The Exchange Project

This year’s Peace Development Award will go to Rev. Dr. Andrea Ayvazian. The event will take place on September 25th in Amherst, as part of the Peace Development Fund’s 30^th Anniversary Celebration. Rev. Ayvazian was the creator and first Director of PDF’s Exchange Project. She has been active in movements for social and political change since 1970. An anti-racism educator, published poet, and singer/songwriter with three albums and CDs in circulation, Andrea has been living in the Pioneer Valley since 1980. She is now Senior Pastor of the Haydenville Congregational Church.

From The Exchange Project: Summer 1995

“The Early Years of PDF’s Exchange Project: A Look Back with Meg Gage and Andrea Ayvazian”

Recently, Exchange Project Director Kenneth Jones talked with Meg Gage, co-founder and first Executive Director of the Peace Development Fund, and Andrea Ayvazian, the creator and first Director of the Exchange Project, about the origins of the program ten years ago.

KJ: How and why did the Exchange Project start?

MG: The EP grew out of our grantmaking program at PDF, where we realized how weak organizationally some of the groups were. There were questions about whether they could even use the money; it was like putting water into a basket that has a big hole in the bottom. I remember when I was researching proposals I would ask groups what their budget was, and they’d say, “Well, I don’t know – we don’t have a budget.” And I’d say, “Well, how much do you think you’re going to spend this year?” And they’d say, “Well. As much as we raise,” and I’d say, “Well, how much do you think you’re going to raise?” And they’d say, “Well, as much as we can!”

KJ: What did that tell you about such organizations?

MG: Obviously, it’s impossible to hire staff, impossible to do anything with program planning like this. You’re reduced to planning a series of events. So I found myself doing training over the phone as I researched these proposals: “Why don’t you try this… have you thought of that… maybe you need to change this way of thinking…” It became clear quite early on, that groups really need the technical assistance as much as they need the money.

KJ: What kind of training was available ten years ago?

MG: The Youth Project had a staff of six around the country who were very autonomous in terms of their own groups. They weren’t available to go traveling or to go to strategic places and work with groups somebody suggested they work with. Kim Klein was doing fund-raising and boards. Nobody that I knew of was doing long-range planning or the talks on burnout that we gave a lot. We were very lucky to hire Andrea, because she developed whole units that really nobody had ever tried before. Especially around leadership issues, what she called the “seven deadly sins.” These really hit on some key issues that many groups were struggling with. It was extraordinary the creativity that Andrea had in developing the curricula and also the high energy level to get herself out there all over the place all the time.

AA: PDF invested in me, because at first the EP was just me. Initially, I turned to Meg, who has a background in training and performance, and who had been talking to groups on the phone. I spent days shadowing and co-training with Kim Klein, practicing with Meg, going to see Grant Ingle and every trainer we could find. We also evaluated very carefully what groups were telling us – and they were very frank – and we would change it when something didn’t work.

KJ: What were you teaching and how did you decide just what to teach?

MG: I’ve learned a lot from Andrea about the importance of a real curriculum. Real material is something to be learned, it’s not just group process. There is a body of information that people learn, and then have help implementing: I think that has always been one of the strengths of the EP program. The second great strength was Andrea’s natural instinct for constant evaluation, refining and honing down what you want to do, then looking back and seeing how we did. Our material was always under development. This was balanced with Andrea’s personal discipline and rigor – a real intellectual rigor that was expansive and open, not rigid.

AA: Our content was very clear – it was sort of empowerment through education. People came with “tool boxes,” but they were missing some key wrenches, like board contracts and development plans. We could fill their tool boxes with concrete skills, not just handholding, although we also listened. A trainer can just be a good talker, and people will like you and they will feel good, but if you haven’t got content and some kind of rigorous curriculum that is directly shaped to what they need, it’s kind of a waste of time.

KJ: What was happening in those first trainings?

AA: The unbelievably fortuitous thing that happened was that we were able to subcontract Kim Klein to be part of the EP. Kim met us on the road from California to Little Rock to Tampa, and brought her genius. There is no trainer like Kim in terms of background, authority, humor, presence, and experience. We got feedback that we worked people very hard and that we needed to play more, and so we started adding things like singing them to sleep with guitars and singing to wake them up. The energy level you wouldn’t believe – it was fun!

KJ: Who else was working with you in those early days?

AA: After a year, we hired Andy Rothschild, who worked part-time as administrator, and part-time as a trainer. Groups loved him! We worked closely with Kim for two and a half years and then decided we needed a full-time trainer on staff, so we hired Randy Kehler. Randy not only did beautiful trainings on boards and long-range planning, but he would also sit up late at night at trainings and discuss strategy and the Freeze with a level of wisdom and authority that was extremely significant.

KJ: How would you sum up your experiences working with the EP?

