Program

This page is under construction and is being updated regularly with additional information. 

Wednesday, May 29

7:45  PM EDT

Sylvie Ndongmo, WILPF International President

8:05  PM EDT

Darien De Lu, President, WILPF US Section

Darien De Lu, WILPF US President and Congress Tech Team Core Member is a peace, justice, and Latin America solidarity activist in the Sacramento branch. She writes her California ballot guide (for over 20 years) plus political and labor songs – and sings frequently!  Prior to retiring, she bicycle-commuted for twelve years to her California state jobs, addressing substance use and co-occurring disorders.  She and her husband bike, especially to the local food co-op. Darien speaks several languages and has traveled extensively. An activist for over fifty years, Darien has been a consensus process and nonviolence trainer. Her civil disobedience, direct actions, and subsequent jail time inform her activism.   

8:30  PM EDT

Mary Hanson Harrison

Mary Hanson Harrison served as WILPF US president (2015-2019),  WILPF US Des Moines Branch president, Congress Coordinator, 2008 Simpson College (IA)\ and Virtual Congress Coordinator 2021. She sits on the board of Jane Addams Paper Project, Ramapo College (NJ). Mary brings not only an academic career but also a policy researcher and hands-on activism with and for nonprofit peace/feminist oriented organizations.  She convened and participated in several presentations on Ecofeminism and the necessity of a revolution in global agriculture and food systems: in The Hague, at the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and the WILPF International Congress – Ghana, and past WILPF US congresses. She is a published essayist and translator. She has a degree in History and a Masters in Literary Criticism and Theory.

8:50  PM EDT

Barbara Nielsen, WILPF US Treasurer

Thursday, May 30

7:30  PM EDT

Tara Vassefi
Welcome and Introduction

Tara Vassefi is honored and humbled to serve as the local WILPF branch contact in dc,maryland,virginia aka Occupied Piscataway and Nacotchtank Territories aka Chocolate City. She likes to introduce her 3rd dimensional self as someone with the brain of an archivist whose favorite language of love is infinitely-long, heavily-cited legal memos. Though she's a human rights attorney by trade and continues to practice pro bono through her firm Solidarity Law Cooperative, her full-time job is at a rEvolutionary ChildCare Center called CentroNía. Should you have the bandwidth for what she calls proFound Orthogony (~exploration without destination), she would love to journey with You toward Water and Food Sovereignty, Tech-no-Logy as a Public Good, and Spiral Economics. 
 

7:45  PM EDT

Mr. Pedro Arrojo-Agudo
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Water & Sanitation
Spain & Geneva, Switzerland, Welcome Message from UN

Mr. Pedro Arrojo-Agudo is the Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation. He was appointed by the Human Rights Council in September 2020 and started his mandate on 1 November 2020. From 2016 to 2019, Mr. Arrojo-Agudo served as an elected member of the Spanish Parliament. He was Professor in the Area of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis at the University of Zaragoza from 1989 to 2011, and has been professor emeritus since 2011. During the last three decades, he has focused his research on economics and water management, publishing his work in more than 100 scientific articles and in 70 books.

7:50 PM EDT

R.I.S.E. Coalition
Resilient Indigenous Sisters Engaging 

Friday, May 31

6:45  PM EDT

Chris Jones

Chris Jones is retired from IIHR-Hydrosocience & Engineering at the University of Iowa, where he worked as a research engineer focusing on water quality in agricultural landscapes. Prior to that, he worked for the Des Moines Water Works, Iowa Soybean Association and as a consultant for water and wastewater utilities. He has a BA in Chemistry and Biology from Simpson College and a PhD in Analytical Chemistry from Montana State University. Dr. Jones has authored 55 articles in scientific journals, several book chapters, and is the author of The Swine Republic, Struggles with Truth About Agriculture and Water Quality. His writing has appeared in the Des Moines Register and Cedar Rapids Gazette and in the on-line periodical, Civil Eats. He's a frequent guest on Iowa Public Radio and was a guest on NPR's On Point. He also writes a Substack column that can be found at riverraccoon.substack.com. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa. 

