MAY 1, 2011
Balloting has closed. Thanks to everyone who voted!
Statements of Candidates (* = Incumbent)
JASON AHMADI (Southwest)
I have found that building real relationships and community is essential to resisting this culture and practice of war. In my anti-nuclear organizing in the rural pueblos of Northern New Mexico, I feel I have fulfilled my most meaningful and effective roles in communicating the greater interconnected struggles and developing leadership within impacted communities. Through my activism in the University of California I learned of my university's management of the nuclear weapons complex. In resisting the military and private nature of my public university I participated in hunger strikes, banner drops, tent universities, radical publications, marches, protests, tree-sits and civil disobedience arrests. I helped organize students from different universities to sit in at countless Regents meetings, performed solidarity work with unions, and worked for Michael Nagler's nonviolence nonprofit. I have supported myself through cooking Food Not Bombs, living out of a car my parents gifted me for graduating and becoming active in the East Bay squatting community. I managed the campaign of Stewart Jones running for city council in Berkeley to expand my experiential knowledge and build relationships. Becoming a member of the National Committee would be a great chance in strengthening ties and expanding our growing communities of resistance. My contribution to the League would center around my connections to radical communities in the Bay Area and the local and indigenous groups resisting uranium mining and LANL in the Southwest.
CLAIRE BAYARD* (Northwest)
An organizer with Catalyst Project, an antiracist movement building center, and a demilitarization activist from a military family, Clare got involved in antimilitarist work through the immigrant rights and global justice movements. She is committed to building the G.I. resistance movement supporting veteran and war resister leadership, and connecting with domestic struggles against the root causes of war. Clare has worked with Iraq Veterans Against the War for 5 years and is supporting IVAW in developing their Operation Recovery: Stop the Deployment of Traumatized Troops campaign, and on veteran-led reparations to the Iraqi people. Through WRL, Clare has participated in the international conscientious objector movement and War Resisters International, developing a global initiative linking climate change and war. Clare is interested in bringing lessons from transformative justice and healing justice projects, and from base-building community organizing work into our anti- war/peace/demilitarization work.
OSKAR CASTRO* (Underrepresented Communities)
I used to coordinate the National Youth and Militarism Program of the American Friends Service Committee and now serve as a Program Analyst in its recently formed Goal Leadership Division. I have been with AFSC for the last eight years and have within that time come to a greater understanding as to how militarism has become one of the driving forces within the United States. It is within this context of understanding, and the awareness building that I do from the vantage point of the AFSC, that I have chosen to serve on the WRL National Committee. I want to facilitate a stronger relationship with the WRL and AFSC as well as other groups I am a part of, to attempt to integrate WRL concepts and ideals into my particular area of advocacy & outreach within the spheres I operate in as an activist, and to assist in the guidance of the organization as it journeys through time as one of the cornerstones of the peace and social justice movement. I hope to be afforded the opportunity to continue to lend my service to WRL and to assist it in accomplishing its many goals to build peace in the United States and throughout the world.
CARLA DAWSON* (Underrepresented Communities)
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.
HALLIE GOERTNER (Underrepresented Communities)
I am running for one of the at-large member's of WRL's National Committee as a representative from two of the underrepresented communities (youth, bisexual). Growing up in Washington, DC, I was exposed early on to the area's peace movement, and started to get involved during high school through my work at the Washington Peace Center and Little Friends for Peace. I currently attend Boston University, where for my first two years I was on the board of the BU Anti-War Coalition, and their representative to the UMass Boston chapter of Campus Anti-War Network. This past semester I had an internship in Paris, France, working for Le Mouvement de la Paix (the Peace Movement), a French pacifist organization. I am highly committed to working for peace and justice and think that serving on the WRL's NC would be a great opportunity for me to play a larger role in the anti-war movement and I could contribute to the WRL’s work towards ending war.
