Vermont and New Hampshire energy educators share out take-aways from their just-concluded VEEP/NHEEP 2024 Summer Institute, June 24-28, at World Fellowship, focused on hand-on education strategies to teach solutions for climate change. 

In 2023, adventurer and writer Freddie Wilkinson embarked on a ~15,000-mile "big-ass canoe" trip together with a group of other paddlers from  different first nations within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, including Ryan Ranco Kelly of the Penobscot Nation in Maine. Ryan and Freddie share stories from the adventure, which will also feature in a book Freddie is writing for National Geographic on the history of the canoe.

Over the last thirty years, the driving concept of Israel-Palestine peacemaking has been a two-state solution based on a hard territorial partition. Recently, however, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians have been exploring an innovative, EU-like confederal arrangement as a way to overcome the obstacles that have tripped up diplomacy in the past. Ron Skolnik will discuss these confederation-oriented initiatives, including “A Land for All: Two States One Homeland” and “The Holy Land Confederation”, comparing and contrasting them with…

The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prison population. The majority of the people in America's jails and prisons will eventually be released, and then they often to face a myriad of challenges. This presentation offers an overview of 10-episode training series, Homecoming: Life after Incarceration, developed by Jacob Mihalak and his filmmaking colleague, Josh Hayes, for the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development. Homecoming is a multimedia project that is…

How does the United States Refugee Admissions Program look almost 45 years after it was created with the Refugee Act of 1980? This presentation will focus on the current realities of US refugee resettlement, along with an overview of expanded pathways to protection, including humanitarian parole, for those facing persecution based on their race, religion, national origin, political beliefs or membership in a social group. Alison Millan has worked in immigrant services and refugee resettlement for nearly two decades and is currently the Deputy Director…

Presentation opens with screening of the documentary film Boycott, which follows litigation against anti-boycott legislation by accidental plaintiffs in several U.S. states. Here's an excerpt from the filmmakers' statement: For the past 18 years, we’ve been making films about everyday people going up against extraordinary odds in the struggle for justice, equity and dignity in Israel-Palestine. As we followed this thread in an era of unprecedented democratic backsliding, we noticed a troubling trend: attempts to silence voices of dissent on…

Climate change isn’t something for the future; it is happening now and we need a now mentality to solve it. What if we cultivate youth leadership to build climate resilience around us? Jackline Edung is a founder the Kenya Institute of Energy, which offers practical education on alternative energy solutions to youth in oil-affected communities in Kenya's Rift Valley, and will offer strategies and perspectives from her work educating and mobilizing youth to be part of the solution to the…

Berenice Abbott: Pioneering Photographer, whose work spans her portraits of cultural figures in Berlin and Paris in the years between WW1 and WW2, documentation of urban life and architecture in the 1930s, a member of the board, teacher and mentor of the New York Photo League, a group and school of progressive photographers concerned with documenting through social realism and innovative photo techniques the important issues of that time from 1936-1952; and her experiments with photographs illustrating for textbooks scientific…

Robert Rotberg, who has written recently and over many years about the desperate and senseless genocidal wars in Sudan, will talk on “How to Halt Sudan’s Vastly Destructive Civil War and Save Millions from Needless Hunger and Death.” He was the Founding Director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution and earlier taught political science at MIT, was vice-president of Tufts University, and president of Lafayette College. His most recent book is Overcoming the Oppressors (OUP,…

Boston Workers Circle and If Not Now share recent experiences fighting for peace in Gaza and strategies to continue the struggle for lasting peace in Israel and Palestine.

Over half of Americans go to some college and now most of the teachers they have do not have and will never have tenure. What does that mean for what they can and do teach and how they teach it? What does that mean for the political activities that they can afford (literally) to support the students in (like the encampments where we noticed it was all tenured faculty who were out there)? Etc. The lack of tenure has created…

In early 2023, Boston became one of the first U.S. city government to take on the question of reparations head-on. George R. Greenidge, founder of Greatest MINDS and a widely respected community leader, is a member of the City of Boston Task Force on Reparations and will share updates and perspectives on the Task Force's work 1.5 years into a 3-year mandate aiming to study the legacy of slavery in Boston and the impact on descendants as the basis for…

Motivated by rethinking her own history growing up as a white child in Englewood, NJ in the 1960s during a battle for school desegregation, Alice Levine has embarked on an effort to understand as much as she can about segregation and civil rights struggles beyond the South.  In looking at how these topics are taught today, she has found that in many schools, especially those for younger children, the emphasis is still placed on the Civil Rights Movement as exclusively…

Elisabeth Bialosky and youth activists from NH 350 share their local new green deal advocacy from anti-fracking to off-shore wind in the Granite State, as well as the story of powerful grassroots advocacy that led to the announcement in March 2024 that Merrimack Generating Station in Bow, NH -- the last coal-burning plan in New England -- will close by June 2028. 