AA: The strongest feeling I have is gratitude. We brought a good program, solid people, a good curriculum. But it was the people. They were so giving and loving and patient. We stumbled a lot, tried things that didn’t work, so then we had to really revamp. But people were so generous of spirit. I worked hard and I gave a lot, but I received so much more back than I could have given in those five plus years.

MG: I think the EP training program is important because it acknowledges how essential it is that we constantly work on our organizations and how we relate to each other doing this work. The techniques and technical things are important – they embody what the work is about. The means are as important as the ends in some ways. So we need to continue to build organizations that become the way we think the world should be – the only way to peace is peace. We need to be what we are seeking and I think with the training program that’s what the message really is, that it’s here and now. We need to stop being racist, we need to build organizations that value people, that accomplish their goals and build a movement. I’ve always felt the training component has been at least as important, if not more important than the grantmaking.

AA: Those really were life-changing years for me. They made me so full of life about social change, what we could do, how many people are dedicated and tenacious, and endure, and what a heartbeat the movement in this country really has.

Hotel Workers Still at Risk

CREDIT: Associated Press, Yahoo News

The recent news about the former Director of the International Money Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the alleged assault on a hotel worker in New York, raises issues about hotel workers and a safe workplace that the Peace Development Fund began addressing long ago. In this 1994 article, hotel workers were organizing for better working conditions, confronting the use of dangerous chemicals in the workplace, and detailing the vulnerability of immigrant workers. It is equally important today to address the safety and security of hotel workers, not only in regards to management practices, but regarding the very guests the hotel serves.

from Peace Developments, Fall 1994, No. 37

“A Closer Look: Victory Over Fear”

The Hotel Workers Organizing Committee, Portland, OR

“I have worked in this luxury hotel for many years. Of all the people in my department, only three are eligible for any health benefits. The rest of us just hope we don’t get sick.”

“Whenever I use the chemicals to clean the bathtub, my nose starts bleeding.”

“The hotel I work at out by the airport decided to stop all employee food privileges. This means no employee menu, no employee receiving any of the leftover banquet food. A lot of the workers depended upon eating at work; it really made a difference for so many workers who are very poor.”

“If you speak up you either get fired or have your hours cut. What are you supposed to do? I complained on May 5 and I’ve had no hours since, even though I’m on schedule.”

– Workers from non-union hotels testifying at a public hearing, as  quoted in the Northwest Labor Press, Vol. 94, No. 19 

At a public hearing in September, 1993 workers from some of Portland’s Class A downtown and airport hotels testified before a panel of government, religious, and community leaders, including the Labor Commissioner and the City Coordinator of Refugees. With some wearing masks out of fear of reprisal, they described long hours without break, poverty wages, dangerous workplace hazards, employee intimidation and discrimination. The hearing generated an exciting amount of community support and public awareness of hotel workers’ struggles. For many of those at the hearing, the testimony was news. Few were aware of the horrendous working and living conditions of this exploited sector of the economy.

The hearing was organized by the Hotel Workers Organizing Committee (HWOC). Initially a project of the Center for Third Organizing and the Hotel Employees International Union, HWOC began in 1991 with the recruitment and training of young activists of color who launched an organizing campaign to address hotel workers’ struggles for representation. The hearing was followed by a Founding Convention bringing over 140 workers, their families and supporters to elect a Board, to adopt a Hotel Workers Bill of Rights as the centerpiece for organizing, and to celebrate a victory over fear in the workplace.

“Since the Founding Convention,” says Kyle Kajihiro, a leading organizer of HWOC, “we have built our leadership, forming committees to do initial contacts, surveys and so forth. Our core group are mostly hotel workers and community allies and families of workers – the majority are people of color, most of them immigrants.”

Hotel workers are among the lowest paid urban workers in Portland, many of them holding two jobs to support their families, many forced to rely on public assistance to supplement their income. Thousands of them have no medical insurance coverage for themselves or their families. And many of these, especially “back of the house” workers who have no contact with guests, are often exposed to highly toxic cleaning chemicals, without information to redress damage done – a form of environmental injustice that has been virtually ignored. (Ironically, for seasonal workers who do agricultural work, some of the very same chemicals that have been banned in insecticides in the field may show up in disinfectants in the hotel.)

In Portland, hotel workers are women and men of Vietnamese, Filipina, Latina, African American, Ethiopian, Brazilian and Eastern European descent. The majority are recent immigrants, many of whom don’t speak English, don’t know their rights, and don’t have the means to advocate for themselves. Lacking structures to bring them together in their communities, they are largely divided and isolated from each other.

