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CORVALLIS, Ore. - Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams will visit Oregon State University April 23-25, where she will encourage Pacific Northwest high school students, teachers and OSU students to create a better world through community service and global action.

Williams will present a free public lecture on Friday, April 23, in the Memorial Union ballroom on campus. Her talk, "When Ordinary People Achieve Extraordinary Things," begins at 7:30 p.m.

The visit of Williams, who won the Nobel Prize in 1997 for her work to ban landmines, is part of PeaceJam, an international education program that works with Nobel Prize laureates to engage youth in volunteerism. PeaceJam is designed to encourage youths to transform themselves, their local communities and, ultimately, the world.

Williams' visit is sponsored by the OSU Division of Student Affairs and the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture for World Peace.

Three hundred youth, teachers and college mentors will attend the two-day PeaceJam conference April 24-25 at OSU. Forty OSU students will serve as mentors during the conference. The emcee for the conference is Rudy Balles, a gang violence prevention specialist who participated in Rocky Mountain PeaceJam as a teenager, which he says changed the direction of his life.

"Rudy is inspiring," said Ann Robinson, a student media adviser and campus coordinator of PeaceJam. "Each year we have a chance to give young people global education and then we do everything in our power to feed their passion to create positive change in the world

"This is our sixth PeaceJam and our fifth Nobel laureate," she added. "The high school and college students personally interact with the Nobel Prize recipient and while they are here, the students will contribute 600 hours in service to a dozen local non-profit organizations in our community."

Youths from Solano County, Calif., to Whidbey Island Wash., will spend the weekend on campus attending PeaceJam. The Solano County students come from 10 different high schools in and around Fairfield and have expressed a commitment to working toward a more just and peaceful world.

Students will present to Williams the service work they have been doing in their respective communities - part of the Global Call to Action, a movement inspired by the 12 Nobel Peace laureates who sit on the PeaceJam Foundation's international board of directors.

For more information, go online to http://oregonstate.edu/studentaffairs/peacejam/