Staff
Sarah Husain
Organizing Coordinator
New York-born activist and poet Saran Husain grew up in Hong Kong, Sudan and Pakistan. She has organized grassroots anti-violence community projects linking communities of colour around issues of state violence, focusing on anti-immigrant legislation, resisting post-911 Muslim and Arab detentions, and working against domestic violence. In 1997 she founded South Asians Against Police Brutality and Racism (SAPBR), a grass-roots activist organization based in New York City. As a student at Hunter College, Sarah found the most important part of her education was not the formal classes, but the training in activism she received during the struggle to maintain open admissions at CUNY from 1994-1998. Sarah's written and performance poetry is concerned with identity, memory, nation, violence, cancer, bioterrorism and the female body. She has edited an anthology of contemporary North American Muslim women’s writings against war titled, Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War Faith and Sexuality, (Seal Press, June 2006). She has also been published in Breaking the Silence: South Asian Americans and Domestic Violence, Mizna, and SAMAR magazines. She was the recipient of Hedgebrook writer's residency, 2005. Sarah joined the WRL staff in February 2008.
Tom Leonard
Bookkeeper
Tom is the former Fund-raising Director for CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. In addition to keeping the books together and the bills paid at WRL and other peace and social justice groups, Tom continues to work for economic and social change in El Salvador.
Liz Profriedt
Administrative Volunteer
Liz Proefriedt is a "retired" Sister of St. Joseph who is involved full time in peace and justice work. Here at WRL, her many jobs include membership data processing, managing the phones, taking literature orders, preparing mailings, participating in demonstrations, etc. She is an Area Coordinator for WRL's Stop the Merchants of Death Speaking Tour. Liz also volunteers at Pax Christi Metro New York, is a member of the Srs. of Joseph Nonviolence Group and a member of the Kairos-Plowshares resistance community.
Liz Roberts
Development & Membership Coordinator
Liz Roberts came on staff at the WRL in December 2006 as the Development and Membership Coordinator.She has been a member of the collective, Resistance in Brooklyn, an anti-racist, anti-imperialist collective, since 1998. From 2000-2006 she worked as the Outreach Coordinator at the the Brecht Forum. She has a bachelors degree in Politics and Women's Studies from Mount Holyoke College and a masters degree in Anti-Racist Education from Vermont College. She is a published poet and has just completed a manuscript of her first collection of poetry (Vintage Morning.) She is currently working on a documentary film project on the pro-feminist and nonviolence activism of her late partner, Jon Cohen, who was a member of the WRL National Committee for close to two decades.
Rustie
Beloved Office Cat
Rustie reminds us that as we work to end war and violence, we need to remember to eat, sleep, and play.
Joanne Sheehan
New England Regional Office Staff
Joanne Sheehan is a long-time peace activist and the former Chair of War Resisters International. She lectures throughout the world on nonviolence and social empowerment, and has been a nonviolence trainer/workshop facilitator since the 1970s. The work in the Regional office includes counter-recruitment work in high schools, campaigning against war profiteers, and work against war profiteering.
Uruj Sheikh
Freeman Intern
Uruj is a student at New York City’s Pace University and a volunteer organizer with Students for a Democratic Society. She grew up in New Jersey, where she continues to live with her family. Her early activism included letter-writing campaigns and participating in the Shalom Club at the all-girl Catholic high school she attended. She later became involved in SDS and also worked on civil rights issues at the New York office of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Uruj was introduced to the War Resisters League by Francesca Fiorentini, who does editorial and design work at Left Turn magazine and was also on the staff of WRL. When the League organized a delegation to the US Social Forum in June 2007, Uruj went with the group and became more involved. As the newest Freeman intern at WRL’s national office, she plans to help with youth organizing and an assessment of the anti-war movement, among other projects. Her internship started in mid-January and lasts through the summer, though she expects to stay involved beyond that time. Uruj is especially excited about this opportunity to learn more and develop her organizing and leadership skills. She believes paid positions are important; she hopes to also help with fundraising so the League can afford to hire more staff and interns.
The Harrop A. and Ruth S. Freeman Peace Internship Endowment was created at the Muste Institute in 1996 by a bequest from lifelong peace activists Ruth and Harrop Freeman to provide stipends to interns in the War Resisters League national office.
Matthew Smucker
Field Organizer
Matthew Smucker is the Field Organizer for the War Resisters League. He is passionate about supporting local justice and peace groups and building a strong and diverse movement to end war and its root causes. Originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Matthew served as coordinator for the Lancaster Coalition for Peace & Justice and on the board of the Lancaster Interchurch Peace Witness. He has served as communications coordinator for School of the Americas Watch, as an organizer for Rainforest Action Network, as a trainer for the Ruckus Society, and as an organizer on numerous local campaigns over the past twelve years. He is co-founder of Beyond the Choir and co-author of "Building a Successful Antiwar Movement."
Linda M. Thurston
Office Coordinator
Linda comes to the WRL staff with nearly 30 years experience in peace, social justice and human rights movements. Linda has worked as Fundraising Coordinator at the Brecht Forum, Program Officer at the Funding Exchange and Education and Communications Coordinator at the Center for Constitutional Rights. She served as the Director of Amnesty International's Program to Abolish the Death Penalty and National Director of the American Friends Service Committee Criminal Justice Program. Linda continues to work with Critical Resistance and with the campaign to free death-row political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. A key part of her work against war, the death penalty and the prison industrial complex is finding ways to make new technologies serve social justice organizing.
Ralph DiGia
Dec. 13, 1914 - Feb. 1, 2008
When Ralph DiGia got his notice to report to the Army for induction after Pearl Harbor, he went to the U.S. Attorney's office to say he wasn't reporting because he was a conscientious objector. The U.S. Attorney sent him to a WRL lawyer for advice, but in those benighted days, the armed services did not recognize conscientious objection that was not religiously based. Ralph therefore spent the war years in Federal prison, going on work strikes to integrate the prison dining hall (an effort that succeeded). When he got out of prison, he headed straight for WRL. In prison, Ralph and other WWII resisters had become determined practitioners of nonviolent civil disobedience. However in those days, many older pacifists believed that civil disobedience was going too far in the quest for peace. Over the years, civil disobedience has become a taken-for-granted element of the pacifist repertoire. Ralph has been in the WRL office since the end of WWII. He was Office Manager for years, finally "retired," and has worked here ever since as a volunteer-allegedly half-time. If Ralph were paid staff, he'd be costing us a lot of overtime! Ralph handles a wide range of office tasks: the finances for our work with War Resisters’ International and the financial records for our endowment fund, WRL, Inc.; the portion of WRL contributions that come through monthly pledges; and a lot of our retail orders, particularly those for the yearly Peace Calendar. Finally, like most (not quite all, despite the stereotype) longtime pacifists, he's a Mets fan.