In our media-saturated world of the twenty-first century, where so many things clamor for the public's fractured attention and for a place on the agenda, some voices are lost. Some of them lack the resources and abilities to compete in the information marketplace or are simply drowned out by the trivial noise of entertainment and vacant commercialism. Some voices are actively suppressed by more powerful interests. Who decides what stories we do get to hear? And then how do we decide what we listen to? What are the effects of such silencing and ignorance for our understanding of the practice of justice and power in the world?
Engaging with such questions, and others even more basic to our humanity, is Voice of Witness. Founded by author Dave Eggers and human rights scholar Lola Vollen, Voice of Witness is an ongoing nonprofit series of books that collects the firsthand accounts of men and women affected by contemporary human rights abuses and social injustice in the USA and around the world. The scope of the project involves numerous editors, translators, historians, activists, academics, novelists, and volunteers who have undertaken to render interviews with these individuals into story. They are books where the dispossessed are given space for their own words.
In doing so, the books provide a perspective on complex situations unique from what can be found in the immediate reports of journalism, the dry facts of statistics, or the brief testaments of social media. It is a perspective from within crisis and out of the voices of the people whose lives have been the most seriously disrupted, whose humanity has been the most severely violated. They are people in failed states beset by violence and brutal outrages of power, such as Sudan, Burma, and Zimbabwe. They are people subjected to the failures of states, namely the United States in the series so far, with books focusing on the wrongly incarcerated, the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the precarious existence of undocumented immigrants, and the governmental overreach of the War on Terror. A constant theme is that these are men and women who have been displaced – from their homes and communities, from the lives they thought they would and should have. The displacement comes from violence, from social barriers, from absurd systems of laws, from the petty self-interest of the powerful, and from the suspension of rationality. It leads to terror, victimization, exploitation, and even enslavement.
Their stories are not delivered simply as accounts of victimhood to be pitied, however. They do depict lives circumscribed by anxiety, where people are forced to make difficult choices and take precarious risks. They are accounts that necessarily focus on the habits and strategies of perception needed to survive in these worlds on the edges of the world we live in. But they are not limited to these things. The storytellers have stories of full individual lives, and the makers of these books want you to know them. For in so doing, they hope to present the greatest challenges possible. As author Brian Chikwava writes in the forward to Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives, “The disconnect between the stories told by a state and those told by its citizens at best obscures the moral choices that must be made, and some states may well prefer it that way.” The stories cannot hope to represent the full experience of a population who has suffered, but they do not need to in order to raise complicating questions.
Voice of Witness includes in its mission statement this goal of raising awareness, and much can be learned from the books. The editors do not pretend, though, that all will be well if we listen, these being stories about the world. Another recurring theme of the collections is how the act of storytelling is in itself an empowering and humanizing one for these storytellers who have been abused and ignored. Through that act, they can reclaim their individuality and their human dignity against those who would deny their voices. It is the chance to locate lives displaced. Through their stories, they tell themselves back into the world.
The following books from the series were kindly donated to the library by Voice of Witness, where they are available for check out. Learn more about Voice of Witness, the project, and the books at www.voiceofwitness.org.
Lola Vollen & Dave Eggers, eds. Surviving justice: America's wrongfully convicted and exonerated. (2008)
Lola Vollen & Chris Ying, eds. Voices from the storm: The people of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. (2008)
Peter Orner, ed. Underground America: Narratives of undocumented lives. (2008)
Peter Orner & Sandra Hernández, eds. En las sombras de Estados Unidos: Narraciones de inmigrantes indocumentados. (2009)
Craig Walzer, ed. Out of Exile: Narratives from the abducted and displaced people of Sudan. (2009)
Peter Orner & Annie Holms, eds. Hope deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean lives. (2010)
Maggie Lemere & Zoë West. Nowhere to be home: Narratives from survivors of Burma's military regime. (2011)
Alia Malek, ed. Patriot acts: Narratives of post-9/11 injustice. (2010)
Date: Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Time: 12:30-1:30pm
Location: Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability
1014 Torney Ave
San Francisco, CA
Presenters: Arlen Samen, Founder, One Heart World-Wide and Carlos Tapadera Concheño, One Heart World-Wide Country Coordinator
One Heart World-Wide is dedicated to saving the lives of women and children. Founded in 1998 by Arlene Samen, the organization works with disadvantaged communities to raise awareness and teach good birth practices. In the 10 years that the One Heart program was active in Tibet, the number of women who died in childbirth annually dropped from thirty-three to zero. One Heart recently relocated its corporate offices to San Francisco and manages close to $1 million in donations to support maternal-child health programs Mexico and Nepal.