The place of the immigrant worker in the context of our shifting economy is highlighted by the growing atmosphere of racism and scapegoating against poor people in general. In the Northwest, with the massive downsizing of the timber industry, immigrants bear the brunt of the rage of white male workers who have lost their jobs in record numbers. In a twist of illogic, as cities and towns turn to the hotel/tourist industry for survival, the immigrant working at the lowest of wages without security is seen as responsible for the plight of the unemployed.

“You see this sort of attitude in the workplace as well,” says Kajihiro, “in the comments supervisors make – ‘you should be thankful you’ve got a job’ – that kind of thing. People are divided along ethnic lines – it’s an intentional segregation. Front-of-the-house workers who meet with the guests, tend to be younger, Anglo, a more privileged group – their concerns are handled by management before those of the janitors, room cleaners, dishwashers or laundry workers. Back of the house, the policy is to keep people apart, even working on different floors. A supervisor may promote Filipinas while putting down Mexicanas. They tell the Chinese, ‘Don’t trust the Filipinos,’ and the Vietnamese, ‘Don’t trust the Chinese,’ and so forth. It goes on and on.”

Assaulted by racism, isolated in their neighborhoods, intimidated at their workplace, and threatened by unsafe working conditions, until now hotel workers have had no organization to bring them together or to help them address their grievances or alleviate their underlying fear.

“Fear among workers is so high it is really inhumane,” says Kajihiro. “To give an example: at the Red Lion Coliseum a room cleaner, Mexican and pregnant at the time, began to feel acute pains while at work. When she asked her supervisor for permission to leave, he told her to finish her work or lose her job. By four in the afternoon, the pain was unbearable. Her friends rushed her to the hospital where she had a miscarriage. The doctor told her it was a case of employer neglect and that she could sue. But like many immigrant workers, she was afraid and went silent about it. We find this is very common: there are many miscarriages, and we are looking into it.”

Visibility also means helping to allay workers’ fears of organizing. Their fear is well grounded, says Kajihiro, but is also the major obstacle to making change. Addressing this problem, HWOC organizes in the communities, going to where the workers live, meeting them through their social institutions: clubs, associations, churches. “Our endorsement by community groups is key; it has helped establish credibility with the workers, making the links with our issues. We hold meetings in the most appropriate ways. We suggest that people bring friends and co-workers to their houses, discuss the problems in their own language.  If this is too threatening, because it’s dangerous to be seen having meetings, then we suggest a neutral place – a church, a refugee center.”

“Our work does not grow by leaps and bounds; it’s very methodical. The real victories, the significant milestones, are to have workers’ fears transformed into hope. When I can meet individually with workers, have them share their stories with me, help them to get in touch with their sense of self respect and turn their fear to hope, this is everything. When you can do that with someone, that person becomes a leader. They may be reminded of the past, but they’re never going to go back. They become the leaders of their co-workers; it is they who insure the success of the organizing. We can actually change this situation if we stick together. This is social change, the kernel of it.”

As PDF connects with groups like HWOC, we find ourselves in a new framework, addressing a configuration of issues that results from the larger picture: the flight of capital at the expense of the worker; the creation and influx of new immigrants in a changing world structure. If, in the Northwest and elsewhere, the “green movement” had brought the fate of our natural resources and wilderness to the social consciousness at large, the realities of environmental injustice – racism, workplace contamination and economic victimization – have not yet entered the public and political debate. Organizations like HWOC are effective on two fronts: by organizing hotel workers to address unfair, dangerous and demoralizing working conditions, they are helping to strengthen Oregon’s labor movement in general; and by bringing to light the realities of hotel workers and other service sector laborers, they are helping redefine the agenda of the progressive community.

CREDIT: Associated Press, Yahoo News

Peace and Freedom Riders

The Peace Development Fund has been a strong supporter of nonviolence training, from early work with youth, schools and Teaching Peace, to the Kingian nonviolence training sponsored by PDF in many parts of the country (pictured right), to Restorative Justice.

“Violence is the language of the inarticulate,” says Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr. (below), who has worked with PDF staff and Board on Kingian nonviolence training.  Dr. LaFayette, one of the Freedom Riders recently seen in the PBS documentary of the same name, will help celebrate PDF’s 30^th Anniversary at the Amherst Cinema (Amherst, MA) on September 25^th.  As the story below shows, PDF has consistently funded groups seeking to articulate a new, peaceful reality and bring change to their communities.

from Peace Developments, Spring 1989

A Closer Look: Conflict Resolution: The Fourth “Basic”?  The Wayne State Center, Detroit

Over the last several years, the improvement of our public schools has emerged as a leading motif in political campaigns.  Less than a decade ago, candidate Ronald Reagan vowed to eliminate the Department of Education; now his successor wants to be remembered as “The Education President.”  But while politicians and journalists argue over the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer in the classroom, the read business of learning is being disrupted by a rising level of conflict and violence.

