PEACE of the ACTION! FOR's 2010 Peace Awards
Planning is underway for our 2010 Peace Awards. This year’s theme is Peace of the Action! Just as in years past, choosing recipients for our International Pfeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Local Nyack Area Peace Awards (from over 50 nominations) proved to be a formidable challenge.
This year’s winners are: Scott Kennedy, co-founder and Middle East Program Coordinator for Resource Center for Nonviolence; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODE Pink and Global Exchange; and Drs. Tashi Dolma and Tashi Rabten, founders of the Tibetan Home of Hope.
Later, we’ll lift up our 2010 winners, however, in earlier FOR staff conversations, we shared there must be some way to give public recognition to the other nominees whose work is also valuable and noteworthy. We decided the best way was to lift up their work here. So going forward, on these pages, we will strive to feature other activists and organizations who are seeking to build a culture of peace in the midst of mistrust and war.
International Pfeffer Peace Prize winner, Scott Kennedy is currently a board member of the Interfaith Peace Builders, and a treasurer of the Refuser Solidarity Network, Kennedy is the cofounder of the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz, CA, and is coordinator of their Middle East Program. His long and varied contribution to the peace movement includes serving several terms on the National Council of the FOR, establishing the national steering committee of Witness for Peace in Nicaragua, and helping to found the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in Jerusalem.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Award created to recognize unheralded persons or groups working in the United States in the tradition of Dr. King, will be presented this year to Medea Benjamin. Ms. Benjamin, our 2010 guest speaker, is cofounder of both CODEPINK, a women-initiated grassroots peace and justice movement, and the international human rights organization Global Exchange. She has been described as “one of America’s most committed — and effective — fighters for human rights” by New York Newsday. A former economist and nutritionist with the United Nations and World Health Organization, Ms. Benjamin is the author/editor of eight books, and lives in San Francisco with her husband and two daughters.
Finally, the 2010 recipients of the Nyack Area Peace Prize which honors an organization or individual involved in significant peace and justice work in the local community of FOR’s national headquarters are Tashi Dolma and Tashi Rabten, founders of the Tibetan Home of Hope, a home and school for abandoned children in Tibet. “The Tashis” are trained medical doctors who were forced to flee their homeland of Tibet in the 1990’s. Fortunately for Rockland County, they rebuilt their lives in the area and developed Health Centers and Tibetan Healing Clinics that offer massage therapy and herbal medicine. The income from their medical practices enables them to continue the orphanage they have founded in their homeland.
Our 2010 Peace Prize recipients will receive their awards later this year, on Sunday afternoon, October 3. The celebration will start on September 25 at FOR’s national headquarters: 521 N. Broadway, Upper Nyack, NY 10960 with an Art Show and Sale featuring artists from the local Hudson Valley area. “A Day in Memory of Peacemakers” will also be held to commemorate those who committed themselves to peace and reconciliation during their lifetimes, and those who lives were sacrificed in the continuing struggle for justice and nonviolent conflict resolution.
If you would like more information on banquet tickets, placing an ad in our Commemorative Journal or Art Show/Sale, contact: jmiller@forusa.org; development@forusa.org; or 845.358.4601.
