 and let me again introduce myself. My name is Terry Rockefeller. I'm a member of September 11th families for Peaceful Tomorrow's. We were one of the founding organizations of the United for Peace and Justice. And today I have the honor of being the co-convener of the coordinating committee along with Jackie Cabasso, who you're gonna hear from very shortly. We're very excited about the positive response this webinar has had because I think it gets back to what United for Peace and Justice was originally created to do and did very well in the opposition to the war in Iraq, which is to bring together local groups and national groups and inspire them to work in concerted ways on issues of war, militarism, disarmament, peace, racial justice, and changing the shameless practices of our government. We're really pleased to have member groups who are gonna be presenting their work. And I think that what has really inspired us is to think about the power of a network. And so I'm gonna introduce my partner in co in crime helping to steer the coordinating committee of United for Peace and Justice, Jackie Cabasso, executive director of Western States Legal Foundation in Oakland, which she has done brilliantly since 1994 and she was a founding mother of Abolition 2000, the global network to eliminate nuclear weapons. And she continues to serve on their coordinating committee. She's also been an executive advisor to mayors for peace and was the recipient of the International Peace Bureau's Sean McBride Peace Award. She is going to be speaking to us about the value of networks. And let me just say at this point, please put any questions you have in the chat. I'm going to be moderating the questions and trying to put them all together for a Q and A session that we hope will be about a half hour at the end. So Jackie, let me turn it over to you. Unmute. Sorry about that. And Terry, just one correction. I've actually been at Western States Legal Foundation since 1984, not 1994. Oh, well, you sent me the wrong information. Well, it's because I was trying to do too many things at once, which is a problem for all of us, I think. In any case, I am going to talk a little bit about the value of networks in movement building. Networks can be built at the local, regional, national and international levels. And I believe that networks organized around common values and vision rather than single issues have the potential to build the kind of broad movements we will need to create the political pressure to make possible essential changes in our societies and our government's priorities. Building networks can be a strategy for movement building when movements are at a low ebb, like now, when there is not a mass peace movement or nuclear disarmament movement. From my own experience, I can report that networks can serve as powerful vehicles for small and local groups to amplify their own efforts and provide mutual aid and support. Networks can also serve as a vehicle for national, regional, local and international groups to develop relationships and work together. And one of the reasons I mentioned in 1984 was because I can't stress enough the importance of showing up and staying with it for the long term. So let me give you a few examples of our work in networks. So Western States Legal Foundation is a small organization, just two staff people. Its focus is on nuclear disarmament. But long ago, we began to understand that nuclear weapons were part of a much larger system and that we were never gonna be able to win on nuclear weapons without connecting with other issues, looking for root causes and trying to build a broad multi-issue movement. So even though we're small, our organization has devoted a lot of its staff resources to kind of serving as mom for a series of networks and coalitions at the local, national and international levels. First, I'll talk about Western States and UFPJ. We have been opposed to every U.S. war and invasion since we started and also committed to nonviolence. So it was natural that we would be involved with United for Peace and Justice from the beginning. And in fact, I believe that I was at every initial planning meeting for UFPJ, even though I'm based in California. And at its first national conference, which was probably 2002 or three, but I think it was 2002, I brought, I got together a group of nuclear disarmament advocate NGOs and we came in with a proposal that UFPJ should make nuclear disarmament one of its priorities, a priority. And we were met with a very strange reaction, which is nuclear disarmament, that's the Bush agenda. Well, that's because of course there had been, Bush was planning to attack Iraq based on the false allegation that Iraq had nuclear weapons, which of course it didn't. In the meantime, the United States had drawn up provisional plans for using tactical nuclear weapons in Iraq. And this illustrated the incredible disconnect that had developed since the end of the Cold War between the nuclear disarmament movement and the peace movement. So our proposal was adopted, but nuclear weapons remained very far at the perimeters of the UFPJ's work for many years, but I kept showing up at every steering committee meeting and eventually ended up on this, was elected to the steering committee and worked in support of a lot of other issue areas and eventually nuclear disarmament moved to the center