Without racial justice, democracy fails. Never perfect, or even a true realization of the fundamental ideals of a healthy democracy, the US currently faces challenges that threaten its very existence. Join us for a discussion of a range of menaces across the country that warrant our exploration and action. Presenter: Tanya Greene, Director, US Program, Human Rights Watch

Many people look at the concepts of police and prison abolition as aspirational visions of the future. Instead, Prof. Vitale will lay out how an abolitionist analysis helps us make concrete decisions today to move us in the practical direction of a safer and more just future. In the process, he will lay out specific examples of efforts underway across the US that meet these criteria from civilian mental health crisis response in Denver to community centered violence reduction efforts…

Amy Antonucci of NH Peace Action, together with state-level organizers from Peace Action chapters across the northeastern United States, share recent organizing strategies to push for U.S. policy change to promote peace in Gaza. Amy Antonucci will facilitate in the room while Kevin Martin may join via Zoom. 

Eric Wolfe’s Acres of Clams is a feature-length video history of the Clamshell Alliance’s direct-action campaign against the Seabrook nuclear plant in the 1970s. Acres of Clams combines archival film footage and music with the personal remembrances of the activists themselves to reveal how disciplined nonviolence can have an out-sized impact on the world—when people take action together. This screening will immediately follow and close out the standing Friday evening Fun Night! Separately, on Saturday, July 27, 4-5:30pm, we will hold a Q&A/discussion of the…

Paul Gunter, co-founder of the Clamshell Alliance and Director at Beyond Nuclear, offers updates on current nuclear threats and NoNukes activism in 2024. Paul will describe opposition to the nuclear industry's plans for a comeback, including massive subsidies and regulators ordered to look the other way in the face of safety hazards exacerbated by a changing climate

A presentation marking the 20th anniversary of Root Shock, a book that examines 3 different U.S. cities (Pittsburgh, Newark, and Roanoke) to unmask the crippling results of decades-old disinvestment in communities of color and the urban renewal practices that ultimately destroyed these neighborhoods for the advantage of developers and the elite. Root Shock, How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It by Mindy Fullilove

Stories and storytelling have been a distinctive and compelling feature of the Zapatista movement since its appearance in 1994. The impulse behind a recent translation of Zapatista stories by an activist translators’ collective will frame the presentation. A brief conceptual summary of the history of the movement will follow, with an emphasis on the 30th anniversary celebration in December and January, and the spate of communiqués that preceded it, announcing a new turn in the Zapatista struggle. Stories for Dreaming…

New Hampshire history is full of people who stepped out of line to challenge patriarchy, violence, racism, capitalism, and other forms of injustice. In many cases they took substantial risks, often suffering imprisonment, assault, even death. Sometimes they met success, other times they lit sparks that led to change over years or decades. Arnie Alpert, creator of nhradicalhistory.org, will introduce us to some of them and tell the story of efforts to place an official marker at the Concord birthplace…

An interactive workshop investigating the impacts of oppression and inequities in the Congo, Gaza, the US, Mali, and elsewhere, along the lines of health, wealth, climate, social media, ethnic conflict, and resilience. We will examine how artists, organizers, women, community and Faith leaders, and youth are responding to these issues. We will tease out concrete steps World Fellowship leadership and members can take. tyty

Kit & Christoph Schmauch share stories of earlier WFC generations, including three generations of World Fellowship leadership from Charles & Eugenia Weller, Willard & Ola Uphaus, and themselves, to others who have made huge contributions to build, grow and sustain WFC. Each life story and legacy will be framed against the backdrop of their unique moments in U.S. and world history. 

