Triangle WILPF was honored to host the 2012 National WILPF Congress, from June 1-5. The Congress included three remarkable and renowned speakers. Kathy Kelly, head of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, which grew out of Voices in the Wilderness, established to protest the brutal economic sanctions imposed between 1990 and 2003 by the U.N. and U.S. against Iraq, spoke on June 3rd, about her most recent visit to Afghanistan.
That evening, the keynote speaker was Bishop Dr. William J. Barber, II, who is currently the President and Senior Lecturer at Repairers of the Breach (breachrepairers.org), co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign – A National Call for Moral Revival (poorpeoplescampaign.org), and Professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy and Founding Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School.
On June 4th, Madeleine Rees, attorney and Secretary General of WILPF International, and former Head of Office in Bosnia for the UN High Commissioner for the Rights of Women, spoke at the gala reception and special pre-release screening of The Whistleblower, a powerful new drama chronicling the true story of the American woman who brought to light the sexual atrocities being perpetrated in Bosnia. The film screening was followed by a Q & A session with Rees and Donna Bickford, Director of the Carolina Women’s Center, who spoke about the growing problem of human trafficking here in the U.S.
