NEWS

Peace Delegation meets with residents at an urban gardening project in Venezuela. WILPF US President Darien De Lu traveled with the delegation and gave a report on the April 1 ONE WILPF Call. Photo: Darien De Lu.

By Eileen Kurkoski
WILPF US Secretary

As WILPF US Secretary, I offer WILPF US members these general interest highlights from the March 19th Board meeting. These highlights reflect some of the exciting ongoing WILPF US programs plus new initiatives, opportunities, and branches. You can be part of the committees and member-leaders pioneering new ground! Contact: president@wilpfus.org.

The WILPF US Board meets every second month. To see the official minutes of the meetings and how to participate in those board conference calls, go to the National Board  page on the WILPF US website.
   
Venezuela Peace Delegation

WILPF US President Darien De Lu, traveling with the delegation of peace movement leaders to Venezuela, found Caracas peaceful, despite the blackout. The lack of electricity made it difficult to get money from banks and water into high-rises, because pumps were not working. (Listen to the April 1 ONE WILPF call for Darien’s delegation report.)

Holistic Committee

At the start of her presidency, Darien appointed an ad hoc committee, the Holistic Program Structure Review Committee (now simply called the Holistic Committee). San Francisco Branch member, Regina Sneed, reported briefly on the work of the committee, which is reviewing many aspects of WILPF US program to see how WILPF work can be better organized and focused. The process is progressing well with the hope that strategic decisions will be made at a face-to-face board meeting in late May.

Women’s Peacemakers Initiative

WILPF’s fiscal sponsor, Peace Development Fund, invited and funded delegates from Women for Genuine Security, Women Cross DMZ and WILPF US for a one-day “Women’s Peacemakers Initiative” conference in San Francisco on March 22. The Board explored what support we have to offer to the other groups and what we may want from them. We overlap in many interests and goals. Delegation coordinator, board member Nancy Price, reported that the delegates were preparing to teleconference. (Watch for a future eNews report on this initiative.) 

WILPF US in NYC for Commission on the Status of Women

Board members Jan Corderman and Eileen Kurkoski provided reports on their week at the annual UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and WILPF US Practicum and Local2Global programs. These two board members focused on the objectives of the two WILPF US programs and how best to accomplish those goals.           
                                                                   
While in NYC, Jan and Eileen also attended a soiree organized by Burlington, VT, Branch member Robin Lloyd at the home of author Blanche Wiesen Cook. (Wiesen Cook is well known for her three-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.) WILPF International Secretary-General, Madeleine Rees, and several International WILPF UN Office staff spoke on WILPF issues and the WILPF US need to grow a WILPF branch in NYC.  

Leaders of a budding Westchester branch, outside of NYC, also attended and talked about their plans.

Inset Photo: A WILPF soiree was part of the CSW experience in New York City recently. Photo credit: Eileen Kurkoski.

Edith Bell was a co-presenter at a Women’s History Month program on “Visionary Women: Champions of Peace and Nonviolence.”

By Susan Smith
WILPF Pittsburgh

On March 27, 2019, Edith Bell and Susan Smith, Ph.D., gave a presentation to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) at the Federal Building in downtown Pittsburgh on the topic  “Visionary Women: Champions of Peace and Nonviolence.”
 
The program was for National Women's History Month. It was hard to choose which women to include but we included local, national, and international women. The program started with founders of WILPF and continued through the present, using photos and giving information about a dozen women. A time for questions and answers follow the initial presentation.

About 50 people attended. The presentation was well received—participants shared the names of some women they wanted to highlight and asked good questions.
 
Here is a copy of the PowerPoint. Others are welcome to use it as is or to update it to fit their needs.

Inset photo: Susan Smith was the other co-presenter at the event.
 

Photo credit: Rachael Warriner / Shutterstock.com

By Randa Solnick
Santa Cruz Branch

The Green New Deal (GND) is one of the most hopeful proposals we’ve seen in a long time. The previous eNews had the first part of this article; here’s the second.

The Green New Deal is being proposed and considered in this Congress, but it has a history:

• 1930s and 40s: Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted his New Deal economic reform and job programs
• 2000: Ralph Nader’s talk of a “blue-green alliance” between labor and environmentalists begins, then in 2006 the BlueGreen Alliance was established
• 2007: The term “Green New Deal” is coined by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
• 2008: Van Jones talked about green jobs in his book The Green Collar Economy
• 2016: Noted by Obama, GND became part of Jill Stein’s Green Party candidacy, and was already central to European Greens
• Then 2018:  Brand New Congress members took it up, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. AOC visited young Sunrise Movement activists twice when they were occupying Pelosi’s office to forward the concept of a Select Committee on a Green New Deal. By December 2018, several senators—including Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, and Jeff Merkley—had signed on with some Congresspeople to support the formation of a Select Committee.

The four pillars of the GND are: The Economic Bill of Rights, a Green Transition for the economy, real financial reform including public banking, a functioning democracy. You can see the details of the four pillars here.

What Can WILPFers Do?