About the presenters:
Arlene Samen has been a Nurse Practitioner in Maternal Child Health for 31 years. In 2004, she left behind her clinical practice to dedicate her life to serving pregnant women living in the most vulnerable conditions in the developing world. In 1997, she met His Holiness the Dalia Lama who asked her to go to Tibet to help the women and children who were dying in childbirth. Arlene spent the next ten years in Tibet working side by side with the local government to bring a safe motherhood project to women who were poor, uneducated, and living in the most remote region on the roof of the world. She brought the "Network of Safety" model to women who face death in order to give life. In 2009, One Heart World-Wide took its life saving model to remote villages in Nepal and to the bottom of the Copper Canyon in Mexico. She has received many awards, including being an "Unsung Herero of Compassion," a CNN Hero and a Rainer Arnhold Fellow with the Mulago Foundation.
Carlos Tapadera Concheño is One Heart World-Wide's in Country Coordinator. He comes to the United States for the first time to share his experiences working with his community. He trains his fellow Tarahumara in the Copper Canyon to raise awareness, teach good practices, train local health care providers and distribute Clean-and-Safe Birth Kits.
Please RSVP to Bruce DeMartini if attending
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.
An Angel Passes, by Cynda Valle
A Celebration of Our New Exhibition - 30 Years Behind the Easel
Thoreau Gallery, Thoreau Center for Sustainability
Thursday, August 18, 5:00 to 7:00
Exhibition dates: August 18 through October 14, 2011
30 Years Behind the Easel is an exhibition by two local artists: Cynda Valle and Robert Brokl. The show documents the evolution of their craft over time and the persistence of their vision as they grapple with day jobs, the emotional needs of family, and the many ways life, in general, conspires to prevent most artists from making art all together. As economic hardships persist, nonprofits and agencies that might otherwise support artists instead strive to plug the rent “safety net,” and governmental programs like the New Deal's WPA are lacking. Artistic sustainability over time is a challenging business — and noteworthy when it succeeds. Cynda and Bob believe having fellow travellers helps.
Garden II, by Robert Brokl
Presenter: Darian Rodriguez Heyman, Editor of Nonprofit Management 101
Wednesday, August 17, 12:30 to 2:00
Pacific Room at Tides
RSVP to bruce@thoreau.org
You dream of a strong, vibrant community and have a sense of how to make it real. But how can you rally the funds you need to connect your vision to action? Join the former Craigslist Foundation E.D. and Editor of the newly released handbook, Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals, as he shares practical, tactical solutions from his new book that can and will help you get dollars in the door. Darian will provide concrete tips and tools for individual giving, foundation grants, corporate sponsorship, earned income, and online and peer-to-peer campaigns, plus point you in the right direction for more information.
After five years of service, Darian recently stepped down as Executive Director of Craigslist Foundation. While there, he helped launch Nonprofit Boot Camp, the Environmental Nonprofit Network, and the Next Generation Leadership Forum. His new book, Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals, includes practical tips and tools from 50 recognized experts across 35 topics, and he recently launched a nationwide Social Media for Nonprofits conference series and his Advancing Social Impact blog on Skoll Foundation’s Social Edge. Heyman previously served as a Commissioner for the Environment for the City and County of San Francisco and currently is a public speaker who provides strategy, messaging, and fundraising consulting for nonprofits and green economy organizations.
A few studies and reports of import that caught my eye this week:
The Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy at California State University, Sacramento issued a report this week entitled Consequences of Neglect: Performance Trends in California Higher Education which finds those trends to be in decline. Using national data, "[r]esearchers analyzed California’s postsecondary performance in the categories of preparation, participation, affordability, completion, benefits and finance, and found that the state’s performance is average, at best, and trending downward."
