As founder and convener of the Global Peace Initiative of Women (GPIW), Ms. Merriam has worked to engage women in peacebuilding activities in conflict and post-conflict regions around the world. She is one of the few women to organize major international interfaith events and has built a global network of renowned women spiritual leaders to foster a stronger role for them.

For the past three years, a major focus of GPIW has been the building of trust and goodwill between Israeli and Palestinian women. To achieve this, Ms. Merriam has organized numerous dialogues with women in the region and convened a major summit of Israeli and Palestinian women leaders at the Dead Sea in Jordan in December 2004 called "Toward Justice and Reconciliation." Based on that model, she is also working toward a conference of Iraqi and US women that will take place in Geneva, Switzerland in 2006.

Ms. Merriam also serves as the co-chair for a global series of youth leadership summits that GPIW is organizing jointly with the United Nations. This series began in Senegal with the Pan-African Youth Leadership Summit in June 2004. Successive summits included one for Asia in Japan, one for Latin American in Brazil, and a follow-up for Africa in Morocco in August 2005. These regional summits will culminate in a Global Youth Leadership Summit at the UN headquarters in New York in August 2006.

The goal of these summits is to mobilize and support a new generation of leaders to work together across regions on peacebuilding as well as the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. These summits have led to numerous on-the-ground projects, including the organization of a Sudan Youth Peace Dialogue, to take place in Sudan in April 2006, under the direction of small delegation of young women from Sudan. Ms. Merriam is also working with the government of Senegal in the organization of a World Summit on Christian-Islamic Dialogue that will take place in Senegal in 2007.

In 2000, Ms. Merriam was one of the chief organizers of the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders that brought to the United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York over 1500 religious leaders from around the world. She subsequently organized a gathering of over 500 women leaders from over 70 countries at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland in October 2002 to focus on the role of women in peacebuilding, which led to the creation of the Global Peace Initiative of Women.

Ms. Merriam also helped establish the Religious Initiative of the World Economic Forum, which brought a multi-faith delegation of religious leaders to the Forum's annual meeting in Davos in 2001, and to its meeting in New York in 2002. Dena Merriam holds a master's degree from Columbia University and has served on the advisory boards of the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, the Manitou Foundation, AIM for Seva in India and is an advisor to the Dharma Drum Mountain Foundation.