The Heroes of Liberia

Fri, July 23, 12:00pm – 1:30pm

1014 Torney Avenue, Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability SF

Women’s Rights International and Voices In Empowering Women, a group of nurse-midwives in Liberia, worked together during a decade of civil war. 14 years later, at the invitation of the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they opened the Truth Commission’s Women’s Hearings with findings from surveys they conducted during the war. Attended by hundreds of Liberian women, the survey findings were presented first as dramatic plays and then as pictorial graphics so that everyone could understand them.

The short film, True Heroes of Liberia, documents Liberian women’s creative and powerful participation in transitional justice mechanisms and shows how local documentation of human rights violations can lead to accountability, justice, healing, and the building of a strong, vibrant grassroots movement that can protect women's human rights.

Shana Swiss, MD, has worked for 20 years with women and girls living in countries in conflict including the former Yugoslavia, Liberia, Haiti, Sri Lanka, and the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Women’s Rights International works with local groups to document human rights violations against women and supports programs using story-telling and popular theater to address the effects of violence on women’s lives.

Thoreau Center Workshop: Lifestyle + Healing

Workshop with Aidan Kinsella

Wednesday, July 14, 12:30P to 1:30P

Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability

Change your posture. Change your perspective. Change your life!

In this 20 minute interactive lecture, Dr. Aidan will discuss the relationship between your posture and how you respond to stress. You will learn a simple tool for creating instantaneous change in how you experience your body.

Dr. Aidan Kinsella, is a licensed chiropractor, specializing in Network Spinal Analysis and Somato-Respiratory Integration. Dr. Aidan combines lifestyle and goal-oriented coaching with reorganizational healing. She will show how gentle touches along the spine develop awareness of the relationships between body, mind, emotions, and human spirit. Her practice, Verve Wellness Studio, is committed to empowering individuals to discover their evolutionary potential, to develop lifelong strategies for transformation, and to live a powerful and passionate life.

Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.

Thoreau Center Brown Bag: New Health Care, What it Means

The Truth About Health Care Reform and What It Means To Us

Friday, July 16, 2010 12:00 PM-1:00 PM
Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability

Four months in, many of us are still not sure what the new health care reform law does.

Please join us to discuss:

• Why it was a hard fight
• What we won . . .the benefits for women, seniors, small business (including nonprofits), public health, mental health
• How we can make it work and make it better: abortion, immigrants, single payer

Speakers:
EQUAL Health Care Le Ondra Clark, PhD
Ellen R. Shaffer, PhD MPH Co-Director
Lisa Kernan Social Justice Fellow, EQUAL Health Care
Joe Brennen, Center for Analysis on Policy on Trade and Health

EQUAL is a project of the Center for Policy Analysis

Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.

Library Survey Results

Thank you to everyone who participated in our recent survey for the Whole Earth Library. We received a lot of useful and thoughtful feedback on the library's resources, programs, and services that should help us to direct our efforts more effectively. The 24-hr book return drop is certainly a priority, and we will work on one that is both secure and respects the historical integrity of the building. Suggestions are welcome. Some other findings we would like to share are:

• A major interest in resources on nonprofit operations and the practice of philanthropy. This is unfortunately one the smallest sections of the library, and it is good to know that we should be giving it more emphasis. Until such time, we would like to point out the excellent resources of The Foundation Center available downtown and on their website, as well as at your local public libraries. We do continue to depend largely on donations for our collection, so if you have books, guides, old textbooks, etc. on these topics and would like to share them, please consider giving them to the library. Other subject areas that people emphasized include sustainable development, social issues, environmental health, environmental justice, agriculture, food and nutrition, green living, permaculture, the transition movement, and personal development. There is also an interest in more fiction.
• A number of people would like to have more access to online resources such as journals and databases. This is an expensive proposition but certainly worthy of further discussion.
• Some support for book discussions. We found it to be a challenge in the past to arrange discussions such that enough people would read the book and have time to discuss it over lunch, but if anybody would like to try organizing them again or has ideas for an alternative model, the library would certain love to help and to support that.
• There is a strong desire to highlight the work of the tenant organizations, and as a community library we would like to emphasize your work more. There are a number of ways this could be done, including the library blog, the library website, the Thoreau Center website, speakers, or a special physical display in the library. If you have any opinions on this idea, please let us know. And if you ever have any work that you would like highlighted, do contact us. As much as we try, it is hard to keep up with everything that goes on at the center.