The intensity of this violence is almost inconceivable: in Detroit, for example, school administrators ruled recently that a child cannot enter into mediation armed with a weapon.  Those of us who remember an orderly and instructive time in grade school might want to believe that this is an extreme case – in fact, the situation in Detroit’s inner-city public schools is typical of conditions across the country.

But while schools in similarly troubled areas elsewhere are calling in police officers to guard students and teachers, Detroit is taking a different tack.  There, a PDF-supported program run by the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies of Wayne State University  is developing an innovative middle school curriculum that will teach young people how to resolve their disputes without violence.

Lillian Genser has been director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies for over twenty years.  During that time she has seen public enthusiasm for traditional peace issues ebb and flow, usually in response to the level of world tensions.  However, interest in conflict resolution for the schools has continually expanded.  Lillian Genser believes this is a direct response to the degree of violence in the schools.

But what is conflict resolution for school-age children?  Can it really make a difference in an environment where schools are reduced to using airport-style metal detectors to keep knives and firearms out of the classroom?

In fact, conflict resolution means many different things.  In many cases, students are chosen (or elected by their classmates) to serve as dispute mediators.  They receive special training and are available to other students who are willing to submit their difference to mediation.

The Wayne State Center’s project takes conflict considerably further.  It is introducing into Detroit’s middle school classrooms an integrated curriculum that teaches a range of skills to help children deal with the conditions of peace and non-violence through self-esteem and respect for the rights of others.

And school-based conflict resolution doesn’t stop with the individual: in many curricula, the link between small and large, between playgroups and disagreements and international confrontation, is often made explicit.  According to Lillian Genser, most school programs are based on a foundation of human rights education: “The integration of the global and the individual is fundamentally important.  Otherwise you never approach the roots of the problem.”  In Detroit, children learn to think about the global implications of violence through education about legal systems and training in human rights.  Classes have made trips to the Detroit Holocaust Memorial and local Afro-American Museum, and they plan to visit a Sanctuary Church in the future.

In additional, Lillian Genser points out that “what is left out of a curriculum makes as much of a statement as what is included.  We are introducing the language of conflict resolution to the schools in ways as subtle as the words in a spelling bee.”  Children, after all, are astonishingly perceptive beings: they learn by picking up on hints and clues that we as adults have long since ceased to notice.

The key to success in conflict resolution is broad participation by different sectors of the community.  The Wayne State Center aims to train individuals in various professions – for example, police and teachers – who can then convey the methods and benefits of dispute resolution back to their peers.  Even the most skilled program of conflict resolution in schools will lose effectiveness if the students receive a conflicting message for society at large.

For the same reason, conflict resolution has to become an integral part of the regular curriculum for both teachers and students.  Lillian Genser believes that a self-sustaining culture of non-violent mediation among children can come about “only if we are able to institutionalize a process so that the lessons can be internalized.  Conflict resolution cannot be simply another ‘activity,’ competing with other extracurricular opportunities.”

In fact, many school districts and state legislatures are now mandating, or, as in Michigan, “encouraging” the institution of such programs for children in the public schools.  Los Angeles, for example, has instituted comprehensive dispute resolution programs in its public schools, and PDF has helped to fund such projects in places as dissimilar as New York City and rural Abingdon, Virginia.  While peace education remains under attack from certain corners (the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, for example), more and more educators are appreciating its contributions toward an innovative atmosphere of learning in the classroom.  “People are unaware of what is possible,” says Lillian Genser.  “It was the so-called peace educators who put China back into the school curriculum well before Nixon’s ‘opening.’  And they were the ones who first focused attention on the global character of environmental pollution.”

We should remember that conflict resolution in the schools doesn’t seek to eliminate conflict – only to help students better deal with disputes.  Conflict is the natural result of our differing needs; learning how to weigh those needs and devise an equitable solution without violence and rancor is an indispensable skill for living in the nuclear age.  It is a skill which is learned, as Lillian Genser says, “the earlier, the better.”  The work that the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies is doing among middle schoolers, approaching young people before their coming preoccupation with high school graduation and jobs, is providing a model for similar programs in middle schools elsewhere.

However, it is often an exceedingly difficult and complex task to introduce conflict resolution into local schools.  Few districts have the excess funding to support programs not considered “basic.”  And even beyond the challenge of finding money, the kind of careful and patient planning that must precede any successful implementation often goes undone.  Without a solid analysis of the school’s structure and environment, as well as that of its community base, a project is bound to fail before it can ever build momentum.  Of course, this is especially true in poorer communities, where tight budgets and eroding tax bases make for even more skepticism on the part of local citizens.

Nevertheless, we are convinced that such programs are indispensable to the improvement for our schools.  At their most basic level, they make for a better learning environment by alleviating the level of violence.  At their best, they help to make young people champions of peace.  Conflict resolution in the schools deserves our advocacy, and the Peace Development Fund is proud to be a supporter of the effort.