of the anti-war and peace movements because people realized how central they are. So in the mom role, having served on the coordinating committee, or before that, I started UFPJ's first working group, which was called Nuclear Disarmament and Redefining Security, which met for many years before I was elected to the coordinating committee and then eventually was asked to serve as co-convener. So still small organization, UFPJ works with a lot of large organizations and small organizations. But as I said, it's a way that small groups can amplify their own efforts and find ways to work in collaboration with lots of other organizations. If I have time, I'd like to go back to another example. We've been about- One minute. Okay, one minute then. I'll just say that one of the local coalitions that we formed, we established was People's Nonviolent Response Coalition in 2002 locally to respond to the, again, to the Iraq War. And we formed its multi-issue around the core value of nonviolence. In our statement, we said we see all too clearly that responding to violence with more violence creates an escalating cycle that threatens to spiral out of control. We reject the idea that we are doomed to a future of endless death and destruction. Nonviolence is a belief that changes possible. Nonviolence is hope. And this history brings us right up to the present with the Poor People's Campaign, which Reverend Theoharis will talk about later. Thanks. Thank you, Jackie. I hope that inspired some of you to be thinking about how to maybe expand and develop the work that you're doing. We're gonna turn now to Carly Town, who's with Code Pink, and also on the Coordinating Committee of the United for Peace and Justice, but worked with divest from the war machine and has many local examples of how this is being developed. She brings experience with feminist organizing to her work and she is currently a national co-director of Code Pink. Carly. Thank you. Thank you so much, Terri, and it's great to have everyone here. So like Terri said, I just wanted to talk a little bit today about our divest from the war machine campaign at Code Pink, which seeks to divest invested assets from companies that profit from going to war. Slide, please. So today, I just wanted to talk us through two different phases of divestment campaigns to study tactics and tools we can use to develop effective campaigns that actually activate people in our communities to really take on some of the most powerful companies in the world, right? So I'm just gonna review a case study of how gathering investment information, a task that can seem pretty daunting, can actually be part of building a strong campaign, right? So we'll also review our Weapons Free Fund, which is a key resource to screen investments once you've actually gathered some of that investment information. Slide, please. So as people can see here on the screen, part of our campaign really is exposing the role that war profit years play in our day-to-day lives. And it's really essential to this campaign because companies like Raytheon and General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin engage in public relations campaigns to obscure how they actually make a profit, right? Which is by making a killing on killing. As you can see, right? This graphic lays out how the US war machine operates to influence our politicians, our national budget, and even our local communities in a very cyclical process. And while this analysis is not all-encompassing, it is really important because it also offers activists key points of intervention and ways to organize in our local communities against the war machine. So slide, please. So some of the way that that takes place in our local communities is we develop institutional level divestment campaigns because like I've said, right? They can drive a new conversation not only around divesting from war, but also investing in socially responsible priorities. So we work to develop campaigns at the city, the state, and the university or school level. Slide, please. So our work on divestment campaigns begins by doing really vital research and gathering information about whether or not institutions are invested in war profiteers and the extent of those investments, right? So next slide, please. Receiving the investment portfolio or investment information from an institution is really essential. And like I said earlier, right? This can deal really overwhelming to people, but it also presents opportunities to activate people. So slide, please. So I'll give you an example. What's on the screen here, right? In the beginning stages of the campaign to divest Chicago from the war machine, activists uncovered that the municipal employees annuity and benefit fund of Chicago might have investments in the war machine. And when they were researching the website, they saw that the person who's being circled here, Steve Yuen, the investment officer for the benefit fund. And they reached out to him for comment or to try to ask about more information, right? They sent in multiple emails, they had multiple phone calls, they even had a local Alderman staff try to request this information and they still never got a response. So next slide. You know, this could have been really daunting, right? Activists gathered, they decided next steps and they decided it didn't have to be an obstacle. It could