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.

Jason Ahmadi

Jason is active in anti-nuclear organizing, including work in the rural pueblos of Northern New Mexico and at the University of California. He has participated in hunger strikes, banner drops, tent universities, radical publications, marches, protests, tree-sits and civil disobedience arrests and has helped organize students from different universities to sit in at Regents meetings, performed solidarity work with unions, and worked with the Metta Center for Nonviolence Education and Food Not Bombs. He joins WRL's National Committee with a strong belief that building real relationships and community is essential to resisting the culture and practice of war.

Ellen Barfield

Ellen Barfield has been a full-time peace and justice activist for nearly twenty-five years. In addition to being on the board of the War Resisters League, Ellen is the coordinator of the Veterans for Peace Baltimore Phil Berrigan Memorial Chapter, and works on national committees of VFP, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and School of the Americas Watch. She served in the U.S. Army from 1977-1981.

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, Frida worked for six years 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 Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer live in New London, Connecticut.

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.

Oskar Castro
Oskar Castro is the Executive Director of Military Families Speak out and is a 1992 graduate of Rowan University where he majored in law & human rights. Oskar was the Coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee’s National Youth & Militarism Program for 8 years and then served as a Senior Program Analyst for 1 year before joining with MFSO. He also served with INROADS/Philadelphia, Inc., an international non-profit career development organization working with youth of color. Prior to working with INROADS Oskar served in the realm of higher education as a community college recruiter and student advisor.

Matthew Daloisio
After graduating Loyola College in Maryland, Matthew Daloisio 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. Matthew and his wife Amanda live in New York's East Village.

Carla A. Dawson
I am the mother of three young men, and the grandmother of two granddaughters. I am a full-time Teacher at North High School in Des Moines, IA; I speak everyday to students about the wars the United States are in, and how people like them, have a say in what goes on in our world, if they are willing to stand for all, not just themselves. I am an African-American, and a past member of the Des Moines Catholic Worker Community. I heard about WRL 23 years ago, when I first moved to the DMCW Community. I thought what a great ideal: a group that works against all wars. My first NC was a very moving experience for me, a room full of people from all over who were working in their own way to promote peace and say no to war. I feel very blessed to be on the NC and look forward to many more years. I will continue striving to make a world were peace is the only answer to conflict. May we continue to shine our lights.

Jody Dodd
Jody has been a life long activist (53 years), working on human rights, environmental, and social justice issues with many people and organizations across the US. She moved to Philadelphia from Texas in 2000 to work for Women's International League for Peace and Freedom's US Section office. For the past 15 years, she has worked doing legal support for activists in Philly and across the country, providing Know Your Rights trainings, as a legal observer for demonstrations and as part of the legal support teams for activists who have been arrested. She served on American Friends Service Committee's Criminal Justice Task Force for 5 years and as a part of their national board's Peace Building Unit for 8 years. . As a single mom, she raised two sons, both adults now, who live in Texas and California. For the past three years, she has worked for Krasner Law Offices as the legal manager/lawyer wrangler, focusing on criminal defense, civil rights and police misconduct litigation.

Jim Haber
Jim Haber joined the WRL National Committee in 2002. He is the Coordinator of Nevada Desert Experience (NDE) which organizes interfaith resistance to nuclear weapons and war. NDE is also a leading voice against the rise of remotely piloted aircraft ("drones") and other armed robots. Currently based in Las Vegas, NV, Jim spent years helping pioneer needle exchange programs for injection drug users and feeding homeless people in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Jim edited the 2008 WRL Peace Calendar which featured grassroots, nonviolent activists and movements from north Africa to central Asia. Since 1983 during the movement to stop the MX Missile, Jim has facilitated many nonviolence trainings. Jim remains very active with Jewish Voice for Peace, the G.I. Rights Hotline and the Catholic Worker movement.

Sky Hall

Sky has been involved with social change organizing since the late 1990's, doing popular education and helping with mass mobilization protests against global financial institutions as part of the global justice movement. Sky is a founding member of the Maine-based art activist group, Beehive Design Collective, and has been involved with organizing for environmental justice, queer visibility and liberation, support for prisoners and alternatives to the prison system, anti-militarism, and local community self-reliance. Sky has also worked as an organizer with the Maine Personal Assistants Services Association, organizing direct care workers and advocating to employers, state agencies, and the state legislature on behalf of workers in the field of work that has been my primary occupation over the years. Since moving to NYC, Sky has volunteered with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and worked with WRL's Archiving Committee.