Taking on Corporate America–and Winning!

The Peace Development Fund has always been an early funder of small groups that take on the behemoths, whether they be in the government or corporate sector. INFACT, a grantee in 1985, was a young and small organization at that time, but had already waged a successful fight that brought about significant reforms in the life-threatening marketing of infant formula in poor countries. Thanks to funding from the Peace Development Fund in the first days of their campaign against nuclear weapons-maker General Electric, they soon brought down that “Goliath.”

Reporting on the fight against GE, they recall, “Our international boycott of GE products cost the company over $100 million in lost medical equipment sales. Major retail stores including Safeway and Target began stocking light bulbs made by other companies. In 1993, GE caved under enormous public pressure and moved out of the nuclear weapons business. When our campaign began, the world was on the brink of nuclear annihilation: 50,000 nuclear warheads were on constant alert and the U.S. was building five nuclear bombs a day. At the close of the campaign, no nuclear bombs were in production on American soil. Allied organizations continue to work toward the elimination of weapons of mass destruction.”

INFACT, now called Corporate Accountability International, is no longer the small, young “David.” They have gone on to many more successful victories, including Challenging Big Tobacco and a highly visible Corporate Hall of Shame. We are proud that PDF’s early support has allowed them to win and flourish.  Like PDF, they can show 30+ years of extraordinary and effective work, “Setting the New Standard: Corporate Accountability.”

from Peace Developments, Winter 85-86

“INFACT Aims Slingshot at GE”

In a David and Goliath confrontation that stirs the imagination, one of the multibillion-dollar corporations most deeply involved in the nuclear weapons business is being challenged with – ironing boards.

The ironing boards, the latest thing in literature tables, are popping up on the streets of Boston, Minneapolis, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay area. They are used by volunteer activists for INFACT, the organization that initiated – and won – the famous international Nestle Boycott. INFACT is now turning its spotlights on General Electric, which claims to “Bring Good Things to Life,” but which also brings us many essential parts of nuclear weapons systems.

From those ironing boards, in the past ten months, 2,721 volunteers have generated 185,172 individually signed messages of opposition to eleven major weapons corporations including GTE, Morton Thiokol, Rockwell International, General Electric, Westinghouse, and Monsanto.

INFACT began in 1976 with a handful of people in Minneapolis who were concerned about infant-formula abuse in Third World countries. It has grown to become an international people’s organization whose purpose is to stop the abuses or transnational corporations that endanger the health and survival of people all over the world.

Thousands of people working together in the effective Nestle infant formula campaign changed the practices of the world’s largest food corporation. INFACT is certain that thousands of people working together can also bring some changes in the nuclear weapons industry.

“People just don’t accept that nuclear weapons give us security,” says Ruth Shy, national director of the Nuclear Weaponmakers Campaign. “They want to challenge the corporations about their role in the nuclear weapons network. It’s exciting!”

The group sees the greatest threat to global survival today as the production and aggressive promotion of nuclear weapons by the multibillion-dollar weapons industry. With so much money at stake, weapons transnationals are involved at every level of the nuclear weapons chain: creating, developing, promoting, producing, and profiting from weapons of mass destruction. They are an invisible force in the decision-making process in Congress.

The Weaponmakers Campaign has begun by exposing and publicly challenging the role of the weapons industry in the spiraling arms buildup.

Now the campaign is shifting to concentrate on General Electric, the country’s third largest maker of primary nuclear warfare systems, involved in the B-1B and Stealth bombers, Trident, MX, and “Star Wars,” and maker of the neutron generators that prime the initiation of the chain reaction within nuclear bombs. GE was heavily involved in the Manhattan Project and is a prime example, INFACT believes, of how the nuclear weapons industry had influenced and engineered nuclear weapons policy for more than 40 years. Since GE’s work is critical to the production of so many nuclear weapons systems, INFACT’s focus on this one manufacturer can have an impact on the entire industry.

“We feel good about this campaign,” Ruth Shy says. “People want something concrete they can do, and we offer them that opportunity,” referring to a highly effective mail campaign to GE. In the first phase of the GE campaign, INFACT volunteers are exposing GE’s role and issuing a public challenge to GE to live up to its corporate motto and stop making and promoting nuclear weapons. The challenge is being made by tens of thousands of people what are signing postcards to GE with an anti-nuclear message.

A replay of David and Goliath? Perhaps. But let’s not forget who won.

Nuclear Repercussions

It’s so easy to make a mistake.  Or not believe that a tsunami big enough to damage a nuclear energy facility will ever wash ashore.  Or forget all the collateral damage that the race for nuclear weapons during the Cold War caused—and is still causing in our grassroots communities.  Let’s remember, while we watch with horror what’s happening in Japan today.

