Jok Abraham Thon is Partnership Associate for CorpsAfrica. He is an educational leader from South Sudan who brings 13 years of experience in community development, transformational education, social and civic entrepreneurship, and intercultural peacebuilding. Jok’s resilience and vision for a better world is rooted in his lived experiences of displacement and conflict across his childhood and his emerging leadership of his refugee community in his early adulthood, culminating in his role as one of the young signers of the 2011 referendum establishing the new nation of South Sudan. In 2016, Jok established Promised Land Secondary School, which has grown into a K-12 school and adult education complex with more than 1500 students and is among the most innovative and top performing schools in the country, and is a cornerstone of Jok’s broader peacebuilding education campaign, Changing Minds from Bullets to Books. Jok has been recognized widely as an emerging African leader and visionary change agent. He was a Mandela Washington Fellow in the U.S. State Department’s YALI Program in 2018. In 2019, he received the Ron Kovic MY HERO Peace Prize for the Bullets to Books documentary. In 2021 he received the Billion Acts of Peace award and, most recently, in 2022-2024, he was the inaugural Global Peaceworker Fellow of The Shriver Center at University of Maryland Baltimore County. He serves as the African Union Youth Charter Advocate for South Sudan, promoting the Youth Empowerment Policy Act. Jok holds a Master’s in Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Leadership and a Graduate Certificate in Community Leadership. He believes that supporting African youth in education and civic leadership is the path through which Africa’s nations will manifest their vibrant futures.