NEWS

by Darien De Lu
WILPF US President

This month is important for seeking out and encouraging potential board candidates. The deadline for submitting a personal nomination, showing your regard and support for a member you think should be invited to apply for a board position, is October 1. The board candidate application deadline is shortly thereafter, on October 9. You can encourage the leadership of others! (Watch for a member-only eAlert about election details later this month.)

Sadly, some white and BIPOC WILPFers have backed off of national leadership, due to their reluctance to be publicly attacked. While it’s true that courage is another quality of leadership, WILPF wants to stand up against any violations of the WILPF International Code of Conduct. WILPFers engage in political disagreements – not personal attacks. If necessary you may report behavior or even file a complaint. Contact me for more info: president@wilpfUS.org.

Encouraging leadership – with any of our members – is crucial, because women are frequently discouraged from putting themselves forward. Some of the most important qualities for leaders are compassion, willingness to listen, an interest in developing the leadership of others, the ability to encourage and accept compromises, willingness to delegate, and a sense of ethical behavior. Time management skills and a degree of organization are also important. Of course, none of us is perfect. Part of the benefit of accepting leadership is personal and character development.

As President and a member of our national Board, I know that WILPF US will be a stronger and healthier organization when we have more racially and ethnically diverse leadership and membership.

That means you must be part of this outreach! Also, branch members, can you seek to have BIPOC branch membership more nearly proportional to your local populations? The COVID pandemic has been a difficult time for organizing work, yet most of us can seek out and cultivate some personal contacts through various aspects of our lives. Also, individuals and branches alike can take the initiative to interact with and participate in BIPOC-led groups. We must reckon with the importance of having BIPOC voices within our branches. Connect with the October return of the “One by One We Grow” campaign to get more pointers on recruitment.

I believe most readers will understand that, given our generally older membership, WILPF has a critical need for recruitment. Will we continue as a progressive, women’s-perspective peace and justice organization? Or will we slowly fade away?

White WILPFers, I want to talk to you for a moment. We have to understand how much harm systemic racism causes. The cost of being a minority is huge: increased rents, higher cost of loans, lack of generational wealth and capital, wage discrimination, and more health care expenses due to chronic health issues related to the stresses of racism and environmental factors that impact BIPOC communities.

WILPF has sought to open up to a more diverse membership and to increase understanding of racism and white supremacy by doing the following:

• Uprooting Racism book study group
• Multiple programs at Congress (see our 2021 Congress playlist to find them)
• the Resource List for Dismantling White Supremacy (over twenty pages!)
• the Board work on racial justice

I encourage folks to contact me, Darien, with any questions about the upcoming board elections and WILPF racial justice work:  President@wilpfUS.org

Photo credit: Martha Spiess

by Martha Spiess
WILPF Maine

September 2022

Maine WILPFers commemorated the 77^th #NagasakiDay on August 9th in Auburn, Maine, gathering at the Auburn-Lewiston Peace  Bridge. They brought a string of peace cranes, a nuclear abolition sunflower and a #NuclearBan banner (with its QR code for the petition supporting Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton’s bill HR 2850 calling for global abolition of nuclear weapons).

Earlier in the week, several peace and justice groups met to commemorate #HiroshimaDay in nearby Lewiston. The bridge connecting the two cities, called the Peace Bridge, is related to nuclear disarmament in a most unusual way. In 2008, Lewiston’s Mayor for Peace dedicated the bridge to Dr. Lown, co-founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and PSR (Physicians for Social Responsibility and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. He was a cardiac specialist and wrote several books on the subject, but one of his most well-known in the peace community is entitled Prescription for Survival: A Doctor’s Journey to End Nuclear Madness. The forward was written by Howard Zinn.

Back in Auburn, a pedestrian stopped to look at the town’s special bridge plaque for Dr. Lown, read the #NuclearBan Banner’s text and left, irritably muttering “They’re not illegal.  Nuclear weapons aren’t illegal. Nuclear weapons are everywhere. All over the place. And this (pointing) is the South Bridge.”

Change is laborious. It seemingly takes forever. WILPF members sharing their NPT notes from the UN meetings currently underway display their dedication and determination. They inspire and  provide each of us a path forward, through different ways to join in the work for nuclear abolition.

By Marybeth Gardam
Women, Money & Democracy Committee

September 2022

The Women, Money & Democracy Committee of WILPF US hoped that its first two Public Banking Learning Circles would attract a large number of people wanting to learn more about what a public bank is, how it works, and how it can benefit women, families, peace, the environment, economically depressed communities, small businesses and communities of color. The first series in 2021 went so well that another was held in 2022. When more intimate groups of 10 to 15 women gathered, there was the opportunity to get to know one another better and for everyone to benefit from the facilitators’ experience: Susan Harman of the Public Banking Institute and California Public Banking Alliance, Rickey Gard Diamond founder of An Economy of our Own, author of Screwnomics and MS Magazine columnist, and Marybeth Gardam Chair of WILPF’s Women, Money & Democracy Committee.

