|
|
The Traprock Center for Peace and Justice, formerly called the Traprock Peace Center, has a long history of working for peace, nonviolence, and economic and social justice in the Franklin/Hampshire County area.
On June 27-29, The Traprock Peace Education Center at Greenfield Community College offers a Peace Leadership Academy, a 3-day event:
Day 1: PEACEONOMICS: How did we get here?
Day 2: PRAGMATICS OF PEACE – Organizing and Sustaining a Grassroots Campaign
Day 3: PEACEFUL REVOLUTION – A day with Paul K. Chappell
Description and Registration form and Application for Scholarship
-
News, Plans, and Upcoming Events
-
Traprock/GCC Partnership for Peace Education
Traprock has partnered with the Peace, Justice, and Environmental Studies Program at Greenfield Community College in the spirit of furthering our common goals of a world in which human and ecological security are achieved through peaceful means and of augmenting the capacity of each organization. Specifically, we jointly sponsor an annual speakers series, Roots of Peace, with talks held at Sloan Theater. We have placed our video and book library with the Peace Studies Program and GCC library for student, faculty, staff and community use. And we are building together a center for peace education for regional teachers and others located at GCC. Other forward-looking collaborative projects, including an annual 3-day Peace Leadership Academy beginning in June 2012, are in the works. We have designated our collaboration the Traprock Peace Education Center at GCC and joined our boards to do our planning together.
Community-college partnerships, such as ours, have been a highly fruitful model supported for more than a decade by government and private foundations to advance community organizations’ social goals and to give colleges reach into and relevance to their communities. The Traprock/GCC partnership builds on the best of this tradition.
 April 20 The Renewable Revolution: Sajed Kamal spoke on how we can fight climate change, revitalize the economy, prevent energy wars and transition to a sustainable future. Dr. Kamal has been a lecturer and consultant on renewable energy internationally, setting up solar projects in the United States, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Armenia and El Salvador for more than 30 years.
-
See a YouTube video of the talk.
Read a Recorder article about Sajed Kamal and the talk.
 May 3 Traprock and Greenfield Community College celebrate Traprock's endowment of the Wally and Juanita Nelson Scholarship in Peace Studies and also thecollaborative Traprock Center for Peace Education at GCC. The Peace Education Center houses Traprock's library of books and films, available for use by teachers, students, and community members.
-
Upcoming Events
-
May 10 12th annual Peacemaker Award for Franklin County high school students, co-sponsored with Franklin County Interfaith Council
June 27-29 Peace Leadership Academy (GCC Downtown) More info above
- Details will follow for all of these events.
- Women in the Battlefield and the Barracks: A Five-Part Series on Two War Fronts for Women Soldiers
- by: H. Patricia Hynes, Truthout
- The first decade of the 21st century was a record one for women serving in the US military: Women constituted 14 percent of all active duty military (over 200,000), with one in ten serving in the Middle East and 17 percent in the National Guard. Women soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, though barred from ground combat, have worked in as dangerous situations as men. These same women have found themselves, concurrently, the target of sexual assault by “brothers in arms” at nearly twice the rate of US society. Military sexual trauma is so severe that it is more likely to cause post-traumatic stress disorder in women than combat trauma and civilian sexual trauma - because of military culture.
In this series, "The Battlefield and the Barracks: Two War Fronts for Women Soldiers," we will probe the magnitude of sexual assault and harassment of women in the military. What is it about military culture that results in such extreme sexual crime? Why is sexual assault so traumatizing for women soldiers? What are the responses of the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration to the epidemic of sexual crime in their midst, with its multiple health consequences? And what are the radical changes necessary to reform a recalcitrant military?
-
-
Read the Articles Below:
* Introduction: "The Battlefield and the Barracks: Two War Fronts for Women Soldiers"
* Why Do Soldiers Rape?
* Military Sexual Abuse: A Greater Menace Than Combat
* The Military and the Church: Bedfellows in Sexual Assault
* Picking Up the Pieces From Military Sexual Assault
* Reforming a Recalcitrant Military
- Roots of Peace Fall 2011 Speaker Series at GCC
In
October and November the Traprock Center for Peace Education at GCC sponsored speaker forums which focused on nonviolent
movements and responses over this last decade that counter the dominant media
focus and narratives on the “war on terror.”
Read the press release
The forum was recorded: Watch the YouTube
Dan DeWalt, Deb Katz, Bob Stannard
-
at the February Roots of Peace panel
Friday, October 7: Hardy
Merriman speaks on Nonviolent Struggle
and Confronting the Issues of Our Times.
 In the last decade, the international and domestic
news media has told us of war, terrorism, financial crisis, environmental
destruction, public health crises, and more.
However, there are other narratives that the news
media often misses, namely the upsurge in nonviolent movements around the world
in the past decade. This presentation will focus on nonviolent movements
and nonviolent struggle as a way to make change at the local, national, and
global scales. It will provide a framework for understanding how nonviolent
movements work and the strategic principles that underlie their effectiveness.
Mr. Merriman is
a Senior Advisor to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and has
worked with activists around the world. He contributed to and edited “Waging
Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential” by Gene Sharp and has co-authored a training curriculum for
activists, “A Guide to Effective Nonviolent Struggle.”
Read his
"Agents of Change and Nonviolent Action".
Friday, November 4: Members
of September Eleventh Families for
Peaceful Tomorrows spoke about the remarkable anti-war organization
for survivors of the September 11, 2001 attacks and their own personal
narratives about embracing a nonviolent response to the attacks. It was recorded - see it here.
 Peaceful
Tomorrows was launched on February 14, 2002, at a press conference at the
United Nations headquarters by members of families that had lost members in the
9/11 attacks who did not want their grief to justify attacks such as the
American bombing campaign in Afghanistan, and to ensure that these actions were
not done in their names and the names of their loved ones.
We just marked the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In this forum we will be introduced to 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization founded by family members of those killed on September 11th who have united to turn their grief into action for peace. We will hear from 3 members whose chose peace-building over the national mood of revenge, the government’s now 10-year war in Afghanistan, and the dominant media focus on the “war on terror.” Each has pursued creative peace-building actions, on which they will speak.
- Traprock in the media: articles about Traprock events and articles written by Traprock people.
- Forgiveness, A poem created in a dialogue circle in the GCC Psychology of Peace, Conflict and Violence class, May 2011.
|
|