actually be an opportunity to engage people who had actually signed up to learn more about the campaign while doing some list building work. So activists created a call script and a simple calendar and ask volunteers to sign up for a few days over a two week period until every day people were calling Steve Yuen's office every day asking for this investment information. And lo and behold, that worked. Finally, they talked to someone in person and they told them to file a FOIA, Freedom of Information Act request. So next slide. You know, instead of silence and like uncertainty, this gave them a concrete next step. So with the help of an organization called Muck Rock, they filed a FOIA request and learned that this fund in Chicago is actually invested in weapons companies. So slide please. So we're really, really excited because the campaign has now progressed to a point where just yesterday Alderman Ramirez Rosa in Chicago officially introduced our resolution to divest from the war machine into the Chicago City Council and we're now working to generate that support. So next slide. So I think this is just a really good example that transparency can really be a win in these campaigns and it can lead to an opportunity to build a stronger campaign and a stronger base of people who are working to pass it a divestment resolution. So next slide please. You know, once we actually have access to the investment documents like the Activision in Chicago, we have to really be able to dig into those investments and see what our institutions are actually investing in, right? So thankfully, if we go to the next slide, please. CodePink has joined with an organization as you so to develop a searchable database of commonly held mutual funds and ETFs to determine if investments or your institution's investments are tied to weapons of war. You can see that on the screen and I'll post it in the chat box as well. But if we go to the next slide, you'll see that this- A minute, Carly. Thank you. You'll see that this is a powerful tool because it enables everyone to do this vital research, right? Once you have the names of these funds, you plug them in here and if you go to the next slide, you'll see that you can actually look and see that every single one of the funds from this BlackRock, which is the world's largest asset manager is actually invested in weapons companies, right? And if you go to the next slide, you'll see that each fund itself has a breakdown of what those funds are actually invested in. Is it military weapons? Is it nuclear weapons? Is it gun manufacturers, gun retailers? So you can really see and it's really helpful. So the last slide, please. Costs of war or something. So like I said, right? Getting access to these investments and screening them for weapons companies are just two sort of tactics and tools that we've used in our local campaigns to build these strong campaigns at the local level. And so there's some extra resources that I can send everyone. My email's on the screen. I'll post it in the chat box. But thank you so much. That was really great to talk with everyone here tonight. Carly, our thanks to you. You've turned our attention to taking on powerful organizations and I'm really pleased to introduce Brian Garvey, who has been doing exactly that with the Raytheon anti-war campaign launched by Mass Peace Action. And I think what's really exciting when we think about United for Peace and Justice is the way that this campaign has inspired other activists elsewhere who are also affiliated. And we hope this means that our network will inspire many, many more communities to take on this action. So Brian, you do so much with Mass Peace Action. You develop the youth voice and you are in the working groups on the Middle East, Latin America, and the no cold war against US sanctions. Brian, tell us about how Raytheon got launched and what it's been doing and how it's growing the Raytheon campaign. Sure, and thank you so much for having me, Terry and Carly for that great presentation. I'll tell you a little bit about how the Raytheon anti-war campaign launched and it's a very personal story for me because it's actually what brought me into peace and anti-war work. I had always cared about these issues but what really got me out on the streets was when the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Ahmad bin Salman came to visit our neck of the woods, he came to visit Harvard, he came to visit MIT. And I realized that, I either needed to get out into the streets and join these people who were acting out of conscience or I needed to stop talking about these issues. And so I went into a protest. I met some kindred spirits and I've been doing this ever since. And what came out of that visit was really the Raytheon anti-war campaign. We wanted to localize these wars, foreign policy and the esoteric, it can be removed, it can seem like it's so far away from our day-to-day lives. But I'll tell you that I just typed it into Google Maps and the headquarters of Raytheon Technologies is six and a half miles from where I'm sitting. So our never-ending wars in the Middle East maybe in a different hemisphere, but an institution that is incredibly local had massive influence and made massive profits off of that suffering. So that was the idea behind the Raytheon anti-war campaign. We knew the mainstream media wasn't gonna cover