Program: Sunday, August 15

9:00 AM PDT
Hearing from Canada’s Blue Communities

Maude Barlow, Board Chair of Food & Water Watch, and Mary Grant, Public Water For All Campaign Director, introduce Blue Communities. Put your town or city on the map; pass local resolution to recognize the human right to safe, affordable, clean water for all and to sanitation; reject all forms of water privatization; promote water as a public trust and public service; phase out bottled water used in government buildings and municipal events. With 80 Blue Communities around the world, but only Northampton, MA and Los Angeles, CA, let’s put US communities on the map. Join Earth Democracy in this campaign.

Maude Barlow is a Canadian activist, author, and recipient of many honorary degrees and awards. She chairs the board of Washington-based Food & Water Watch and Ottawa-based Blue Planet Project, a global initiative by the Council of Canadians working with partners around the world to achieve water justice based on the principles that water is a human right, a public trust, and part of the global commons. Maude co-founded the Council of Canadians and chaired its board for over three decades.

Mary Grant is the Public Water for All Campaign Director at Food & Water Watch. She oversees campaigns to support universal access to safe water in the United States by promoting responsible and affordable public provision of water and sewer service. She is a policy analyst on US water utility privatization. Food & Water Watch is a national nonprofit environmental organization that mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time.

Nancy Price, the moderator, joined WILPF in 2002, first with Challenge Corporate Power/Assert the People’s Rights, then Save the Water Campaigns. Currently she is an At-Large Board Member and Earth Democracy Issue Committee Co-chair. In 2011 when “Save the Water” expanded as Earth Democracy, Nancy and the leadership team created campaign materials on the: human right to water, bottled water, environmental impacts of free trade agreements, Climate Justice+Women+Peace, Human Right to Safe Food, and Rights of Nature. Most recently, Earth Democracy has focused on the impact of war on the environment and helped create the militarypoisons.org project on contamination of water with PFAS and impact on public health. Find new campaigns, projects and actions on the website. 

10:00 AM PDT
It All Runs Down Hill: The Price of Cheap Meat

This panel will discuss the nationwide movement against confined animal feeding operations, also known as factory farms. Activists in the Des Moines, Iowa, and Triangle North Carolina WILPF Branches and allied organizations will discuss the problems associated with factory farms and the campaigns to oppose them. Factory Farming creates a wide variety of problems, from economic impacts on rural communities, water and air pollution, increased greenhouse gas emissions, health problems, and poor treatment of animals. We will provide ways for WILPF members to oppose this system of agriculture, including advocating for legislation on the state and federal level, and getting involved in local governance. 

John Aspray is an Iowa organizer with the Factory Farm Team at Food & Water Watch and also chairs the Iowa Alliance for Responsible Agriculture, a statewide coalition working to promote ethical agriculture in Iowa and hold politicians accountable.  Prior to joining Food & Water Watch, John was an organizer with the American Federation of Teachers and served as National Field Director of the United States Student Association when he was a student at Rutgers University.  

Donna Chavis currently serves as Senior Climate Campaigner with Friends of the Earth, US, and Founder/Convener of the Red Tailed Hawk Collective.  She is part of the collective leadership team for the North Carolina Climate Justice Collective.  Donna was a member of the Planning Committee of the First National People of Color Leadership Summit in 1991, which developed the Principles of Environmental Justice. She remains committed to those principles. She is also a member of the CAFO Roundtable. 

Sharon Donovan is a retired teacher who favors dark chocolate, has lived all over the world, and now fights powerful corporations destroying our planet. She is active in the Des Moines, Iowa, WILPF Branch.

Jan Corderman speaks from experience when she says that there’s nothing better than growing up on a farm. But today’s farms are more “factory” than farm. That’s why she represents her WILPF Des Moines Branch on the Iowa Alliance for Responsible Ag’s Steering Committee. 

Emily Keel is a retired primary care physician assistant with a love for local food and all animals.  She serves on the Triangle WILPF steering committee.  

Naeema Muhammad has been the organizing co-director of NC Environmental Justice Network since 2013. In addition to organizing and advocacy, she is an educator to those not aware of the technology or toxicities. She co-authored many publications in community-based public health research. She is on the NC Department of Environmental Quality's Environmental Justice Advisory Board, which is one of only a few such boards in the country.

12:00 pm PDT
Uniting Communities for Environmental Justice: Radioactive Pollution Deadly In Any Space

Robin Lloyd, panel moderator, is a member of CONPRO, the Burlington, VT, WILPF US branch, and co-chair of the Disarm/End War Committee. She is looking forward to the Congress and seeing her sisters again. For Robin, the last year has been such a desert—no opportunity to get together at the CSW or the conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. She is excited about the scheduled exchanges with members and staff of International WILPF and is organizing a tête-à-tête with Director of Global Programs Maria Butler.