SKY HALL (Underrepresented Communities)
I became involved with social change organizing in the late 1990's, doing popular education and helping with mass mobilization protests against global financial institutions as part of the global justice movement. After a few years of participating on a national/international level, I moved back to Maine to focus on local organizing. I was a founding member of the art activist group, Beehive Design Collective. In Maine, I was 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. Later, I spent a year 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, I have volunteered with WRL occasionally, as well as volunteering for the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and wish to become more involved and to plug into other social change projects
DAVID KOENIG (Northeast)
I read an article recently, in which a fellow high school history teacher described a unit he had taught on the abolitionist movement in the United States. Students were assigned to write an autobiography of themselves as members of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The author said: "I hoped that the autobiography assignment would help students imagine lives of commitment, to consider experiences that might lead one to dedicate one's life to something beyond simply making a living, enjoying one's family, and having a good time."The above quote effectively summarizes my reasons for wanting to serve on the National Committee of the WRL. Since the beginning of our country's militaristic response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, I have been searching for the best way to commit myself to working for the cause of peace (while at the same time continuing to make a living and enjoy my family and friends.) I would like to serve on WRL's National Committee in order to increase my current involvement in the struggle for peace. I believe firmly in the WRL Pledge, and I feel that the moral imperative to remove warfare from our national policy in today's world is equal to that to remove slavery from the nation in the abolitionists' time.
MIKE LEVINSON (Northeast)
I want to re-join the NC. Hooray! I was on the old Executive Committee during the last millennium, and then the staff. I focus mostly on international issues, I was part of the great Gaza Freedom March last year, was deported from Israel in 1992, and organized nonviolence workshops in Eastern Europe for WRL/WRI. Nonviolence and anarchism mean exactly the same thing! We in the peace movement will surely win; after all, THEY have only the guns and money, but nothing else. Hi Ho!
ISABELL MOORE* (Southeast)
Isabell Moore grew up and lives in Greensboro, NC, where she is active in economic, racial justice and multi-racial LGBT/Queer organizing efforts. She feels strongly about connecting these issues to anti-war and anti-militarist work
through WRL. She also teaches history at the local community college and Women and Gender Studies at UNC-Greensboro. Since joining the WRL National Committee in fall of 2007, she has served on an NC Agenda planning committee, played a role in facilitating strategic planning, and serves as co- coordinator of the Anti-Racism Task Force. She hopes to be able to continue working towards a world free of war and oppression with the WRL NC!
PATRICIA ORLINSKI (Southwest)
I'm writing to nominate myself to be a member of the National Committee. I have been a member of the WRL for a number of years and admire and agree with your philosophy. I have supported the organization personally by purchasing the WRL calendars, making donations and speaking about the organization. I am a retired Elementary School teacher and took many opportunities to create lessons for my 5th grade students to learn about and question what has happened in the past and what is happening in the present relative to war and conflict. I made it a point for my students to contact a veteran from their family or from the school staff and interview them. I am living my life working to resolve conflicts of my own in ways that are peaceful and I work to resolve conflicts with others in ways that use peaceful procedures. I believe that talking and listening to one another creates a space in which people can become more accepting of each other. I have participated in interfaith activities and belong to an Interfaith Project here in Arizona, working to change legislation and open minds to better thinking.
PRACHI PATANKAR (Underrepresented Communities)
I grew up in rural India, raised by a Gandhian freedom fighter grandmother and Marxist parents who are deeply involved with rural peasant movements. My personal history has allowed me to form strong connections with social movements in India. In New York, I work with South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI), a New York based collective that engages in the US public sphere to challenge the US establishment wherever it reinforces repressive politics in South Asia and seek to be solidarity with movements in the subcontinent. Among other issues, SASI focuses on creating awareness around the US war and occupation of Afghanistan. I have had the pleasure to collaborate with WRL on various initiatives like the events on the 9th anniversary of the U.S. led war on Afghanistan in October 2010 as well as the upcoming tour of the former Afghan parliamentarian, Malalai Joya. Throughout the last 10 years of doing anti-war organizing, I have followed and respected the work of WRL as one of the oldest anti-war organizations in country that has been doing sustained political work. As WRL gears up for another year resistance to the never-ending US wars and occupations, I would love to be part of developing its vision and future strategies against these wars and for a better world.