Tanya Snyder spent the last three years organizing and then leading a brand-new union at Politico, which everyone said couldn’t be done. After nine months of underground organizing and 20 months of contract bargaining, Politico now has its first-ever collective bargaining agreement. It addresses pay inequity, protects journalists against the threats posed by artificial intelligence and ensures that workers aren’t unfairly targeted by managers. She’ll tell the inside story of how it all happened and invite others to share their…

Michael Evans of the National Security Archive discusses how he used the Freedom of Information Act to document Chiquita's role in Colombia's civil war and talks about his experience serving as a witness in the U.S. civil trial against Chiquita and several of its former executives for funding a Colombian terrorist group. Michael Evans, Editorial Director, Senior Analyst, National Security Archive

Melissa Blue Sky, a Senior Attorney with the Center on International Environmental Law (CIEL), reports on progress toward an international treaty on plastics pollution against the specter of projected tripling rates of plastic waste entering the aquatic ecosystems by 2040. Will we meet the target of a binding agreement by end of 2024?

This fall, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial and economic justice, will be knocking doors and running phonebanks to speak with voters in majority-white counties in key battleground states. Join us to learn how you can participate from wherever you live! SURJ and movement partners have identified Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona as strategic states in which white voters could go either way or stay home,…

Antisemitism is both real and rising, and being mis-used to attack movements and initiatives for justice. In this session we will conceptualize antisemitism in the framework of a power analysis that integrates a holistic understanding about intersectional oppression and explores the role antisemitism plays in justice movements. We will review both where antisemitism came from, and how the narrative gets weaponized as a tool to disempower Black women in leadership and other marginalized communities. We will use a range of…

Mary Kuhn works with SlipStream to support energy transition strategies for affordable housing in the Midwest, including promoting passive architecture techniques in partnership with groups like Habitat for Humanity. 

Scholar-activist Bob Ross, who has previously engaged WFC with his work on sweatshop labor, turns his attention to the pandemic inspired policies that reduced poverty and temporarily stopped the increase in inequality. The author of two books on global capitalism (Global Capitalism: The New Leviathan and Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops), Ross taught urban affairs and social policy at Clark University for forty years. Much earlier he was among the founders of Students for a…

As the climate crisis continues, rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 is essential to minimize human suffering and to avoid the worst impacts of the crisis. The pathways to climate action require rapid deployment of renewable energy, reductions in animal agriculture and changes in land management to protect forests and promote reforestation, all of which take place in rural communities. Here, I discuss ongoing research (focused in upstate NY) on US rural community perceptions of climate…

Judy Clark was a red diaper baby who jumped into activism in her early teens, supporting the struggle for quality education and community control in NYC, led by the Black community in Brooklyn. By 1970, she joined Weatherman SDS, and for over a decade immersed herself in small, self-enclosed. anti-imperialist cadre organizations that championed armed struggle, even after becoming a mother. Ultimately, she spent 38 years in prison for her part in the 1981 BLA Brinks robbery, in which three…

Andru Volinsky was the lead lawyer in a series of cases (the Clarement cases) that established a constitutional right to public education and challenged the constitutionality of NH public school funding. He will share highlights and lessons from his book in process, Litigation and Public Policy for Change, which connects the dots between a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that shut down the prospects for a federal constitutional right to education and the struggles over 30 years of litigation around…

Former Vice President Al Gore once remarked that "all we lack is the political will" to act on climate. In 2007 a retired real estate agent from southern California decided to do something about this. He founded Citizens’ Climate Lobby with a mission of building the political will for a livable world by awakening individuals to their power as citizens. In this interactive session, participants will be introduced to the concept of transformational advocacy with examples drawn from the speaker’s…

Kim Landaverde is a young organizer with City Life | Vida Urbana (CLVU) who helped her immigrant parents stay in their home during the pandemic, when the landlord was going to “evict” them for lack of payment. It is from this organization, City Life | Vida Urbana, that we first heard the chant, “When We Fight, We Win!" Kim shares more about CLVU's work and her experiences organizing in Boston's Salvadoran American community. Listen to her story here!

In Spring 2023, Bob Nolan completed a thru paddle of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. The NFCT is a 740 mile waterway trail connecting New York, Vermont, Quebec, New Hampshire and Maine by canoe via flatwater, whitewater and overland through deep wilderness and rural communities, starting in Old Forge, NY and ending at Fort Kent, ME. Bob will share stories, pictures and advice for anyone who might want to embark on such an adventure -- or a part of such…