things like Yemen even though it was the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. So we wanted to localize it. We wanted to tell people that, this is a Massachusetts war and this is our responsibility to do something about it. And if we're not gonna do something about it, who is? So that's how the Raytheon anti-war campaign was born. We've done dozens and dozens of educational events in the last three years. We've done demonstrations at career fairs. I personally have seen students change their mind about applying to work at Raytheon Technologies. That person-to-person interaction, it matters because people don't wanna work for a company that profits off of suffering around the world. But you really need to reach out and talk to them. It makes a huge difference. I'm sure most of the people on the call know about Raytheon and how wide their reach is, one of the biggest war profiteers in the world and one of the most politically powerful institutions in our country. And we talked about the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. Raytheon really illustrates the point, right? Secretary of Defense Mark Gessler in the Trump administration came right from Raytheon. He was their head lobbyist. Our current Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin came right from Raytheon. He was on their board of directors. So Democrat or Republican, these institutions, the military industrial complex we know has power no matter who's in charge. Jackie was talking about nuclear weapons. Raytheon has their hands in nuclear weapons too. They've gotten a $2 billion contract to make the new nuclear capable cruise missile. And when I think about all these things that Raytheon does, the weapons that it makes, they don't make us safer, right? Our foreign policy doesn't make sense. What it does is it makes money for companies like Raytheon, right? So the war on terror was really won by companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics and Boeing. I like to say that the reason our military budget gets bigger and bigger each year, one of the main reasons is so these companies can steal a large piece of that budget as it makes its way from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon. And the dirty secret is a lot of that money never leaves Northern Virginia. Or in this case, the outskirts of Boston. So... One minute, Brian. One reason why this campaign can be replicated so easily is because Raytheon and companies like them like to spread out. They like to make sure that they have jobs in every congressional district around the country. But we can use that against them as well because no matter where you are across the country, you're probably not far from one of these companies will have a location that you can target, that you can rally around, that you can bring attention to. And I know that my colleague Ken Jones is gonna tell you a little bit more about the network that we formed, but I just wanna let people know that there is a fight going on right now in the next two to three weeks, about a $650 million arm sale to Saudi Arabia. In the next two to three weeks, every member of the US Senate is now going to have to vote on whether they approve this money to Raytheon and the war profiteers. So I would encourage you all to reach out to your members of the US Senate and tell them to pick a side. You know, they're either on the side of the people of Yemen and the people of this country who desperately need these funds or they're on the side of Raytheon. So please reach out, I know that you will. And with that, I'm gonna pass it back. Thank you so much. Brian, thank you for that introduction. And I'm gonna turn it over very quickly to Ken because I think this is an illustration of how campaigns through a network, Dugo National, Ken Jones is in Asheville, North Carolina, where he is organizing the North Carolina Raytheon campaign. Ken has been a draft resister, a plasterer, a school teacher, a professor. He's a grandfather and a member of Veterans for Peace Chapter 099. Ken, welcome. Hi, and thank you and good evening, everyone. Here in Asheville, we're one of those places that Brian just mentioned that is an outreach of Raytheon. We found out a year ago that one of their divisions, Pratt and Whitney, is opening a plant here in Asheville. Pratt and Whitney is headquartered in Connecticut but they have seven locations around the United States and they're in over 40 countries. They're a very large corporation. They make jet engine parts for commercial and military jets and including the F-15, F-16, F-35s, they make engines for them. They're used, these engines are used in 27 air forces around the world. So here we're concerned about the military involvement of Pratt and Whitney and also about the aerospace industry which they represent as well and its contribution to climate emergency. As I say, we just found out a year ago that they were coming here and so we organized ourselves. We're a coalition, we're called Reject Raytheon and we started out as Veterans for Peace, DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, PSL, Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Sunrise Movement. What I'm gonna do is show you some slides here to give you an impression of what we've been at for the last year and most of what I'm gonna show you is our street actions, just to show you kind of what