The Virtues Project™ is a global grassroots initiative to inspire the practice of virtues in everyday life, sparking a global revolution of kindness, justice, and integrity in more than 100 countries through Facilitators, Master Facilitators, Champions and Virtues Connections. The Virtues Project empowers individuals to live more authentic meaningful lives, families to raise children of compassion
and integrity, educators to create safe, caring, and high performing learning communities, and leaders to encourage excellence and ethics in the work place. It has inspired and mobilized people worldwide to commit acts of service and generosity, to heal violence with virtues. The Five Strategies™ awaken the gifts of character, through inspiring programs, books, and materials that help us to remember who we really are and to live by our highest values. The Virtues Project was founded in Canada in 1991 by Linda Kavelin-Popov, Dr. Dan Popov and John Kavelin. It was honored by the United Nations during the International Year of the Family as a "model global program for families of all cultures". Virtues Project Fiji was introduced into Fiji back in 1994. The first product of the Virtues Project – “The Virtues Guide” which was reviewed and later published as “The Family Virtues Guide” penguin etc – arrived in Fiji in 1994 and was associated with a project to improve the meals in boarding schools throughout Fiji where it was incorporated into the workshops designed to encourage parents to support education for their children. The vast majority of ‘boarding schools’ at that time were situated in rural areas near Fijian villages and the boarding facility was a small house, in some cases a ‘grass hut’, where children from villages miles away stayed from Monday to Friday as the distance to school may involved several hours of walking, a boat ride or the negotiation of swamps and rivers prone to flood. Parents took turns to come to the school and stay for the week to cook and care for all of the children from their village. It was clear that in order for these people to understand the virtues project the first requirement was for the 52 virtues words defined in the book had to be translated into the Fijian language. The Fijian language only contained a few words which covered all the English words which have subtle but distinct meaning – for example “Trust” and “Trustworthiness”. It took 6 years for the 52 words to be defined in a meaningful way. In 2000 Vision Fiji, an NGO dedicated to support children in Fiji undertook a project to have the Virtues Project promoted in the media with the result that all media agencies – newspapers, radio stations and the television station put the “Virtue of the Week” out through its system for three years. The Permanent Secretary for Education was given a copy of “The Virtues Project, Educator’s Guide” and arranged for the purchase of 1,000 copies so that every school in Fiji would have access to this as a component of the moral education program that was being introduced to the “Family Life” program which was made compulsory for all primary school students. Through the cartoons in the newspapers in the media support, the Commissioner of Prisons was attracted to the idea of putting the Virtues Project into the prisons and contacted “Virtues Project Fiji” an NGO established in 2002 to take up the project as an independent agency instead of part of the program of FSP Fiji (now PCDF). Prison officers were trained as facilitators and prisoners received training through the workshops offered and supported by a variety of donor agencies. The Virtues Project was designed for parents to raise children of character. Our children are born into our culture, attitudes and economic level or social level in society and the training parents can provide with the virtues project brings out the potential gift that was given to each child.