ROSALIE G. RIEGLE (Northeast)
As one who tries to follow Catholic Worker principles, I have long admired the WRL and respected your unswerving pacifism. WRL seems to be one of the few secular peace groups that preserves a broad yet radical anti-war stance, and I'd like to help it grow in the Chicago area and throughout the country. I've lived in the Midwest all my life -- mostly in Michigan but for the last six years in Evanston, Illinois. What a difference I've found in this large metropolitan area! In Saginaw, we had a handful of peace people; here there are hundreds of activists, many with differing approaches and interests. Since coming to Chicago, I've Coalition for Peace, North Suburban Peace Initiative (NSPI), the White Rose Catholic Worker, 8th Day Center for Justice, and Voices for Creative Nonviolence. I also facilitate the interactions of 152 groups on the Michigan Peace Network and have worked on the WAT campaign with Frida Berrigan and Matt Daloisio. I'm professor emerita in English from Saginaw Valley State University. Relevant publications are Voices from the Catholic Worker (Temple UP, 1993) and Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her (Orbis Books, 2003.) My current project is Crossing the Line, an oral history of nonviolent resisters who have gone to prison in their work for peace. For this book, I was privileged to interview both Ralph DiGia and Grace Paley of blessed memory. Dave McReynolds has been helpful in the segment on resistance to the civil defense drills. I would consider it an honor to serve as an at-large member of the WRL National Committee.
JOSE VASQUEZ (Underrepresented Communities)
I'm honored to be considered for an at large seat on the WRL NC. My relationship with the organization started when I came across the website during my search for answers to the deeply conflicted questions I had about my military service in 2004. In January of the following year, after much soul searching I applied for conscientious objector status. I was honorably discharged in May 2007. In the meantime, I joined IVAW and served as the NYC chapter president. Our first office space was in the WRL office. I worked closely with Steve Theberge, Matt Smucker, and more recently Kimber Heinz on numerous actions, events, and trainings. As the executive director of IVAW I am committed to nonviolence and ending war. I hope to bring my experience and knowledge of the military and veteran community to the organizing efforts of WRL. My other strengths include budget and financial management, event planning and logistics, facilitation, conflict resolution, and liaising with allies. In the past, I have worked as a health and safety instructor, museum staff, adjunct lecturer, and union organizer. If elected, I look forward to joining the team.
HART VIGES (Southwest)
In my running for the National Committee of the War Resister League I was inspired by the history of the League and the first two activities listed in your brochure, helping war resisters and counter-recruitment. I became a Conscientious Objector after my tour in Iraq. I received my Honorable Discharge and would love to help others in their struggle for freedom. I also have been active with Sustainable Options for Youth, the counter-recruitment group here in Austin, for the last four years. We have tabled during the lunch hours using League material and from my experience I thank y'all for all that y'all do. I am entering my last year on the National Board for Veterans for Peace and would like to contribute in a similar manner while reaching out to build connections in the Peace Movement. Being here in Texas it seems that the David vs. Goliath aspect of the struggle appears to be bigger. This doesn't bother me because I have faith in the evolution of the Human Race. I am a current student majoring in Communication. This is my major because I feel that healthy communication is the best remedy to ending war. Granted that most focus on the current wars, I feel that these wars are just an effect of the militarization of our culture. It is as if you have a yard full of weeds. Mowing the top of the weeks will only have more weeds (wars) in the future. Pulling the weeds out by the roots will prevent future wars. I feel that the focus of the League is aimed at the roots of the weeds.
TOM WARREN (Southeast)
In the WRL Statement of Purpose, particularly the phrase "war is a crime against humanity," I knew I had found an organization which embodied my deepest beliefs about, and longings for, our world. As a member of the clergy, I have always believed that nonviolence is the only long-term, sustainable hope for humanity. War, regardless of its justifications, simply replaces one system of domination with another. Such faulty replacement can only be addressed through public education, social organizing, political resistance, and human reconciliation. While this work is difficult, often requiring nonviolent confrontation with the "powers that be," it is the work necessary to move humanity toward the "beloved community" which Martin Luther King articulated so clearly. I am enthusiastic about serving on the National Committee because of WRL's commitment to confronting, not simply the criminality of war, but the societal institutions which actively promote and legitimize war as social policy. Work in counter-recruitment, against war profiteering, and for war-tax resistance sets WRL apart in their understanding and commitment to make war a joyful casualty of human history. It is my hope, through service on the National Committee, to enhance the work of the WRL.