it looks like on the ground. Okay, so that's our website. We've been at it for a year. As you can see, we're trying to emphasize positive, build a just, sustainable and local economy. This is a aerial shot of the 1.2 million square foot plant, footprint that is being built in a forest area outside of Asheville. You can see it looks like mountaintop removal. It's right by the French Broad River which we're concerned about, the environmental damage that's gonna happen to the river. There's a picture I, you can't get, you can't see this from the road, the actual building of the plant, huge plant, but you can if you trespass onto the territory where it's being built, which I've managed to do once or twice or more. This is our first action that we did about a year ago. You can see, I don't know if you can see, but there's young and old alike in there. And we have these street actions and every single time we have them, we have maybe 20 to 30 people involved. So there's a level of enthusiasm, maybe because we're new at it only a year. I know that Tucson has been at it for many years and of course, Boston's been at it for at least three and more than that. The, whoops, went one too many there. That's our Diane that we did as our first action. Show you some of these images quickly. We did convene ourselves for the, actually we celebrated the entry into force of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And as Brian pointed out, nuclear is part of what Raytheon does. We show up on the street quite often, every two weeks, these days, sometimes not, but mostly that. There's one of our veterans for peace, the chairman, the coordinator of our veterans for peace chapter here, out on the street with us. There was a global day of action about Yemen and we showed up right at the site of the construction, right where they're building the bridge and there were a bunch of us out on the street for that. The land was given to Pratt and Wendy, a dollar for 100 acres and it was given by Biltmore Farms. Many people know about Biltmore Manor here in Asheville. Biltmore Farms is an adjunct to it and we went right into the Biltmore Park where the headquarters are to show them what we think. Chamber of Commerce is of course, behind the development, this economic development. So we made an appearance there. EDC, you can see that banner in the front, Eco-Death by Capitalism. EDC is the Economic Development Commission. It's a organization, public private organization of public elected officials and the Chamber of Commerce. We've done banner drops from our interstate. We did a nine mile peace walk through Asheville. See a couple of Buddhist monks there with us. We have a local peace pagoda that we are connected with. We emphasize, this is the peace walk. We emphasize that as the cost of war project tells us, you get a lot more jobs when you have green jobs than you do with investing in the military industrial complex. We do tabling. We did a canoe in the French Broad River is a place where a lot of people go for recreation. So we've gotten some canoes, painted them up, got out on the river and passed out flyers. Part of the Keep Space for Peace Week. We got ourselves out and walked through, you know, Asheville is a tourist town. So we walked all around town passing out flyers and letting people know about the nuclearization and the weaponization of space and reject right down as part of that as well, as you can imagine. We've been emphasizing climate change recently. We got this banner from the backbone campaign out in Seattle. You can see behind that banner is the bridge they're building and the road they're building. Imagine that all being trees at one time, it's all forest. These are some of our younger members standing there with a sign in front of the bridge, one of our actions. As I say, we're emphasizing the climate emergency out there on the street. One minute can. All right, thank you. We're about to, this banner here on the ground, you can see we're about to, it's 18 feet long. We're about to join the holiday parade uninvited that's gonna happen in Asheville here this weekend. We're gonna just tack one to the back of it and carry our banners and signs. That's the detail of that sign that we painted on there showing the melting of the earth because of warming and of course the bombs and missiles. I wanna end with emphasizing or I say reiterating what Brian mentioned is a network that we're developing and the power of networks as was mentioned in the beginning of this session is so great that we've reached out to people around the country and even into Canada of those groups and people who are opposing war corporations whether it be Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman or any of them. And at this point, we've met four times in about three or four months, we do as you can see have 30 people from all over the country pretty excited about the level of engagement we have and we're growing, we keep wanting more and more people because military industrial complex is everywhere. At the moment, we're mostly sharing experiences and strategies, CodePinx involved and so is Veterans for Peace and both of them are strong supporters and will lend a national oomph to us. Most of our actions, all of our actions really are gonna be local actions. And in fact, we're planning a week of local actions in tax week, April 8th through