eet Field Organizer Matthew Smucker. Meet National Office Coordinator Linda Thurston.

Say a sad goodbye to Administrative Associate Yeidy Rosa.

There have been big changes in the national office, and we’re excited about (almost all of) them. We believe the larger staff will be better able to bring activists around the country together to counter the recruiters, expose the merchants of death, and resist war in all the ways we can think up together.

Matthew Smucker will be critical in that process. With 12 years of grassroots organizing under his belt, he says he had been “pondering how next to contribute to building a stronger and more strategic antiwar movement” when he read the posting for the field organizer position. In the companion piece, he talks about his plan for how he’s going to do that here.

A fully functional office is equally critical, and that’s where Linda Thurston comes in. Linda knows more than most people about the nuts and bolts of movement work. She’s worked for social justice and human rights for decades—she even put in a stint here helping create our “Day Without the Pentagon” in 1998. With that long perspective, she notes, “WRL is crucial to the vibrancy of the peace and justice movements in this country, and keeping things organized as we organize is a task that a lot of groups aren’t able to give enough resources to. WRL’s efforts will be strengthened by keeping things running smoothly as we go about the work of revolutionary nonviolence.”

In the midst of all these improvements, we are sad to lose Yeidy Rosa, who helped keep this office going for the last two years, depositing checks, talking to callers, keeping track of orders, and much more. Yeidy has moved to Quito, Ecuador, to continue working with the Latin American COs and antimilitarists she met during the International CO Day events in New York in May 2006, and we remain connected her the global context.

Former intern and part-time staffer Mimi LaValley has also left. Mimi stepped up to keep the Bite the Bullet War Profiteering Education network going between Simon Harak’s departure and Matthew’s arrival. We’re happy to say that she hasn’t gone as far as Yeidy did—she’s still in New York and will be working with the national office on a number of projects.

Much of the staff expansion was made possible by a generous bequest from the late Shirley Lens, who died at 84 in 2005. Lens, a former schoolteacher, was a recognized leader for peace and justice in Chicago (where she was blacklisted during the McCarthy years) and later in Oakland, California. She and her husband, Sidney Lens, a dynamic organizer and writer who died in 1986, worked closely with A.J. Muste and the War Resisters League for more than 40 years. This bequest is their final—and largest—contribution to WRL’s ongoing work, and we remember them with gratitude as we welcome the new staff they helped to fund.