At the Peace Development Fund, we are committed to making this message heard.  Let’s hope that the lesson will finally get through.

from Peace Developments, Summer 1989

“The Human Cost of Nuclear Weapons Production”

The chances are good that you’ve passed them, unknowingly, while driving on the highways in your own state: a seemingly unremarkable convoy of one truck and two or more escort vehicles.  You probably didn’t event realize they were together – the escorts might have been Chevy Suburbans, or Beechcraft Motor Homes, or even a 40-passenger bus.  And the truck would have been unmarked, nothing to indicate its contents or attract attention.  A perfectly ordinary truck: why should you notice?

In fact, hundreds of trucks like these are under contract to the Department of Energy (DOE), a misnamed bureaucracy which spends more than 65% of its funds to make nuclear weapons.  Every day of the year they travel our public roads hauling refined uranium, plutonium, and tritium gas between the widespread reactor facilities and assembly plants that make up our H-bomb production network.  From 1976 through 1987, these trucks were involved in over 170 accidents on highways from New York to California.  At least once, torpedoes tipped with nuclear warheads have rolled off the bed of a speeding truck onto a metropolitan interstate highway.

Alarming though it may be, the transportation of highly radioactive materials is only a small part of the process of making nuclear weapons.  Some of the most serious environmental threats come from pollution at the facilities themselves.  Recent news reports have focused attention on problems at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina and the Hanford Reservation in Washington, where production reactors make plutonium and tritium.  But these are only two of the thirteen DOE production sites, each of which has an ample record of mismanagement and disregard for the health of workers and townspeople.  In Tennessee, the Oak Ridge facility has released over 23,000 pounds of uranium into the air; at Fernald, in Ohio, six open pits contain a deadly tea of 11 million pound of uranium and other radioactive substances; in Ohio, plutonium from the Mound Laboratory has contaminated local ponds and a public park where children swim and play; and the list could go on.  Epidemiological surveys of surrounding populations are beginning to turn up hard evidence of the hazards that researchers long suspected: high cancer rates, infant leukemia, and genetically-associated deformities.

These problems won’t go away soon: plutonium-239, for example, the substance which initiates a nuclear explosion, has a half-life of 24,000 years.  If you care to figure it, it generally takes eleven half-lives for a substance to decay to “safe levels.”

In response to the health and environmental threat pose by weapons production, anti-nuclear citizen’s campaigns are turning toward new ways of organizing.  Bill Mitchell of the Nuclear Safety Campaign in Seattle sees an increasing sophistication among community-based organizations working in areas surrounding weapons production facilities.

“We’re seeing more and more emphasis on the research, litigation, and advocacy aspects of anti-nuclear activism,” says Mitchell.  “Many groups continue to sponsor civil disobedience actions, but they’re blending that with a commitment to outreach through public exposure of the issue.  Activists are learning the benefits of careful research through Freedom of Information Act requests and the like.”

While large national organizations such as Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council have been instrumental in providing technical and lobbying support, equally important is the grassroots organizing in neighborhoods surrounding weapons facilities.

These efforts are often complicated: offending facilities are also frequently the main source of livelihood for local residents.  Citizens who speak out for closing bomb factories are often met with suspicion, or worse, by their neighbors.  Management at the private facilities – and the Department of Energy – try to reinforce such suspicions by blaming activists and the media when plants are closed, even when financial problems and gross health risks are the cause.

In many ways, the problems at our nation’s nuclear weapons facilities represent deeper issues at the heart of our national infatuation with “the nuclear deterrent,” as policy makers call our immense arsenal.  For fifty years, civilian control over the military has been eroded by a special relationship between contractors and the Pentagon, and by the secrecy of nominally independent agencies like the Department of Energy.  The energy and sophistication of groups like the Nuclear Safety Campaign and Colorado Peace Network are helping to reestablish a measure of control over the contractors’ unsupervised conduct.  The impressive research and legal challenges being used alongside more traditional organizing activities is a measure of how far the peace movement has come.  Our alliance and environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, and our dialogue with trade union groups concerned for the health of employees indicates the way toward a more secure future – a future when the need for a national defense no longer gives cover to those who poison our water and air.

It’s a lesson in their perfect evil: weapons of mass destruction need not be detonated to bring suffering and death.  If we are going to teach that to the DOE and the profiteers who run its facilities, we have to start at the grassroots.  Thanks to organizers and activist in the peace and environmental movements, the lesson may finally be getting through.

Grassroots Group Vanishes

More than a decade ago, the North Carolina Lambda Youth Network aimed to inspire real social change.   They started in the LGBT community, particularly with teens, to deal with their issues and problems in terms of their own identity.  But by the middle of the decade, this promising group had disappeared.  What happened?