8:30  PM EDT

Sara Thomsen
Concert

“Thomsen’s soulful voice, poetic lyrics and unforgettable melodies cut through to the heart and the soul of human experience,” proclaims the Minnesota Women’s Press. Dubbed in her local press as “one of Northern Minnesota’s best kept secrets,” singer-songwriter Sara Thomsen’s home base is in the Lake Superior region of Duluth/Superior. “The Twin Ports folk singer picks up the torch carried by the balladeers of decades past: Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Holly Near, Ronnie Gilbert, and Peter, Paul, and Mary” writes the Duluth Reader Weekly. “She could make Conan the Barbarian drop his sword and collapse blubbering.”

Increasing wonder and awareness, deepening spiritual connection, and widening social engagement through song is at the heart of her work. Sara's ability to get people singing magically transforms gatherings into communities empowered with possibility. Thomsen is a recipient of the Duluth Community Peacemaker Award for her use of music towards building a more just world. Her music starts locally and expands globally. With a voice rich as the best Midwest soil, Sara's songs carry you inward and outward—in, to the particulars of your own life, and out—into the shared humanity of us all. While at home, Thomsen and her spouse Paula Pedersen love spending time gardening and enjoying the outdoors alongside Athena the dog, Eva the cat, a dozen chickens and two beehives.

More about Sara on her website: www.sarathomsen.com

Saturday, June 1

1:15 PM EDT 
DISARM Committee
History of Conflicts Over Water and Strategies to Avoid Conflict for the Future

Cherrill Spencer

Cherrill Spencer is a retired experimental physicist who was born and educated in England and has lived in Palo Alto, California since 1974. She joined WILPF in 2012 to work against war and for disarmament. She is a member of the Peninsula/Palo Alto, California, branch of WILPF through which she works on CEDAW, nuclear disarmament and the Poor People’s Campaign. Spencer’s major projects for WILPF have been: an extensive exhibit celebrating WILPF’s centenary; a detailed report on treaties; coordinating the 2020 Solidarity Season; co-creating the online 1945 timeline; coordinating the 2021 Call for Peace campaign and co-chairing the DISARM/End Wars Issue Committee since mid-2020. Spencer has been an official delegate for WILPF to United Nations conferences on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Program Summary
The Disarm committee will show a powerful 15 minute video on conflicts and wars related to water. It is by expert, Peter Gleick, from the Pacific Institute think tank. His presentation provides some strategies to reduce the risks of conflicts in the future and we will have a guided discussion after the video on what WILPF members could be doing about current conflicts over water. The discussion will be led by DISARM members Cherrill Spencer and Eileen Kurkoski.

2:30 PM EDT 
Water is Life! Especially During Wartime

Barb Taft, Moderator

Barb Taft is former co-chair of our WILPF Middle East Committee (now called MEPJAC).  She visited the Middle East 10 times from 1967 to 2009, and co-authored our Hamas booklet.  More recently, she wrote an article for Disarmament Times.  She has served on the WILPF national board, as well as the board of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America (BPFNA) and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). In Arizona, she is convenor of the Greater Phoenix branch of WILPF and owner of a private school, The Accent Expert.
 

Mazin Qumsiyeh   

Mazin Qumsiyeh was born in 1957 in Beit Sahour (known in English as Shepherds Field).  He is a Palestinian scientist and author. Currently, he serves as founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History (PMNH) and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) at Bethlehem University, where he also teaches. He served on the faculties of the University of Tennessee (1989–1993), Duke University (1993–1999), and Yale University (1999–2005).  Dr. Qumsiyeh now researches and teaches at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities since returning to Palestine in 2008. He joined other professors to introduce the first Biotechnology Masters program in the region. Over the course of his career he has published well over 150 scientific papers on topics ranging from cultural heritage to biodiversity, as well as several books. He also serves on the board of a number of Palestinian youth and service organizations.

