WILPF Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty Review Conference Activities

A message from Susi Snyder, Secretary General of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Dear WILPF members and Friends,

More than 100 of you have registered for the WILPF delegation to the nuclear NonProliferation Treaty Review Conference. Nearly 2000 NGO representatives will be gathered in New York for this event.

WILPF members will be participating in lots of different events, you can find a complete listing of all NPT events here.

WILPF members have also organized a lot of great events, and you can find the listing of WILPF events here.

Remember that WILPF, through the Reaching Critical Will project, will be publishing the only daily newsletter covering the NPT, the News In Review. You can either subscribe to that by sending an email to: nir-subscribe AT reachingcriticalwill DOT org, or you can read it online. (Replace AT with @ and DOT with . in the email address.)

Thank you all for your hard work for nuclear abolition,

Susi
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This message was sent to WILPF listservs, in a slightly different form. (I created the hyperlinks and changed the email address in hopes that it wont be spammed by posting it on this site.)

WILPFer on Democracy Now! Today

Rhianna Tyson, the Project Manager of the Reaching Critical Will project, will be on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman today. Rhianna will be discussing the nuclear NonProliferation Treaty review conference and WILPF's activities around the conference.

You can check this page for a local broadcaster of Democracy Now!

May Day Events

Chicago Social Forum
Attention Midwesterners!

In the spirit of the World Social Forum, please join us at the Chicago Social Forum this Sunday, May 1. I will be sitting at an exhibit table selling WILPF resources (and encouraging people to join WILPF). My fellow national board member, Gwen Braxton, will be presenting a racial justice workshop on behalf of the United for Racial Justice, Truth, Reparations, and Restoration (UFORJE) National Campaign.

Website: www.chicagosocialforum.org
Time: 8:00 am to 6:00pm (registration begins at 8, the Morning Plenary begins at 9)
Place: Jones High School, 660 S. State Street

No Nukes! No War! Central Park Rally
Attention New Yorkers and New Englanders!

Please join WILPF, Abolition Now!, and United for Peace & Justice for a May Day March by the U.N. and Rally in Central Park, NYC

March and Rally Details
We will assemble on 1st Ave. from 50th St. north between 11 AM and 12 noon. The march kicks off at 12 noon.

The rally will begin at 2 PM at the Heckscher Ballfields in Central Park and conclude by 6 PM.

The May Day Rally is part of a series of events surrounding the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Seventh Review Conference; May 2- 27, 2005 in New York

Happy 90th Birthday, WILPF!

Today is the official birthday of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. I believe that means the women who met at the Hague 90 years ago officially formed WILPF on April 28, 1915.

In honor of our birthday, the Jane Addams Peace Association announced this year's winners of the Jane Addam's Children's Book Awards.

Since 1953, the Jane Addams Children's Book Awards annually acknowledge books published in the U.S. during the previous year. Books chosen for the Awards effectively address themes or topics that promote peace, justice, world community, and/or equality of the sexes and all races. The books must also meet conventional standards of literary and artistic excellence.

The winner in the Books for Younger Children category is Selavi, That is Life: A Haitian Story of Hope, written and illustrated by Youme Landowne, from Cinco Puntos Press. In this arresting story based on real children, a homeless, nameless boy finds companions in the street who together build a community of survival and a radio station that speaks courage to struggling youth. Illustrations, skilled in their directness and power, striking photographs, and an afterword by Edwidge Dandicat complete this view of contemporary Haitian life.

In the category of Books for Older Children, the winner is With Courage and Cloth: Winning the Fight for a Woman's Right to Vote, by Ann Bausum, published by National Geographic Society. Attractively designed, With Courage and Cloth focuses especially on the period of the woman suffrage movement from 1913 to 1920, when the vote was finally won by determined suffragists. Bausum frankly addresses, in text and graphic archival photographs, the controversies, the failures and the triumphs that prove that it was, indeed, a fight. Impeccable documentation completes the book.