the 17th and all of us, all 30 of us are all of our locations who however many we have at that point are gonna do local actions in a coordinated way. So we're acting locally but we're also making a national network. And thank you so much. I hope that has inspired people to think about actions that start in one place or originated in one place for good reason can be spread broadly. We're gonna turn now to the back from the BRINC campaign and I'm gonna introduce Denise Duffield. I have so much information on all the wonderful things Denise had done but let me just say briefly, she is the Associate Director of Physicians for Social Responsibility in Los Angeles where she leads the PSR's Los Angeles participation in Back from the BRINC which is a national grassroots campaign to fundamentally change US nuclear weapons policy through local organizing and advocacy. Denise, let me turn it over to you. Alrighty, hi everybody. I'm gonna share my screen here. Ooh, can I share? Advanced sharing options. Let me try this again, share screen. Ooh, there it is, all right. And now you go over here. I should know this at this point. All right, how does that look for folks? Probably you might have to, if you need to see the question. Looks good, no looks good. Okay, here we go. So Back from the BRINC is a US national grassroots campaign for nuclear weapons abolition that is built on local community organizing. We have a five point policy platform that I will get to shortly. The main strategies involved are local organizers who seek endorsements of Back from the BRINC locally from organizations and from elected officials and then build teams or coalitions in the region and work together to get resolutions past the municipal, county and state level. This process also allows us to reach out to different kinds of groups that we normally talk to and do more intersectional outreach and develop partnerships. And the end result of these endorsements and resolutions is that they become tools for legislative advocacy and they can help build the political will for nuclear evolution and fundamental changes in US nuclear weapons policy. I was attracted to this campaign and decided to put my efforts into this campaign because my background is as a local organizer, particularly fighting for the cleanup of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory which is a former nuclear site near Los Angeles, former nuclear research and rock prevention testing site that is massively contaminated and continues to harm the health of nearby community. So when I heard about Back from the BRINC I thought, I can do this. I know how to do this. I know how to get people to show up at meetings and that began my participation in the campaign. The five policy points are actively, we've called the United States to lead an effort to prevent nuclear war by actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals, renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first ending the sole unchecked authority of any US president to launch a nuclear attack, taking US nuclear weapons off of hair trigger alert and canceling the plan to replace the entire US nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons. We have endorsements from over 380 organizations and we have gotten resolutions adopted to now over 54 municipalities and six state legislative bodies. These are cities large and small. So we've got Los Angeles, Washington DC, Baltimore, Salt Lake City, Tucson and then towns and villages. And we also have the participation now of elected officials. We have over 300 local, county and state elected officials who recently signed on to a letter to Biden and members of Congress urging bold action on nuclear weapons, particularly ahead of the nuclear posture review. And again, I think most people on this call probably believe that real change starts from the bottom up. And that's what this campaign is, is our central tenant. So here are just some of the, some photographs from some of the efforts that have happened around the country. People can't take action on something that they don't care about and they can't care about something they don't know about. And right now too few people know a damn thing about nuclear weapons, the dangers they pose, the growing threats and their impacts on our environment and their tremendous financial costs as well. So these resolutions allow us to make a very succinct argument. Elected officials are not often gonna take time for the day to talk about this issue or to read papers, but they can read it to a page resolution and you can put the footnotes in there if they have any trouble with the information. Building a coalition is how we started. This is Los Angeles Coalition for our resolutions. We had students involved. We have Habakasha. We have public health officials and doctors. Climate Change Act of this, a Venice for Peace was involved, Beyond the Bomb, other peace groups, and that's who we pulled together for the effort. Another step in the process, I mentioned getting local endorsements. So this is what the folks in Oregon did and these are some of the groups that they were able to pull together to help them with their resolution efforts. And you can see there's quite a diversity of the kinds of groups that were involved in that particular effort. It's also great because these resolutions while we have a system that