Rabbi Arik Ascherman  

Rabbi Arik Ascherman is an American-born Israeli Reform Rabbi, and Executive Director of the Israeli human rights organization Torat Tzedek—Torah of Justice. For 21 years, starting in 1995, he served as Co-Director (1995-1998), Executive Director (1998-2010), Director of Special Projects (2010-2012) and President and Senior Rabbi (2012-2017) for Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli organization.  He is also affiliated with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and has been attacked by both the Israeli military police and by settlers, as well as arrested for his nonviolent activism.  He is currently working to protect sheep-herders from being forced out of their grazing areas and their occupations.

3:30 PM EDT

Rachel Betesh, Poet

Rachel Betesh is a registered nurse and poet - as well as a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and Jewish Mothers Against War Crimes. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Wildness, and Bennington Review.

4:45 PM EDT
Earth Democracy
PFAS and Water Contaminants

While providing some basic information about PFAS, Marguerite's presentation will focus on the true personal and economic costs of PFAS to our health and our environment, as well as the difficulties of passing legislation to curb or ban PFAS. PFAS chemicals are cheap to buy, but enormously expensive to clean up. The U.S. chemical industry spent over $110 million during the last two elections, sending out lobbyists to kill or gut dozens of pieces of PFAS legislation; they were successful. Every day of delay in legislation leads to more PFAS contamination that irreversibly accumulates in the environment, harming our health and the health of future generations. We need to treat the PFAS pollution crisis as the emergency that it is, turning off the PFAS tap now and forever. 
 

Marguerite Adelman

Marguerite Adelman, a Vermont resident, is a retired non-profit administrator (education, social services, and government).  Marguerite served on the WILPF US Development Committee and attended the 100th Anniversary Conference of WILPF at the Hague in 2015 and the UN Commission on the Status of Women Conference in NYC in March 2018.  As an experienced grant writer and past Communications Director for the Cook Department of Public Health (Illinois), she became interested in per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in 2019. For the past 5 years, she has served as the Coordinator for the Vermont PFAS/Military Poisons Coalition. Marguerite has given presentations on PFAS to citizen groups, WILPF branches across the U.S., and WILPF International's Earth Democracy Committee. The VT Coalition includes diverse groups (peace, social justice, economic justice, religious, and environmental) that collaborate to provide education on "forever chemicals" and advocate for legislation to ban PFAS forever.

6:15 PM  EDT
Water Scarcity and the Future

Moses West

Moses West is a retired Army officer. He is currently the CEO and Founder of AWG Contracting, and his Non-profit 501c3 The Moses West Foundation. He works closely with the U.S. Military, universities, and municipalities to mitigate the prolonged effects of drought, water contamination issues and food shortages by advancing the technology of Atmospheric Water Generators. He has worked endlessly over the past 10 years to manufacture the most energy efficient high-volume water producing Atmospheric Water Generator units available for Military use, disaster recovery, and normal everyday usage for a myriad of other solutions where water has become difficult to obtain. He has proven that the Atmosphere is an endless, inexhaustible source of pure water that is limitless in its ability to provide for a growing global population. This is necessary source of water for many critical areas of society today and well into the future. He has developed mass production water facilities as well as small units for emergency use. He has made it his mission to prove that the atmosphere is a limitless source of water that will help provide for society well into the future. He has been the first to successfully the largest AWG unit for the first in a any major water crisis event. Moses deployed the technology in Puerto Rico on the Island of Vieques to supply all the island with potable water, He has deployed one AWG unit to Flint Michigan and Jackson Mississippi. These missions are recorded as the first time that any large Atmospheric Water Generator has been deployed in recovery efforts from a natural disaster or water contamination issues within the United States.

7:00 PM  EDT
Navigating Toward Peace: Overcoming the Militarization and Climate Crisis of our Oceans

Tamara Larincz

Tamara Lorincz is a PhD candidate in Global Governance at the Balsillie School for International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has a Masters in International Politics & Security Studies from the University of Bradford and a Law degree and MBA specializing in environmental law and management from Dalhousie University. Her research is on the climate and environmental impacts of the military. She’s a member of the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-Canada. Tamara is also on the advisory committee of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, and the No to War, No to NATO Network. She’s a long-time environmentalist, feminist and peace activist and a mother with two teenage boys.