There are also Honor books in both categories. To read the entire press release, please go to JAPA's homepage and click on the Book Awards link on the left side of the page.

The Jane Addams Peace Association is the 501c(3) educational affiliate of WILPF. US WILPF is a 501c(4) organization. For those of you not in tight with IRS codes, that means WILPF can more easily lobby the US government on important peace and justice issues than our sister peace organizations, who must spend the majority of their money on educational activities. There are other implications of the status; but since I'm not an expert on these things I wont attempt to explain them.

Event: GrassRoots Organizing Workshop in New Hampshire

Sha'an Mouliert, a member of the Uniting for Racial Justice, Truth, Reparations, and Restoration (UFORJE) WILPF campaign is organizing the following conference. She will be facilitating Creating Caring Communities, one of UFORJE's Building Beloved Community programs.

Who: GrassRoots Organizing Workshop (GROW) New England
What: A gathering of people new to or experienced with grassroots groups from Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont
When: June 16-19, 2005
Where: World Fellowship Center, Conway, New Hampshire
Why: To learn from each other; understand the big picture of social change; increase skills in working with grassroots groups, be more effective in doing social action; become lifelong organizers for change
Cost: $0-90 (whatever you can pay) for the 3-4 days includes food and housing

For more information or to register contact:
Sha'an Mouliert
mouliert AT vtlink DOT net
(replace capital letters above with appropriate symbols...I am doing this to decrease the amount of spam created by publicly listing Sha'an's email address.)

Introducing a New Member of Our Blog Team

The following post is by Mary Bricker-Jenkins, our incoming Program Chair. (Our membership votes on a new national board every three years and the new board's term begins at the end of our Triennial National Congress.)

mbj (Mary Bricker-Jenkins) said...
This is my first entry. Thanks to CJ for making this possible, and for presenting WILPF so beautifully. Hoping others will do the same, I'll introduce myself:

In WILPF I am on the Cuba Issues Committee (formerly a campaign) and the CEDAW Issues Committee. My special interest within the latter committee -- and in my life-- is on Economic Human Rights and, of course, their relationship to the experience of women.

A newly elected member of the board, I was able to attend one day of the April board meeting in Philadelphia. As an activist since the 1950s, I am accustomed to being in the room with awsome people, but seldom have I experienced such a stunning concentration of brilliance and commitment. Particularly notable was that nearly everyone (maybe everyone) had something informed and incisive to say.

In the rest of my life I teach Social Work at Temple University (soon to retire!) and work with Philadelphia's Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the national Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. My home, when I'm not in Philly, is WIT's End Farm in Tennessee. (WIT's End is where you go when you're already there! The acronym stands for Women in Transition/World in Transformation.)

I look forward to our work together for peace and justice.
mbj

Howdy from a WILPFer

My name is C.J. Minster. I'm the At Large Membership Representative on the US WILPF national board. I joined WILPF in 1999, when I was a senior at Wellesley College. At the time, I was overwhelmed by the fact that an organization exists that combines social justice and anti-war activism. After all, no justice, no peace. Since I graduated college, I have been an active member of the Boston and Los Angeles branches and have been on the national board for the last two and a half years. I'm also involved in the Middle East issue committee, which was recently selected to become a national campaign.

Regardless of your age or gender, WILPF is the perfect organization to make your primary home as an activist. Unlike many American organizations, we do not operate primarily through professional activists. Our amazing six person staff in Philadelphia do fabulous work for WILPF and the peace movement, but we also offer tons of leadership opportunities for members. We have active branches all around the country and our at large members gather electronically via a listserv. There's a lot more that should be said about the benefits of membership, but for now I'll direct you to US WILPF's website for more information.

In the meantime, please check out these affiliated websites:
Peace Rave, the blog of US WILPF's fabulous Philly staff
Counting the Cost, a project sponsored by US WILPF to raise awareness of the human cost of the Iraqi war
Chicken Foot Stew, my personal political blog