We would like this to be an ongoing discussion, so if you ever have any ideas or suggestions, feel free to contact John at library@thoreau.org or Bruce at bruce@thoreau.org. You can also follow the library blog at welibrary.blogspot.com for updates on the library and Thoreau Center events, and leave comments there. Thank you again for your feedback.

Finally, the winner of the $25 Books, Inc. card is: Gilden Chung of Benningfield Financial Advisors in Building 1016. Congratulations!

John Bertland
Librarian, Whole Earth Library at Thoreau Center for Sustainability
library@thoreau.org
http://library.thoreau.org

Thoreau Center Brown Bag, July 1

Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Thursday, July 1 12:30pm - 1:30pm
Atlantic Room at Tides, Thoreau Center

From a distance, the U.S.-Mexico border looks like a dividing line. In her new book, The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, journalist Tyche Hendricks shows us that that border is actually a region. A complex, multi-faceted, often-misunderstood, bi-national terrain, it is more borderlands than borderline.

Many people have lives on both sides: they cross daily for work, school, family, shopping. Pollution and disease flow back and forth. Extensive trade and economic activity tie the United States and Mexico together. And there's a shared history and culture. But with a stalled immigration policy and a raging drug war, it's the people who live in the borderlands who are bearing the brunt of the violence, the political friction and the pressures of the recession.

Hendricks traveled through the border region and gathered some remarkable stories -- from emergency rooms and factory floors, farm kitchens and jail cells. She saw American and Mexican cowboys, environmentalists, nurses and nuns wrestling with shared bi-national problems. A better understanding of the borderlands -- and the way the United States and Mexico are connected there -- could help policymakers reach more lasting solutions that benefit both countries.

Tyche Hendricks reported on immigration and immigrant communities at the San Francisco Chronicle for many years. She has taught at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and took her international reporting students to Tijuana last winter. She is now an editor for The California Report on KQED Public Radio. The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands is out this month from the University of California Press.

Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.

New Exhibtion at Thoreau Center

Memory Traces

by Bay Area artist Olaitan Callender-Scott
June 17 through August 6, 2010
Thoreau Gallery

Opening Reception: June 17, 5:00PM to 7:00PM

Considering memory as a trace of something passed, Olaitan Callender-Scott uses fibrous sculptures, rusted metal, prints, and photographs to explore the vestiges that remain. Inspirations for her interest include her backyard compost bins, plant roots, and lost and found metal findings.

Thoreau Center Brown Bag: Global Sustainability - A New Tool for Thinking About It

Global Sustainability — A New Tool For Thinking About It

Presenter: Robert Horn, Stanford University
Thursday, June 10, 12:30p to 1:30p
Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability SF

How do we even begin to wrap our minds around the whole future of the next 40 years? What are the requirements (the “must haves”) for a sustainable civilization? What are our measures of success? How hard will it be? What are our chances of getting to a sustainable 2050?
These are some of the questions Bob Horn will talk about at our brown bag on June 18. Bob created the mural on the wall at Acre Café for a task force of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development. It contains over 350 milestones decade-by-decade that need to be accomplished if we are to come even close to the sustainable world described in the poster called Vision 2050. He regards it as a jumping off point for thinking about other scenarios, what might happen, what we think will actually occur and what we’d like to happen.

To learn more, contact Bruce DeMartini at bruce@thoreau.org

Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.