Here are some of my ideas about what we WILPFers can do, and I’m sure you’ll be able to think of more once you get enthused about this:  

1. Let your organizations know of your support for the GND. Many of them are very familiar to us: Food and Water Watch, Organic Consumers Association, 350.org, the Sierra Club.
2. There’s one major organization you might not have worked with yet, the Sunrise Movement. Founded a year and a half ago by young adults, you might have read that two hundred of their activists occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office a week after the midterm elections, pushing for a Climate Committee that would have the teeth of subpoenas. They were joined by AOC and other Representatives! We can educate young people and their families by signing them up for notices from the Sunrise Movement (again, it’s a movement for young people). They say they’re “building an army of young people to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process.” Get high school students to sign up for the High School Green New Deal Campaign here.
3. Talk to community groups, get them excited and hopeful. I have lots of articles and ways to use them, contact me if this would help. In this article in The Atlantic, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says “This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil-rights movement of our generation.”
4. Speak to groups of voters and workers; speak to workers’ rights activists, to community organizers, to single-payer health care proponents, to sustainable farmers. Create public information programs on the GND together. An informative article in The Nation, Why the Best New Deal Is a Green New Deal, explains: “The climate movement has become a powerful political force, with tens of thousands of people from across America’s largest cities and smallest communities calling for an end to the unsustainable use of fossil fuels—but now the call includes plans that create jobs and address the possible disproportionate effects on marginal and at-risk communities. Progressive politicians are following their lead, increasingly realizing that the only way to equitably meet the challenge of a clean-energy revolution is a 21st-century economy that guarantees clean air and water, modernizes national infrastructure, and creates high-quality jobs.”
5. Visit your Congressional reps and say (as this Huffington Post opinion piece puts it): “We need a mass mobilization of people and resources, something not unlike the U.S. involvement in World War II or the Apollo moon missions―but even bigger. We must transform our energy system, transportation, housing, agriculture and more.”  
6. Contact your local people involved in Public Banking – you can find a map and information at PBI, Public Banking Institute. Its founder, attorney Ellen Brown, has a number of articles on the PBI website to explain her ideas for funding the GND in the huge amounts we need to counter climate change. We’re trying right now to connect her to the Congresspeople involved in figuring out how to pay for this undertaking.

The Green New Deal connects the dots just as WILPF has been doing for this last century. For those of you who’ve been the recipients of some of the good done by FDR’s New Deal–help pass that on to our younger generations.  Spread the message that the Green New Deal for our time needs to be "broader and more inclusive" than the original one!

Sign up for the websites, to get updates, and help spread information and action opportunities around your community. A GND week of action in early February already took place, getting even more individuals and groups involved. We’ll be hearing a lot more about the ideas and efforts taking root, and very soon!

The Greens say:  Let us not rest until we have pulled our nation back from the brink, and until we have secured the peaceful, just, green future we all deserve.

I hope to hear from some of you with your ideas and plans for action. Contact me at rsolick@gmail.com.

By Jan Corderman and Linda Lemons
WILPF Des Moines Steering Committee Members

WILPF Des Moines’s major event in February was our 9th Strong Feisty Women, Powering Change Event, honoring Eloise Cranke for powering change in our community, Marti Anderson for powering change in our legislature, and Cathy Glasson for powering change in movement politics. More than 100 people came together to celebrate the power and resilience of women using their talents and skills to create change.

Eloise Cranke is a longtime activist and member of WILPF, whose calendar is always full advocating for peace and justice issues. Marti Anderson, also a long time WILPF member, has been involved her entire career in the advancement of women’s and children’s rights and the human need for safety and respect. She has served in the Iowa Legislature since 2013, and is working hard to advocate for human rights and the protection of our environment in a legislature focused on supporting corporations. Cathy Glasson, President of SEIU Iowa, which represents more than 5,000 hardworking Iowans, ran for governor of Iowa, and used an approach called movement politics in which she created her platform from listening to the needs of people and the issues they are facing. Mary Hanson Harrison, our outgoing US WILPF President, shared the legacy of women coming together to meet the needs of people, and the advocacy for peace and justice, which eventually led to the creation of WILPF.

The Raging Grannies led us in song, expressing our sentiments with new lyrics to familiar tunes. We even had a statue of Jane Addams and encouraged people to take pictures with her. We had 22 cosponsors of our event and offered space for people to share information about their church community or organization. We believe we were quite successful in creating space for people to come together, and to share their stories, gifts, and ideas with each other, so that we can continue to enhance and build our movement for peace and justice.

Besides our Strong Feisty Women event, WILPF women continued to remain active in a variety of other events this month. As a coalition member of Iowa Alliance for Responsible Agriculture, WILPF women joined with other coalition members at the capitol the day before our Strong Feisty Women Event to lobby for a moratorium on factory farms. At any given time, the state of Iowa has over 20 million pigs and more than 40 million egg-laying hens that are predominantly confined on over 9,000 factory farms. We don’t need more!! This method of farming can have a myriad of impacts on air, water, and public health documented in over 50 years of respected, peer-reviewed studies. It’s time to reclaim the rich agricultural heritage of our state. The Raging Grannies closed out the day by leading everyone in the “Personhood Song” to the tune of “This Land Is Your Land,” and “Home on the Earth,” to the tune of “Home on the Range.”  

At our regular meeting we heard about different types of representative governments from Jeffrey Weis, a local professor, who delivered a talk on “How Presidential Republics Fail and why the United States May Be No Exception.” WILPF members also attended a Climate Revival, featuring the author of a recent book club read Climate Church, Climate World, which focuses on the importance of faith communities taking action to address our climate crisis. Carolyn Uhlenhake Walker, WILPF member, spoke about the Sustainability Task Force she is helping to lead to create a climate action plan for the city of Des Moines.

Regardless of the activity, our focus is on building relationships, changing the narrative, and finding our feminist voices to create a movement for change.