What happend to this group?

We don’t know.  Sometimes we bet on a group and make a grant, provide training (in this case, we also sent a Peace Development Fund trainer to work with them, Tema Okun), and then the group members move on or the group disbands or merges with another.  That’s part of the dynamic of grassroots organizing.  Hopefully what they learned with PDF’s support has stood them in good stead for the rest of their careers.

Anyway, we’d love to know if that’s so!

from Peace Developments, Winter 2000

“Challenging Oppression from the Inside and OUT!”

When Zabrina Aleguire, outreach and education coordinator – one of the first young people hired to the North Carolina Lambda Youth Network staff – talks about the organization, her voice gets a lilt and it is clear that she is involved in something challenging and exciting. Her work is a calling, not unlike most of the people who believe that social justice is a lifetime commitment. She speaks for her peers from a place of strength when she says emphatically: “Young people really have amazing potential to be powerful social change agents. They have a lot of vision pragmatism, experience, and desire to learn. North Carolina Lambda Youth Network (NCLYN) is a youth-led organization with a vision, pragmatism, experience, and desire to learn.”

North Carolina Lambda Youth Network (NCLYN) is a youth-led organization with a vision and desire to see real social change, beginning with work with the youth in gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities. Founded in July 1996, it is a grassroots organization with both a statewide and a local focus.

It is especially striking to note that these young people have come together under a variety of circumstances. They are intimately challenged not only with the task of working toward social justice, but also within a framework of identifying themselves in terms of their sexual and social orientation. This is not easy work, but movement building has been the focus from the beginning. There are those within LGBT communities who respond that the movement should focus on getting legal rights passed for LGBT people. Zabrina has a different take: It is incomplete to think only in one way. While homophobia is an issue, [oppression] isn’t just one issue. It is very linked.” She stresses that NCLYN works hard not to continue perpetuating the same oppressions of class, race, and gender that exist within the mainstream gay and lesbian movement.

Within the words that are poignant and idealistic, is also a passion that moves NCLYN to see real change happen through programs that create spaces for young people to make the vision real. A Drop-In night across the three cities that make up Raleigh-Durham, Chapel Hill triangle provides and opportunity for young people in the area to get to know one another. Soul Circle provides a network for people of color to talk about issues pertinent to their communities. The Rainbow Youth Coalition consists of educators, young people, and community members who are working to make schools a safe place for young people to learn,

Another important component is the continued learning within the network of a Summer Leadership Institute. Again, Zabrina lights up to share more about the institute. She speaks highly of the fact that real training on social justice issues takes place. It really moves her because it is almost completely volunteer run, and not very staff dependent. The facilitators for the workshops are previous graduates of the institute. Fifteen young people participate in the institute. They pick an organization within the Raleigh-Durham, Chapel Hill triangle to work on a social service project, like an elder center or daycare. After the project day ends, they come back to share some of what they are learning and try to place it in the context of organizing for social justice. There is a sense of intense training, of group bonding.

NCLYN is working with PDF’s Exchange Project to do dismantling racism workshops. It is their hope to be able to continue implementing concrete strategies that will help them become a truly antiracist organization. They are planning for their whole organization to go through training this summer with trainers for the EP.

They have had to cross some tough roads in committing to this process. Recently, the staff and board decided not to attend a particular workshop that is usually quite valuable. The workshop is a networking of LGBT students attending southern colleges. However, the conference is in South Carolina. NCLYN is standing with the NAACP, which has called for a boycott of the state, in protest of their refusal to take down the confederate flag over the statehouse. NCLYN plans to do a press release explaining why they are not attending the meeting.

Of course, there are other real and concrete challenges to this work. Many don’t believe that young people can be responsible to organize and lead movements. There is a sense that leadership doesn’t come until a certain “mystified” age. Many adults who are very supportive still can’t let go of their own assumptions about ways to approach difficult problems. Acknowledging that there are many things to learn is also not the easiest thing for the young people themselves. And finding funding is a significant issue; traditional foundations are not always willing to take chances on youth leadership, and it is especially challenging to get support in the south about LGBT issues in general.

Zabrina also shared that while there is some parental support, some parents, even those who know their kids are not heterosexual, feel powerless or unwilling to offer support to their children. However, these young people are not daunted. Matt Nicholson, one of the participants in the Summer Leadership Institute, put it this way: “Through NCLYN I have come to know myself and my community in new and challenging ways. I have learned how to make something happen. To implement. To empower. I now have access to information, networks, and relationships that keep me strong in the face of resistance. Queer is a part of a love, a politic and a passion by which I work for change. These people and this place keep folks like me alive, and we become dangerous to those who would hold us down.”

