Dear Supporter,
|
A $5, $10 or more year-end gift
will help sustain our work.
Money donated to our work helps foster and promote positive, pro-active solutionsto help manifest a culture of peace.
|
Wishing you a Happy New Year. 2013 has been a big year for us, one of action and positive momentum. Please help us make 2014 even better.
► Help prioritize positive and pro-active peacebuilding solutions to the challenges before us by making a YEAR-END DONATION
We are committed to building communities, a nation, and a world that honor peacebuilding as one of our top priorities. We are working hard to build the large-scale peace constituency needed to make the work and practices of peace and peacebuilding a reality.
The Peace Alliance and Student Peace Alliance are among the leading efforts working to help harness and galvanize this momentum into a powerful new peace movement.
This March will mark our 10th anniversary(!) as an organization and we are proud of all we’ve accomplished and excited to move into this next chapter. With your support, 2014 will be our most productive year yet.
Highlighted 2013 Accomplishments:
Celebrating our successes this past year as we have worked to move the conversation of peacebuilding into a deeper and broader arena both on The Hill in Washington and in our own communities coast to coast.
Working with our mighty Grassroots network, the following are highlights of what we've done together this past year.
✷ Grassroots Organizing: We have launched a robust new field program of Peace Alliance and Student Peace Alliance Action Teams around the nation -- working with the esteemed Sam Daley-Harris, founder of RESULTS. We have hired a superb National Field Director, Dan Kahn, and our leadership team is making grassroots trainings and actions our highest priority.
In the less-than-four months since we initiated our new Action Team approach, we have launched established teams all over the country - from Florida to Alaska – who have written dozens of letters to the editor of major newspapers, as well as to their Senators and House Members, had several Op-Ed pieces published, and begun to have in-person meetings with Congressional Staff – all in support of breakthroughs in the availability of practical, powerful, peacebuilding tools.
We also held outreach organizing events around the country, in Colorado, Northern California, a big International Day of Peace event in Los Angeles with hundreds in attendance and over 2000 watched live stream on the web, to name a few. Next year we will be touring the country raising awareness and building Action Teams. We hope to see you!
✷ Peacebuilding and Violence Prevention Advocacy: Along with all of you, our grassroots network, we helped generate over 50,000 letters and calls to Congress and the President -- as well as direct meetings in D.C. and around the nation -- on key peacebuilding and violence prevention legislation, particularly the Youth PROMISE Act and legislation to establish a U.S. Department of Peacebuilding.
We also supported International Peacebuilding initiatives like funding for theU.S. Institute of Peace, the Complex Crises Fund and the Conflict Stabilization Operations Bureau, along with support for the President'sAtrocities Prevention Board. We joined with other groups to help re-authorize and pass the Violence Against Women Act, and also urged the President to focus on negotiation with North Korea -- all of this and other key peace issues.
Our CA grassroots leaders also got the CA Democratic Party to endorse the Dept. of Peacebuilding legislation and add key peacebuilding language into the Party's platform -- the most comprehensive of it’s kind for a party platform, and in the largest and one of the most influential states in the union.
✷ Public Education and Media: With our increased visibility, we have achieved greater credibility to speak out on matters of the day and found platforms to express our views on various relevant peacebuilding approaches, from radio and TV interviews to Huffington Post articles to requests for speeches and to serve on panels.
✷ Coalition Building: We participated in a number of collaborative partnerships, events and actions with groups like the Prevention and Protection Working Group, Coalition for Juvenile Justice, National Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Coalition, Summer of Peace & Shift Network, SGI-USA, United Religions Initiative, ACLU, Alliance for Peacebuilding, World Vision, River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Roots Action, Beyond War, BayNVC, Global Alliance for Ministries and Infrastructures of Peace, National Peace Academy, National Association of Community and Restorative Justice, Peace Ambassador Training, and others.
D.C. Ben & Jerry's Scooping Event |
✷ Ben & Jerry's at the Capitol:Despite taking place in the middle of the unfortunate Government Shutdown, our Fourth Annual Ben & Jerry's Capitol Hill "A Celebration for Peace" Ice Cream Scooping event had over 800 Congressmembers and staffers attend, learning about the Youth PROMISE Act.
✷ Restorative Justice: We’ve continued ramping up our engagement around the methodologies of Restorative Justice (RJ), a powerful, healing oriented alternative to punitive criminal justice. We've allied with groups like Colorado Restorative Justice Council, Communities for Restorative Justice in Massachusetts and also the DC Alliance for Restorative Practices. We had an exciting victory in Colorado, where we helped pass state-wide legislation to enact juvenile RJ programs and funding throughout the state! We have continued our partnership with theRestorative Justice on the Rise weekly tele-council series, hosted by Molly Rowan Leach, featuring dozens of top leaders and thinkers in the RJ and peacebuilding field, including: Arun Gandhi, Professor Howard Zehr, best-selling author Sebastian Junger, founder of the discipline of Peace and Conflict Studies Johan Galtung, and many others.
✷ Clinton Global Initiative: This past Spring, our Student Peace Alliance was honored to present at the prestigious Clinton Global Initiative University in support of our Peace Jobs initiative.
✷ There is so much more, stay tuned…
We hope you are proud of the work we continue to do together, all of us. The staff and Boards of The Peace Alliance are excited about the abundance of opportunities for peacebuilding ahead. With your support, we can continue to help manifest the dream of peace on Earth into greater reality.
In deep gratitude,
Bob Baskin
And all of us at The Peace Alliance
"Being a Peace Partner with The Peace Alliance [our monthly donors] has moved me from being a despairing bystander to an active participant in the practical and tangible strategies of building a nonviolent world.”
- Terry Mason, Encino, CA
.jpg){kind=small}
No comments:
Post a Comment