National Committee

WRL’s work is directed by its highest decision-making body, the National Committee (NC). The NC meets twice a year and has a New York-based Administrative Coordinating Committee that meets more frequently.
 
Ellen Barfield
Ellen Barfield is a full-time peace and justice activist.  She served in the U.S. Army from 1977-1981. In addition to serving on the board of the War Resisters League, Ellen is also National Vice President of Veterans for Peace and a member of the national boards of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the School of the Americas Watch.

Clare Bayard
Clare Bayard is a core member, organizer and trainer with the Catalyst Project. She has played a lead role in forging alliances between mostly white global justice and anti-war groups with immigrant-led economic and racial justice organizations. Clare played a leading role in building relationships between Food Not Bombs and the Day Labor Program and Coalition on Homelessness. Through her work with the anti-imperialist Heads Up Collective, she continues to develop strategic alliances to build movement in the Bay Area.

Frida Berrigan
Frida Berrigan serves on the Board of the War Resisters League. A graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, for the last six years Frida has worked with the World Policy Institute, a progressive think-tank based at the New School University. Frida is also a contributing editor to In These Times magazine. She and her partner Ian Marvy, an urban farmer working with young people, live in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Rick Bickhart
Radicalized during the early 70s, discovered WRL in 1982 and have never left. Started out as a dairy farmer but for the last 35 years have made a living as a graphic designer and art director, prefer to be hiking in the mountains rather than in front of this damn computer where I am too often, father of two beautiful daughters, lucky partner to my very best friend, war tax resister and anarchist because I have to be, volunteer at local homeless shelters and food banks, jazz gives me comfort, can’t wait to put in the garden, love a good mystery or a good political essay, don’t bother with TV but can’t wait to see the next good movie, and hope to someday to have a fraction of the courage of Ralph DiGia. WRL is my political home and home to many very fine friends.

Iván J. Broida-Fontánez
Iván  participated in the V and VI World Social Forums and helped organize the Puerto Rican Social Forum. He is currently working with the Caribbean Project for Justice and Peace based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, sits on the Advisory Board for the Not Your Soldier Project, and is a part of the AFSC Youth & Militarism Program Committee.

Oskar Castro
Oskar Castro is  the Youth and Militarism Program Analyst for the American Friends Service Committee's Central Office. Oskar has been involved in human and civil rights discussions related to the U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico, college anti-war activism and support for U.S. political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. Currently, Oskar works to educate young people about the risks, horrors and misconceptions of military life including: Recruiter Lies, Conscientious Objection, Selective Service Registration, U.S. Militarism around the Globe & in the Public Schools.  Oskar's knowledge specialties include the expansion of the Junior Reserves Officer Training Corps (JROTC) in high schools, the administration of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test, and the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on military recruitment. He travels widely to lead counter-recruitment trainings, workshops, and discussions. He is currently one of the key architects of the National Network on the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY), a network of counter-recruitment organizations from around the US. Oskar spent ten years working with young people in college as a recruiter and career developer before joining AFSC six and a half years ago.

Jo Comerford
Jo Comerford is Executive Director of the National Priorities Project.  She has nearly two decades of experience in community organizing, strategic program planning, organizational development and fundraising. She is the former director of The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and former director of the American Friends Service Committee's justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in Western Massachusetts. She holds an MSW in community organizing from Hunter College School of Social Work and is an adjunct faculty member of Smith College School of Social Work.

Matthew Daloisio
Matthew Daloisio has lived with his wife Amanda at the New York Catholic Worker since August 2002. After graduating Loyola College in Maryland, Matthew worked with AIDS advocacy organizations in Boston, MA and then lived at Haley House, the Catholic Worker in Boston. He currently works with the GI Rights hotline, the War Resisters League, and the Kairos Community in NYC and is an associate editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper.

Carla A. Dawson

Sam Diener
Sam Diener is co-editor of Peacework Magazine at the American Friends Service Committee. He is the co-founder of the GI Rights Hotline and volunteers with the hotline out of the East New England node. While on staff at CCCO, he co-led a campaign against the expansion of JROTC which helped stop two dozen proposed JROTC units and initiated a campaign against mobile military recruiting. He frequently files Freedom of Information Act requests which has exposed the realities of military life and the demographics of military recruiting. As a member of the New England Nonviolence Trainers Network, he has led nonviolent direct action trainings, peacekeeper trainings, and trainings for trainers. Sam is a mediation trainer and conflict transformation educator who formerly worked at Educators for Social Responsibility coordinating the Stories Program, and was the conflict intervention coordinator in an 1100 student public middle school. He's also taught history, english, computer applications, public speaking, and peace studies at a high school primarily for immigrant youth in Washington DC, and an alternative high school for students who've been pushed out of other high schools in Oakland, CA (Emiliano Zapata Street Academy). Sam is an ongoing partial war tax resister and was a public draft registration resister. Sam is available to speak at campuses and events on empowerment and peace journalism, nonviolent direct action, pro-feminism and nonviolence, liberatory pedagogy, revolutionary visions, and other related topics.

Jim Haber
Long-time San Francisco activist, Jim is now Coordinator of Nevada Desert Experience which organizes interfaith resistance to nuclear weapons and is based in Las Vegas, not far from the Nevada Test Site, the most bombed place on Earth. Jim joined the WRL National Committee in 2002. He edited the 2008 WRL Peace Calendar which featured grassroots nonviolent activism from the greater Middle East, north Africa and central Asia. Jim is also very active with Jewish Voice for Peace, the G.I. Rights Hotline and the Catholic Worker movement.

