.

Submit your candidate