Lauren Child: UNESCO Artist for Peace

British author and illustrator Lauren Child is UNESCO's latest Artist for Peace and will be formally inducted in a ceremony at headquarters on December 12. She has won numerous awards for her best-selling children's books featuring now well-known characters such as Charlie and Lola, Clarice Bean, and That Pesky Rat.

This award is a recognition of Child's work with UNESCO's Programme for the Education of Children in Need, which is a program that works to provide education to vulnerable children. This program, created in 1992, has raised over $33 million that has been fully given to over 332 projects in 92 countries.

Child has also shown her dedication to helping deprived in disadvantaged children in numerous ways. One way has been through a three-year agreement between Child and UNESCO signed in June of this year, all royalties and publisher profits of Child's book That Pesky Rat will be donated to UNESCO and will finance various projects for children in need.

Another result of Child and UNESCo's partnership is a project called "My Life as a Story." In this campaign, Child seeks to document stories from children around the world. This project was motivated in part by Child's 2007 trip to Fondation Renacimiento, which is a center for street children in Mexico City. She found, "One of the things [the children] said to me there was that they would really like to be connected to children in other places." Child hopes children would eventually put their stories on the Internet for others. "It is about linking children together, from across the world, through their stories."

For more information, visit My Life as a Story or the Programme for the Education of Children in Need.