Margareta Ingelstam is an educator, writer, editor and a peace activist. She is married to Lars Ingelstam and they have five daughters and an expanding family with grandchildren and one great grandchild.

Ingelstam’s first book was about international adoption as a natural way of creating a family. The book led to the forming of a new Swedish organisation, the Adoption Centre, with Ingelstam as the first chair.

In the seventies Ingelstam worked as a long range planner for new media in the government funded pilot program TV and radio in Education, TRU. Her work included several books on decentralisation and democratisation of media: Whither video? (translated to English), Free Speech?, More voices in radio. As a member of the Swedish parliamentary commission on the future of video, Ingelstam pointed to the consequences of media violence for children. The book “Violence Nurtures Violence” deals primarily with the relations between society, violence and media.

Since the late seventies her main focus has been education, empowerment and advocacy for justice and peace. As a producer and project leader at the Educational Radio and TV of Sweden, Ingelstam contributed to several multimedia productions of the company, e. g. with books such as The Peace Manual (1986), Resistance Without Violence (1988) and Sweden is Unbeatable, a book for a study campaign for a new, global and comprehensive policy for human security (1989). In 1986, the International Year of Peace, the company received a Peace Medal from the United Nations. 1987 she co-produced the film “The Way of Nonviolence” about Hildegard Goss-Mayr and her husband Jean Goss (Hildegard was the recipient of the Niwano Peace Prize 1991).

Ingelstam has been the General Secretary (1982-1983) and President of the Swedish Fellowship of Reconciliation (1983 – 1986) and member of the Steering Committee of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (1984 -1992), an organisation with a membership from all the major spiritual traditions. In 1991 she was a MacArthur Foundation Peace Scholar at Loyola University, Chicago.

In 1987 in Sweden, an international seminar with nonviolent leaders from conflict areas of the world became the starting point for developing a global faith-based civilian peace service. Since then, and full time at Christian Council of Sweden (1995-2002), Ingelstam has been working with initiatives paving the way for a global peace services. Significant realisations have been the Ecumenical Monitoring Program in South Africa 1993-1995 and the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel, 2002 – . Ingelstam was herself an “accompanier” 2003 – 2004. The curriculum “Empowerment for Peace Service” (1995) has been translated and used in programs in Germany and the Balkans. She was the co-editor and co-writer of the books In Search of Peace Builders, 2004, and Peace Agent 1325, 2006.

Margareta Ingelstam received the Martin Luther King Prize in 2008 and “the special prize” of the Nonviolence Foundation of Sweden 2009.