Branch Happenings: Humboldt and Cape Cod

The Humboldt Branch sells raffle tickets for its annual quilt project to raise funds for their scholarship and to purchase Jane Addams books. Here is this year’s quilt!

April 2021

Humboldt WILPF Goes Virtuoso!

By Carilyn Goldammer
Humboldt WILPF

Greetings to our WILPF sisters everywhere. This year during our time of COVID, our group in Humboldt County, CA, managed to turn to Zoom for both our meetings and our annual International Women’s Day community celebration. Why virtuoso? Well, getting everyone hooked up to Zoom, plus our musical celebration, required new challenges and success!

Our community celebration for IWD included our Raging Grannies, a keynote address by our local NAACP chairwoman, and our two talented musicians once again led our sing-a-long. Zooming helped reach friends in our more rural areas!

Additionally, this year we chose to join under the Humboldt “Ink People’s DreamMakers” umbrella in order to help facilitate community donations to our Edilith Eckart Peace Scholarship, as well as post events and sell raffle tickets for our annual quilt project. Our quilt donations result in a raffle that helps fund our scholarship and our Jane Addams book purchases. If you’re interested in making donations (yes, I’m hawking here!) or simply seeing our new alliance with the DreamMakers program, check out “The Humboldt Ink People DreamMaker Program” under “Edilith Eckart Peace Scholarship”.

We continue to reach out to other local groups with peace/justice/freedom projects ranging from supporting the houseless population, food distribution, immigrant support, and supporting the local annual girls empowerment camp. We wish you all health, joy, and peace.

Cape Cod Branch Honors International Women’s Day with Wise Words

By Elenita Muñiz
WILPF Cape Cod

Screenshot of WILPF Cape Cod recording its March 8 Zoom celebration of International Women’s Day. Top row, L to R: Candace Perry, Donna Pihl, Elenita Muñiz; center row, L to R: Alycia longriver Davis, Paula Schnepp, Dianne Ashley; bottom row, L to R: Chris Morin, Margy Marhdt, Jan Hively.

On March 8, members of the Cape Cod branch of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom gathered over Zoom to record a program to honor International Women’s Day. Not in person this year, but heartfelt and joyous nonetheless, the program featured the writings of Alycia longriver Davis, who has been a member of this branch for many years. Alycia is a prolific, astute, and thoughtful writer, as everyone who reads her email reflections to the branch listserv knows well. Alycia is currently in hospice care for Stage IV cancer and we were thrilled and touched that she was able to join the call and hear the program.

Candace Perry and Jan Hively organized the event. Readers included Dianne Ashley, Irina Kosterina and her children, Margy Marhdt, Chris Morin, Elenita Muñiz, Donna Pihl, and Paula Schnepp. The program, emceed by Candace, began with a short history of International Women's Day. The readings included a short story, “The Kite,” which Alycia wrote during her early days living in Provincetown in 1994, followed by several meditations Alycia wrote for her book Opening Our Hearts. This collection of stories in Native American style, featuring the words of wise grandparents to children or poetic reflections on the gifts of nature and our world, has been adapted to become a religious education curriculum for the Unitarian Universalist Association!

We will be posting the program on the WILPF US YouTube page, but for now the recorded program (27 minutes) can be viewed through this link.

Honoring Women’s History in Town Government

WILPF Cape Cod member Paula Schnepp, who serves on the Barnstable Town Council, recently organized a proposed resolution for the council to consider. The proposal was put forth by all six women members of the council, each reading a paragraph of the motion, that the town declare the month of March to be Women’s History Month. The proclamation cites the contributions of women to the history of the town, the role of women of color, immigrants, and indigenous women, and the critical significance of women to the success of the town.

The resolution was adopted unanimously, with applause and a virtual standing ovation from the [male] Barnstable Town Council chair! Well done, Paula! Thank you for all the work you do.