The Humboldt WILPF Branch with their banner at a local “Families Belong Together” march.

By Sue Hilton
President, Humboldt Branch

We’ve been pretty busy here in Humboldt this month, gathering for the Poor Peoples Campaign, marching to keep families together, and celebrating the Fourth of July with a book sale supporting peace.

Like many other branches, we have been participating in our local PPC gatherings. Gatherings here were small but committed, and the local organizer really appreciated having us there with our banner. Our local Raging Grannies, which includes several WILPF members, brought song sheets relevant to the monthly topic and encouraged everyone to sing along.

Later in June we joined a much larger “Families Belong Together” local march. Attendance estimates ranged from 1,500 to 3,000, pretty good for our small county. The Raging Grannies sang briefly.

The march was partly sponsored by Centro Del Pueblo, a local immigrant-rights organization which we’ve supported in various ways for a few years now. One of those ways has been in helping gather signatures for a countywide Sanctuary Ordinance. We heard just after the rally that the Ordinance has qualified for the ballot this fall, so there will be more work to do on that.

We also held our annual Fourth of July Book sale. We made some money, which we’ll use for our annual Edilith Eckart Memorial Scholarship grant and for buying the Jane Addams peace prize books for local schools and libraries. And we made connections with lots of people during the event, from a woman who wants to be a Raging Grannie to a local man working on Middle East Issues and folks from the League of Woman Voters.

We appreciate our local community as well as our WILPF community, and we appreciate everything everyone is doing to support people and the planet in very difficult times.