Susan Kingsland

Christopher Knestrick
Chris is currently on sabbatical from the NC, working with a Christian Peacemakers Team in Columbia.  These words are from his "statement of conviction" written as he left for Columbia:  "As a college educated hetero-sexual white male with United States citizenship, I have inherited immense, unearned privileges. These privileges have been given to me by a violent system of heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. I want to recognize this reality and admit I am a part of it and have internalized it. With this understanding, I commit to undoing oppression both in our society and in my person. I commit to accepting criticisms by individuals when I act in such a way that perpetuates these oppressions. I commit to act as an ally to the people that are most affected by heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. I pray and ask for forgiveness from my community, knowing that I will fall many times at this work because this is a journey of liberation for myself and others. But I assure you, I commit to getting up again and again each time I fall."

Bob Meola
Bob Meola has been a radical involved in struggles for peace and justice since the 60s. He was a Vietnam era Conscientious Objector and as a peace activist has worked to end the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Central America, etc. Bob is a long time member of WRL and was a founder of Southern California War Resisters League and Southern California War Tax Resistance. He has been a peace and justice organizer and anti-draft and anti-nuclear and anti-war activist. He is a Gandhian pacifist, has been a non-violence trainer and has committed numerous acts of civil disobedience. He realized he was an anarchist when he realized his communist comrades had forgotten about Marx's withering away of the state. Bob has been a draft counselor, veterans' counselor and volunteer on the G.I. Rights Hotline. He believes peace education,counter-recruitment, GI Resistance and all anti-militarist efforts to be important. He has been active previously in SDS,the National Lawyers Guild and around many movement issues. He is also a member of Movement for a Democratic Society and a member of the Courage to Resist Collective. He is currently the Chairperson of the Peace and Justice Commission of the City of Berkeley, CA and has been active on that commission since 2006. He has a B.A. from James Madison College at Michigan State University where his "Field of Concentration" was "Justice Morality and Constitutional Democracy." He has a J.D. from New College of California School of Law.

Matt Meyer
Matt Meyer is an educator-activist based in New York City. Matt has long worked to bring together academics and activists for lasting social change. A former public draft registration resister and chair of the War Resisters League, he continues to serve as convener of the War Resisters International Africa Working Group. With Bill Sutherland, Meyer authored Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan-African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation, Time is Tight: Transformative Education in Eritrea, South Africa, and the U.S.A., based in part on his experiences as Multicultural Coordinator for the NYC Board of Education's Alternative High Schools and Programs. He has edited the Fellowship of Reconciliation's "Puerto Rico: The Cost of Colonialism;" War in Africa and an African Peace; and the two-volume Seeds of New Hope: African Peace Studies for the 21st Century. Matt currently co-chairs COPRED, the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development.

John M. Miller
John M. Miller is a co-founder and National Coordinator of the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network  and UN representative of War Resisters International and the International Federation for East Timor. He is a former editor of the original WIN Magazine, and has worked for National Mobilization for Survival, the Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Harbor, among others. He is author of numerous articles and pamphlets, and editor and/or publisher for several newsletters and magazines. He served as staff for a Parliamentarians for East Timor observer mission to the 1999 referendum in East Timor. John has appeared on CNN, CNBC, BBC, Canadian Broadcasting, Pacifica's Democracy Now! and a numerous local radio programs.

Isabell Moore
Isabell is an activist, writer, teacher and student focused on economic and racial justice issues, as well as on fighting war and police brutality. She grew up in Greensboro, NC and returned to live there in 2003 after living, studying and working for six years in New York, where she was involved in fighting for protection of community gardens and opposing corporate globalization. She earned her B.A. in historical sociology from Columbia University, where she focused on race, class, gender and social movements. Most recently she worked for the Justice at Smithfield campaign organizing community folks to support workers at the world's largest hog processing plant in Tar Heel, NC. Currently working on a master's degree in Women and Gender Studies at UNCG, she is a graduate assistant for the university's African American Studies Program and a trainer in training for the anti-racism process of the Leadership and Empowerment Institute. She is a longtime member of Cakalak Thunder Radical Drum Corps, Southerners On New Ground, and Project South. She also frequently writes for Left Turn magazine.

Judith Mahoney Pasternak
Longtime socialist, pacifist and peace activist Judith Mahoney Pasternak is in her other life a journalist and writer. She coordinated feminist programming on WBAI, the Pacifica listener-sponsored radio station in New York and was Managing Editor of the independent left newspaper the Guardian Newsweekly. The author of several books on travel and popular culture, she now writes about movies for The Indypendent, New York’s Indymedia newspaper, and about traveling in the political dimension on her blog, “The Political Landscape”. She joined the WRL staff in 1995 as Editor of the Nonviolent Activist (the magazine now known as WIN). Ten years later, she left the job to write full-time, after which she joined the Administrative Coordinating Committee. On a personal note, she has three grown children and three grandchildren. Finally, she feels a particular responsibility as a U.S. Jew to fight for justice and self-determination for Palestinians.

Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer
Patrick cares for his two year old daughter, Rosena, in the daytime and in the evenings works with adults with psychiatric disabilities who need assistance learning to live in the community on their own.  He is the outgoing WRL Representative to War Resisters International and heads up WRL's International Task Force.  A counter-recruitment activist since his high school days, he is still in the school every week working with teen activists and talking to students about the military's lies.  He is also a non-registrant with Selective Service and a war tax resister. In his spare time he likes to bowl.

Jennifer Webster

Gloria Williams