Program Summary
Tamara will talk about the crisis in the oceans from militarism and climate change. Through, the expansion of NATO, the new Indo-Pacific Strategy and the formation of AUKUS, the oceans are increasingly becoming militarized spaces for warmaking, though they are dangerously warming and acidifying. However, this militarization of the oceans is ignored at the United Nations climate and oceans conferences and reports. Tamara will explain some of the adverse environmental and social stressors to the marine environment of regular naval war exercises like the US-led RIMPAC in the Pacific, NATO’s BALTOPS Exercise in the Baltic Sea, NATO's "Cold Response" Exercise in the Arctic, Exercise Talisman Sabre in Australian waters among others. She will discuss how activists and anti-war groups are coming together to navigate toward peace and protection of the oceans. 
 

8:00 PM EDT

Helen Jaccard
The Golden Rule and Ending the Whole Nuclear Era
Veterans For Peace Golden Rule Project Manager, Jane Addams branch, member of WILPF Disarm/End Wars Issues Committee

Helen Jaccard is a non-veteran member of Veterans For Peace and a member of the WILPF Disarm/End Wars Issues Committee.  She co-founded the Veterans For Peace Nuclear Abolition Working Group and manages the Golden Rule Project.  She is an author and public speaker and travels internationally, most recently a second trip to Guatemala to investigate the cultural and environmental harm caused by US and Canadian mining.

Summary:Veterans For Peace's anti-nuclear sailboat, the Golden Rule, "Sails for a Nuclear-Free World and a Peaceful, Sustainable Future".  

Learn about:

• The history of the boat, which in 1958 helped to stop nuclear weapons tests.  
• Voyages and educational campaign since 2015, when the rebuilt boat sailed again into the Pacific Ocean.  
• Nuclear issues and solutions -
• The whole contaminating nuclear chain
  • Hope through taking action.  Support Eleanor Holmes Norton’s bill to eliminate nuclear weapons and move the money to support non-carbon, non-nuclear energy and human needs
• Actions can be at the local, state and federal level through interaction with politicians, political parties and organizations , groups of faith, and Indigenous groups including Marshall Islands Communities. 
  • Protest against weapons manufacturers.
  • Push pension funds, cities to Divest from weapons companies and banks that support them.
  • Educate the community through presentations, letters to the editor, resolutions in support of nuclear disarmament

9:00 PM EDT

George Friday
Virtual After Party

George Friday grew up in a rural low-income community in North Carolina in the 60s. She holds degrees in Political Science, Economics, and African American Studies from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, from which she graduated in 1982.

George was the fundraiser for SANE (then SANE/FREEZE, now National Peace Action) in the latter half of the 1980s and Development Director, then Assistant Director of the Piedmont Peace Project in North Carolina in the first half of the 1990s. She directed a National Office of Juvenile Justice project from 2000-2004.  George served as co-chair of UFPJ from 2005 to 2008.

They began working as National Field Organizer for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee/Defending Dissent Foundation in 2008. George was one of the founding members of Move to Amend in 2009. Since 2017, George has been staff to NC Peace Action and UFPJ
 

Sunday, June 2, 2024

1:00 PM EDT
Feeding Two Birds with One Scone: Taking Action to Address Both Climate and Nuclear Weapons

Summary
Timmon Wallis will share insights from his new book, Warheads to Windmills: Preventing Climate Catastrophe and Nuclear War and Vicki Elson will outline some of the steps we can all take to get us out of this mess. Despite the continued increase in global carbon emissions and the collapse of disarmament treaties, all is not lost! The companies responsible for nuclear weapons and for the continued burning of fossil fuels are calling the shots in Washington. But these companies themselves are surprisingly vulnerable to legal threats emanating from the Nuclear Ban Treaty and from the global movement for a Fossil Fuel Treaty. They are also vulnerable to public disapproval and investor anxiety as more and more faith communities, financial institutions, colleges and cities divest, boycott and stigmatize these companies for their actions. By working together to pressure these profiteers, we can get them to change the policies that are threatening the whole planet.