It is the power of this testimony that makes the work and the successes continue. Confidence is indeed a life force, and if this leadership is any indication of goals being achieved, we will all be hearing a lot more from North Carolina Lambda Youth Network.

Memo to Governor Scott Walker: Bargain for Peace

When the Peace Development Fund gave its Grassroots Peace Award to the Jobs with Peace Campaign in 1989, it anticipated the showdown between the unions and the Wisconsin governor as a false issue. “We are always blaming the victim,” Ann Wilson said in Milwaukee then, and this time the victim is government workers. But it is not pensions that have bankrupted state, local and the federal governments; it is the ongoing costs of war.

PDF grantee, National Priorities Project (costofwar.com), estimates that the savings to taxpayers in Wisconsin for the proposed total spending for FY2011 for Iraq and Afghanistan would be $2.7 billion—quite a dent in the state’s $3.6 billion shortfall. How could the state benefit from that kind of savings? Here are just a few choices Governor Walker could make: salaries of 43,957 elementary school teachers for one year; salaries of 60,578 firefighters for one year; 394,158 Head Start slots for children for one year; 377,736 military veterans receiving VA medical care for one year; or salaries of 42,578 police or sheriff’s patrol officers for one year.

If Governor Walker would focus on ending war, instead of collective bargaining, he could save the citizens of Wisconsin a boatload of money, and heartbreak.

from Peace Developments, Winter 1988

A Closer Look: Jobs with Peace – A Multiracial, Multilevel Campaign

“In this country, we are always blaming the victim,” says Ann Wilson of Milwaukee’s Jobs with Peace (JwP) campaign, “but when you convince people that they can do something, that they are somebody, they will go out and change things themselves, provided there’s organization. That’s what Jobs with Peace is all about.”

Ann Wilson knows. “I got interested in politics when I lost my job; then I began to see the connections.” After the factory she worked in closed shop and moved abroad – like so many others in Milwaukee – she volunteered at the local Jobs with Peace office. “I did some reading and began to see that the closing was a foreign policy decision. A company can’t take off to Puerto Rico or Korea unless the government permits it.” Soon she was working 30-40 hours a week with JwP on voter registration and housing issues. When the city threatened to cut the manager/tenant liaison program in public housing, she brought together tenants like herself to gather signatures to petition the city government.

“Our petition was successful,” she says, “and in the process, people began to tie into the bigger picture. They saw that cuts at the federal level mean cuts at the state and city levels.” The housing projects had always been isolated from each other, but now people saw advantage in working together. They set up a tenants’s council, which meets regularly at the JwP office and, with help from JwP, they are putting out their own newspaper, The Independent.

With the election of a new mayor after twenty-eight years, thanks in part to public forums staged by Jobs with Peace, Ann Wilson was appointed to the City Housing Authority, of which she is now President. Her work there coincides well with her position as senior organizer for Milwaukee JwP and co-chair of the National Board.

Getting people involved is the first priority of the Jobs with Peace campaign, a national organization with eleven chapters and many affiliates, from San Francisco to Baltimore. With a history of remarkable achievements in cities across the country, they have recruited, organized and sustained the work of those people most affected by the rapid escalation of the military budget and most underrepresented politically. As Jill Nelson, Director of JwP’s national office in Boston, explains, “We work community by community to provide an agenda that really addresses people’s needs. We offer a mechanism for people to get involved and to get their neighbors involved.”

When Jobs with Peace first began, early in the eighties, it focused its efforts on putting referenda on city ballots nationwide calling on Congress to transfer military funds to domestic programs. In late 1986, however, JwP decided to make the message less abstract – as Ann Wilson says, “You can’t talk to people about billions when they’re only making $400 a month!” People care, and will get out to do something about it, when the problem is brought home to them around an immediate, concrete issue.

An important reason why people stay involved to Milwaukee’s Roger Quindel, is organization and training. Jobs with Peace works hard at helping people make specific commitments that they can accomplish, however small. “When they achieve what they’ve set out to do, you’ve strengthened the human being,” says Quindel. “All our work is aimed at involving new people, then helping them to feel successful, to develop their skills, to feel part of the work of change.”

How does all this link up to peace? Jobs with Peace is helping to build what Jill Nelson calls a “triangle coalition” of labor, civil rights, and peace groups around an agenda that speaks to all their needs. In real terms, this coalition building brings heartening and measurable successes. The Minnesota Alliance of Progressive Action (MAPA) is an example: over the past several years, JwP’s work on economic conversion laid the groundwork for an alliance of twenty organizations which this fall registered over 10,000 new voters.

The challenge is great, but the vision is clear: “The majority of the people do not support the policies of our government,” says Anthony Thigpenn of the Los Angeles Jobs with Peace campaign. “We are building a multiracial, multilevel power base, reaching out to the millions and millions”.