Over a 6-session series, facilitators offered impressive tools and resources: The WILPF US Public Banking Toolkit, videos, and collaborations with An Economy of Our Own and California Public Banking Alliance.  They explained the public banking movement, and brought together women who admitted they didn’t know much about public banking, but agreed that the for-profit commercial Wall Street banks are ripping people off left and right.

During this session, a happy accident brought together five women from Vermont who shared an interest in transitioning to a more equitable economy. They gained momentum because of another chance coincidence– an upcoming run for State Treasurer. A few years ago, there was a vibrant and hopeful public banking movement in Vermont under the leadership of Gwen Hallsmith, an economist and author. But efforts were impeded by the previous Vermont State Treasurer. The five women from our Learning Circle now have the tools and resources necessary to do the relationship building and outreach across Vermont to convince incoming candidates for State Treasurer to consider the wisdom of a Vermont Public Bank. They’ve set out to do just that, with continued mentoring and advice from the Learning Circle guides.

They’re holding weekly organizing meetings in preparation for the November elections and meeting with all the candidates and influencers. They are reaching out to allies whose dreams for environmental solutions, public education funding, affordable housing, small business support and affordable student loans will benefit from public banking. You can see how they are doing by tuning in to their Friday half hour “PUSH” meetings at 7:30 pm EST, joined by Vermont legislators and influencers! Here’s the zoom link to tune in.

The group will hold an in-person gathering on October 7^th at the Pavilion Building of the Vermont State Capital in Montpelier called MONEY MATTERS:  WOMEN and TRANS THERAPEUTIC JOURNEY OF FINANCIAL FREEDOM, which will include lunch and lots of amazing panels and workshops. The event is produced in collaboration with the Vermont Kindness Project and is co-sponsored by WILPF US and An Economy of Our Own, among other allies. The women are also planning a statewide zoom forum on public banking to put their hopes and ideas before the whole state. Local leaders are Shanda Williams and Jaqueline Reike, Learning Circle graduates and women on fire about economic justice in Vermont!

All in all, the Women, Money & Democracy Committee is pretty pleased with this outcome. They’d love to see the same kind of informed and motivated cohort grow in every state. The WMDC Committee is working with An Economy of Our Own to create Public Banking Learning Circles “packages” with resources and Facilitator Packets, so that activists can mount their own organizing and educational efforts in every city and state. If you are interested, contact wmad@wilpfus.org.

by Gloria McMillan
Tucson WILPF

September 2022

I’m Gloria ("Glo"), with a suggestion to all my well-read WILPF friends. How many times has somebody cited a text during a WILPF meeting that you later forgot to read? Reading belongs to the people, not just “experts” and is a part of our inclusionary work via creative and activist literacy!

Reading brings people’s stories to light by embodying values. Reading books and having illuminating discussions with WILPF members can be an aid to our collective action. So I’m proposing that we start a virtual WILPF book club. I am a bibliophile and happy to coordinate this Zoom-based WILPF Book Club to start us off.

WILPF members, I know you have more creativity in naming than “The Book Club,” so we’re open to names. Contact BookClub@wilpfus.org with your ideas.

Among exciting trends in literature are the BIPOC writers who are writing their own take on classic novels: Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone (original by Sophocles). Or how about Wide Sargasso Sea — a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847). Nigerian American science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Hugo Award-winning novel Binti (2015) is a short but powerful ride into Afro-futurism. Multi-faceted Indian writer and former UN Undersecretary Shashi Tharoor wrote a humorous novel about colonialism and Indian lit: The Great Indian Novel (1989).

Or how about the short story where Ray Bradbury takes on US racism, nuclear war, and imperialism’s payback, “The Rocks Cried Out”? Or Magic Realist classics like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Mexican writer Gabriel García Márquez. There are more possibilities than space here permits, as well as those books known to you and not to me! And this is just fiction.

Besides the benefits of fiction for a book club, many new histories like Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What Britain Did to India (2017) and William Darity’s 2020 text on slavery and reparations, From Here to Equality, offer new lenses for understanding how the past has shaped us and placed us in today’s world.

So – pause for breath here – we can choose from many excellent books, fiction and/or non-fiction.  What is your preference, if any? Again, if interested, contact me at BookClub@wilpfus.org. Thanks for your consideration!