Hallie Goertner

Hallie Goertner has been involved in the peace movement since she was a high school student, working with Washington Peace Center and Little Friends For Peace. Currently a student at Boston University, Hallie has served on the board of the BU Anti-War Coalition and has represented the Coalition at the UMass Boston chapter of Campus Anti-War Network. She recently completed an internship with Le Mouvement de la Paix (the Peace Movement), a French pacifist organization.<

Susan Kingsland

Bob Meola
Bob Meola has been a radical involved in struggles for peace and justice since the 60s. He has worked to end the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Central America, and everywhere else since then and has been an organizer and peace and justice and anti-draft and anti-nuclear 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 was a founder of Southern California War Resisters' League and Southern California War Tax Resistance. He is a long-time member of WRL and is a contact for WRL-West. Bob has been a draft counselor, veterans' counselor and volunteer on the G.I. Rights Hotline. He is a Commissioner and immediate past Chairperson of the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission in Berkeley, CA and a member of both the Courage to Resist Organizing Collective and of the Bradley Manning Support Network Steering Committee. He has a B.A. from James Madison College at Michigan State University and a J.D. from New College of California School of Law. He believes that mass desertion by U.S. troops would be a good way to end the current immoral and illegal wars of the United States in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Matt Meyer
Matt Meyer is an educator-activist, based in New York City. Founding PJSA Co-Chair along with USF Dean Jennifer Turpin, Meyer 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, of which Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote, "Sutherland and Meyer have looked beyond the short-term strategies and tactics which too often divide progressive people . . . They have begun to develop a language which looks at the roots of our humanness." Meyer is author of 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 forthcoming two-volume Seeds of New Hope: African Peace Studies for the 21st Century. Former WRL Chair Matt Meyer currently co-chairs COPRED, the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development, and convenes the Africa Working Group of War Resisters’ International.

John M. Miller
John M. Miller is a co-founder and National Coordinator of the East Timor Action Network where he coordinates ETAN's New York chapter and directs ETAN's Foreign Bases Project. 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 and has made numerous visits to East Timor. John has appeared on CNN, CNBC, BBC, Canadian Broadcasting, Pacifica's Democracy Now! and a numerous local radio programs.

Isabell Moore
Isabell grew up in Greensboro and is a long time activist around issues of racial justice, war and LGBTQ issues. She is currently on the board of the Fund for Democratic Communities, is a member of Southerners on New Ground, Project South and Cakalak Thunder, and frequently writes for Left Turn magazine. Right now she’s an MA student in the Women and Gender Studies program at UNCG, where she is focusing on issues of race, racism and social movement building. She really really likes to cook and walk and laugh at good jokes. She is trying to resist becoming a free internet tv junky.

Judith Mahoney Pasternak
Judith Mahoney Pasternak is the former editor of WRL's Nonviolent Activist magazine (now WIN magazine). Judith is a journalist and writer on travel and popular culture. Publisher of a number of books and essays, she is also a poet published in So's Your Old Lady, Tikkun, and Curious Rooms. She writes currently for WIN, the Indypendent and numerous other magazines.

Prachi Patankar

Prachi Patankar is an activist, educator, and arts administrator based in New York City. She grew up in rural India, raised by a freedom fighter grandmother and parents who are deeply involved with rural peasant movements. In 2000, Prachi went back to India where she helped start a school for children of people displaced by dams and worked with local educators to create curricula emphasizing issues related to their daily struggles. She has been involved in antiwar organizing for the past ten years in New York City. She has also organized education initiatives like the Youth Solidarity Summer and Palestine Education Project. Currently, Prachi works with South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI), a New York–based collective that works in solidarity with social movements in South Asia. Most recently, she organized Malalai Joya’s 2011 U.S. speaking tour.

Rosalie Riegle

Rosalie Riegle moved to Evanston, Illinois from Saginaw, Michigan in 2004. In Saginaw she co-founded two Catholic Worker houses of hospitality. During the Vietnam War, she was one of the conveners of Saginaw Valley Peace Watch with Davis Sommers as coordinator, and in the 80s, she worked to close Wurtsmith and KI Sawyers AFB. In 2002 she helped to start Tri-City Action for Peace. Rosalie taught English at Saginaw Valley State University from 1968 through 2003. In Evanston, she plays with her seven grandchildren, continues to write oral history, and works with Neighbors for Peace, St. Nicholas Peace and Justice Committee, the Iraqi Student Project at DePaul, and the Illinois Coalition for Peace, Justice, and the Environment. She is facilitator for three state websites through the Project for Justice, the Environment, and Peace.  She is the author of several books, including Voices from the Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her and Doing Time for Peace: The Voices of Resister Families and Communities..

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.

Eric Stoner
Eric Stoner is a New York-based freelance journalist, activist and an adjunct professor at St. Peter’s College. His articles have appeared in The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Nation, The Huffington Post, In These Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and in newspapers across the country. He edits and writes for Waging Nonviolence, a blog that covers nonviolent actions and campaigns around the world, and serves on the advisory board of the Center for Peacemaking at Marquette University.

Jose Vasquez
Jose Vasquez is the Executive Director of Iraq Veterans Against the War. He served fourteen years in the U.S. Army and was honorably discharged in May 2007 as a conscientious objector. Jose was a key organizer of Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations and represented IVAW in the editing process for the book published by Haymarket. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center conducting research on the politics of veteran status in contemporary American society.