Among the findings:
- California ranks last in total funding per student
- Tuition and fee increases exceed the national average rate
- Each successively younger working-age generation is less highly educated that the one before.
- Black and Latino students continue to lag behind other racial/ethnic groups in levels of college preparation, participation, and completion
A new study from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Physicians for Social Responsibility entitled Toxic Power: How Power Plants Contaminate Our Air and States rates the states with the most toxic air pollution from coal- and oil-fired power plants based on publicly-available data from the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory, a database of emmissions reported by industrial sources. Findings include that power plants are the single largest industrial source of toxic air pollution in 28 states and the District of Columbia. For the full methodology and to find out how your state ranks, see the analysis at: http://docs.nrdc.org/air/air_11072001.asp.
The Environmental Working Group released a study of the varying health, climate, and other environmental impacts of meat and dairy consumption: Meat Eater's Guide to Climate Change and Health. which finds that "that if every person in the US refrained from eating meat or cheese one day a week every week for a year the reduction in emissions would be equivalent of taking 7.6 million cars off the road." Their interactive website includes a handy chart for comparing the consumption of different foods with miles driven. On methodology:
To assess climate impacts, EWG partnered with CleanMetrics, an environmental analysis and consulting firm, to do lifecycle assessments of 20 popular types of meat (including fish), dairy and vegetable proteins. Unlike most studies that focus just on production emissions, our assessment calculates the full “cradle-to-grave” carbon footprint of each food item based on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated before and after the food leaves the farm – from the pesticides and fertilizer used to grow animal feed all the way through the grazing, animal raising, processing, transportation, cooking and, finally, disposal of unused food. The analysis also includes the emissions from producing food that never gets eaten, either because it’s left on the plate or because of spoilage or fat and moisture loss during cooking. About 20 percent of edible meat just gets thrown out.
And a new study published in the July 15 issued of the journal Science from a group of twenty-four researchers - Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth - details how the decline of large apex predators, such as wolves, lions, and sharks, represents one of the most powerful impacts of humanity on the world's ecosystems, as their removal leads to a wider range of ecological disruptions through the processes known as trophic cascades. From the abstract:
Until recently, large apex consumers were ubiquitous across the globe and had been for millions of years. The loss of these animals may be humankind’s most pervasive influence on nature. Although such losses are widely viewed as an ethical and aesthetic problem, recent research reveals extensive cascading effects of their disappearance in marine, terrestrial, and freshwater ecosystems worldwide. This empirical work supports long-standing theory about the role of top-down forcing in ecosystems but also highlights the unanticipated impacts of trophic cascades on processes as diverse as the dynamics of disease, wildfire, carbon sequestration, invasive species, and biogeochemical cycles. These findings emphasize the urgent need for interdisciplinary research to forecast the effects of trophic downgrading on process, function, and resilience in global ecosystems.
Presenter: Author Richard Heinberg
Thursday, July 28, 12:30 to 1:30
Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability.
Join us for a discussion with Richard Heinberg, author of The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality and Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute. We all take economic growth for granted...until it falters, as it did in 2008. But what if the recent meltdown was not just an interruption in the story of continuous economic expansion, but the first intimation of the end of growth as we know it? Will a convergence of financial disruption, resource depletion, and environmental impacts create "Business as Unusual?" We know that traditional economic growth models do not reconcile the best measures of human health and welfare. So how can social change advocates and philanthropists prepare for -- and thrive in -- a future that is not based on assumptions of cheap energy, reckless consumption, and financial speculation? How can we decouple qualitative progress — in education, arts, health, well-being, freedom, happiness -- from ever-expanding consumption and growth?
Health Care Reform - Why Social Justice is the Best Medicine
Presenter: Joe Brenner, EQUAL Health Network of the Center for Policy Analysis
Wednesday, July 20 - 12:30PM to 1:30PM
Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center For Sustainability
Joe Brenner of the EQUAL Health Network/Center for Policy Analysis will discuss the latest developments on health care reform and how they affect access to quality, affordable health care in our communities, from Vermont to California.
The EQUAL Health Network brings together partners from public health, women’s health and the public to advocate for Equitable, Quality, Universal, Affordable – EQUAL – health care.
Update: This event has been cancelled and will be rescheduled for a later date. Stay tuned.
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.