Timmon Wallis

Timmon Wallis, PhD is the National Coordinator of the Warheads to Windmills Coalition. He has spent his life teaching, writing, directing organizations, and campaigning on peace and environmental issues in colleges, war zones, and with governments around the world. With his colleagues at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, he shares the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. His newest book is Warheads to Windmills: Preventing Climate Catastrophe and Nuclear War.

Vicki Elson

Vicki Elson, MA is the Creative Director of NuclearBan.US, which facilitates the Warheads to Windmills Coalition. After a long career in childbirth education and labor support, she has shifted her focus to supporting human well-being with total nuclear abolition and converting the resources wasted on WMD's to science-based climate solutions. 
 

2:00 PM EDT

Osprey Orielle Lake
Conversation on Climate Change

Founder and executive director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), Osprey works internationally with grassroots, BIPOC and Indigenous leaders, policymakers, and diverse coalitions to build climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition to a decentralized, democratized clean-energy future.

She sits on the executive committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and on the steering committee for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Osprey’s writing about climate justice, relationships with nature, women in leadership, and other topics has been featured in The Guardian, Earth Island Journal, The Ecologist, Ms. Magazine and many other publications.

She is the author of the award-winning book Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature. Osprey holds an MA in Culture and Environmental Studies from Holy Names University in Oakland and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area on Coast Miwok lands.

4pm EDT
 

Rickey Gard Diamond
Women's Waterways vs. Financialization

Rickey Gard Diamond, author of Screwnomics and a column at Ms. Magazine, Women Unscrewing Screwnomics, got her early education in economics at a welfare office in the 70s. A newly divorced mother of three, she just couldn't make her budget work despite a fulltime job, and believed it was her fault. Since then she's made a study of how our economy works—and doesn't work—for women and people of color. Most recently, she  started an alliance of feminist activists and organizations to spotlight women already working on transforming a patriarchal system never designed with women in mind, except as property. An Economy of Our Own (AEOO),is finding solutions to growing inequality from the bottom up. AEOO is grateful that WILPF-US and its Women, Money and Democracy  committee is one of its strongest partners in this work. 

Program Summary   
What are women's waterways, and what on earth is financialization? We may feel ourselves in a fight for Earth's survival, and we are, in fact, being hammered by new mystical weapons of an economy waged as war. Come learn how Elinor Ostrom and others point to more powerful water solutions, freed for peace and life.  

5PM  EDT

Mary Sanderson and Fernanda Lugo
Can We Rescue Water From Financial Trickery?
 

Mary Sanderson is a veteran Raging Granny, postal worker, farmer, interpreter, peace activist, mostly veteran at this point.  Growing up among dying family farms, then spinning wheels as a WILPF activist for 3 decades, brought me eventually to study monetary reform. We'll sketch out the argument that Just Money (public-purposed and debt-free) is a pre-req for rescuing water and food, for peace, for respecting our living Earth and rebuilding trust.

Fernanda Lugo is an activist and artist, and works as the Social Media and Outreach Director for Alliance For Just Money, and as an educator for sustainable solutions in her local desert region, El Paso Texas. She graduated with a Master's in biobehavioral health, a field at the intersection of health psychology, promotion, and policy. Her research at the intersection of sustainability and health led her to find that one of the missing links is simply the power to organize people with resources. She believes that the power of money can help us meet the goals of a just society, and advocates for monetary reform to reprioritize the wellbeing of the earth and human health. 

Program Summary
"Can We Rescue Water from Financial Trickery?"  is another big piece of Women, Money & Democracy Committee work. Monetary reform activist Mary Sanderson (WILPF, Madison WI) and biologist Fernanda Lugo (AFJM, El Paso) will show us exactly where these looney financial schemes come from, and outline a surprising, but traditional and necessary, strategy to rescue water from the financiers.