Mary Olson is founder and Director of the Gender and Radiation Impact Project since 2017. She served from 1991 to 2019 as Staff Biologist and Senior Radioactive Waste Policy Analyst at US-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a non-governmental organization. Olson’s work on radiation education led her to the question of whether biological sex is a factor in radiation harm. Her paper, “Atomic Radiation Is More Harmful to Women” (2011), was featured at the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons (2014). She has presented at the European Union Gender Summit in London and the Low-Dose Radiation Conference.

Leona Morgan (Diné/Navajo) is an indigenous community organizer and activist who has been fighting nuclear colonialism since 2007. Morgan works with the Nuclear Issues Study Group in New Mexico and is cofounder of the Nuclear Issues Studies Group and Diné No Nukes, which contributes to the Haul No! initiative. 

Tina Cordova is a sixth-generation New Mexican, born and raised in the small town of Tularosa. In 2005 Tina cofounded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (TBDC). TBDC’s mission is to bring attention to the negative health effects suffered by innocent victims of the first nuclear blast on earth that took place at the Trinity site in South Central New Mexico. The goal is the passage of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act Amendments to bring much needed health care coverage and compensation to those people of New Mexico suffering from the health effects of the Trinity test. Tina is a cancer survivor, having been diagnosed with thyroid cancer when she was 39 years old.  See WILPF US 75^th Anniversary of Trinity Test 2020 webinar.  

Helen Jaccard (She/Her) is a researcher, author, and speaker with a desire to bridge the gap between long-time activists and the public.  Her primary focus is to bring about an end to all aspects of the nuclear era.  She is the Project Manager of the Veterans For Peace anti-nuclear sailboat, Golden Rule, and a member of the WILPF Disarm Issue Committee. Veterans For Peace, Golden Rule Project Manager, 206-992-6364, www.vfpgoldenrule.org, Facebook.com/goldenrulepeaceboat

1:00 PM PDT
Changing the Intent and Purpose of Money -

In conversation, we will examine how our unseen beliefs work against health and prosperity, specifically, how our subconscious trust in rich white guys allows a parasitic monetary system to sap our strength minute by minute, enslave us, and destroy our habitat. We will then discuss exciting ways the W$D Committee is working to replace that system. We will compare proposals to replace that system with a healing, nurturing money system, specifically considering the history-based “just money” solution proposed in the National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act. 

Marybeth Gardam attended Seton Hall University (NJ) and New School for Social Research (NYC). Her career began in advertising, fundraising (for nonprofits), and marketing (for Bell Labs). In 1984, in Macon Georgia, she helped set up a Migrant Farmworker Coalition, serving as Director of the Central Georgia Center for Peace & Justice. In 2001, relocated in Iowa, she founded Women for Peace Iowa, later joining WILPF US in Des Moines. She served on the WILPF US Board of Directors for three years and is Chair of WILPF’s national Women, Money, and Democracy Committee, partnering with An Economy of Our Own.

Mary Sanderson re-joined the Women, Money, and Democracy Committee in 2018. She grew up on a Wisconsin farm at a time when the monetary system and government policy converged to push small holders off the land. Mary always wondered why peace and justice could never get traction if great majorities always want it. Her puzzle came together in 2017 when she learned that banks create and allocate all the “money” we use. Since 2019 she serves as a director for Alliance For Just Money.

Dorothy Van Soest is the current WILPF liaison to the Poor People’s Campaign, a member of the Women, Money and Democracy Committee, and a member of the Washington State Poor People’s Campaign coordinating committee. She is Professor Emerita and former dean at the University of Washington, and an educator, activist, and author of several award winning novels with a heart for justice.  www.dorothyvansoest.com

2:00 PM PDT
Climate Change of Costa Rica

Aimará Espinoza Ulate is a forestry engineer and has a Master’s in Environmental Law. Worked 21 years at the Ministry of Environment, Department of National System of Conservation Areas. Experience doing community work, with international funding for the use and management of biodiversity. Survivor of domestic violence and sexual and labor harassment. 

Adilia Caravaca is Costa Rican by birth, internationalist  by heart.  Active mostly in the areas of women’s rights, human rights, food security,  environment protection, Indigenous peoples, and community development. Lawyer, mother of two girls.  Involved in WILPF since 1983, being its International President (2011-15). Earned a Master’s Degree in Gender and Peace Building at the University for Peace (2004). Co-founder and  member of the  National Committee for Decent Housing, which put the topic on the public agenda, a movement that contributed to enact legislation and programs to make housing accessible to low-income families.  Litigation, consulting,  activism, and some gardening are part of her current life, which provide excitement and challenges to discuss and share with friends