we're working on it's also great because these resolutions while we have a sample one on our website, groups can customize them, make them very specific to their municipality, to their area. Statements about the cost of nuclear weapons are particularly powerful like they were in the case of Baltimore. Other resolutions do include statements about calls for divestment, diplomacy with Iran, nuclear weapons free zones. So they really can be home to the community. If you want information on how much nuclear weapons cost to your community, PSRLA has been doing a Dr. Bob Dodge who's in this webinar right now has been doing this for over 30 years. And we have on our website where you can go and calculate the cost or we can help calculate that for you. I think the resolution process and the public awareness that we do through this campaign is most effective when we're able to have the voices of impacted communities represented. And this is a photo from the Los Angeles resolution. You can see from the looks on the people there, they don't hear this information very often, but when Junji Sarashina got up and told the story and testified for the resolution, he had everybody's attention. Some miscommunities. Okay, Marshall East Community, US Downwinders, other communities impacted by nuclear waste and contamination and veterans are also helpful to the effort. Folks that put in a statement about the treaty on the problem of nuclear weapons then become part of the ICANN Cities Appeal. And we have plenty of advocacy tools on our website, again, as I said, organizing tools, resolutions, sample resolutions you can download and modify. And then UCs and legislative advocacy, it's one thing when you tell somebody 70% of people opposed nuclear weapons, but when you tell an elected official, these cities in your district, these organizations in your district have signed onto this, it makes a difference. And so here's our information, preventnuclearwar.org, our Facebook, our Twitter, our email. And finally, because I am a local organizer, I have to promote this movie in the dark of the valley, which is about the Santa Susanna cleanup effort and the horrible impact on local communities. If you wanna talk about bringing the cost of war home, you really need to see this film. It's gonna be on MSNBC this Sunday at 8 Eastern, and there's plenty of other ways to do it as well. So I've done my due diligence as a Santa Susanna organizer as well. Thank you. Brilliant, Denise. Thank you so much for the incredible breadth in the presentation. And I'm gonna turn it back over to Jackie who does not need to be introduced again. Jackie Cabasso is gonna speak about the mayors for peace organizing effort, which is clearly something that we can be doing wherever we live, Jackie. Yeah, and I'm gonna take you through a mayors for peace action toolkit that I have just updated, which you can find on the United for Peace and Justice website, which is where I'm starting here. I'm gonna show it to you and kind of walk you through it. To find it, you go to resources and just click on the resource link and scroll down. You'll see mayors for peace action toolkit. So mayors for peace was founded in 1982 during the United Nations, or at the conclusion of the United Nations special second session on disarmament. That was the time when there were a million people in Central Park calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons, was founded by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it's working for a world without nuclear weapons, safe and resilient cities and a culture of peace as essential measures for the realization of lasting world peace. As of November 1st, 2021 mayors for peace has grown to 8,054 cities in 165 countries and regions. There are 220 US members and the total membership of mayors for peace represents over one billion people. Mayors for peace is next membership goal is to reach 10,000 member cities as quickly as possible. So I would like to ask everybody to invite, find out if your mayor is a member and if not, invite them to join. And this click here is your mayor member. It will take you to the mayors for peace website All right, or maybe not, maybe not live. Huh, okay, I don't know what's happened. Let me try it one more time. I was planning to show you these links. Okay, this link is being glitchy. All right, we'll move on. So one thing that may be surprising is to look at where the member cities are now. And this is the top 10 countries with mayors for peace. So you'll see that Japan, maybe not surprisingly has the most members. Iran has over a thousand members. Germany's has 776, Italy 517. Nicaragua has under 55. Well, this was perhaps not a democratic decision but the president of Nicaragua actually arranged for all of the mayors to join mayors for peace simultaneously. So there are many different situations around the world but can we catch up a little in the United States? So there are lots of resources here. There's a mayors for peace introductory video here which you can take a look at. And this is one of the main successes we've had in the United States is that the US Conference of Mayors which is the National Association of over 1400 American cities with populations over 30,000 has unanimously adopted mayors for peace resolutions for 16 consecutive years. And these are strong resolutions and resolutions adopted at annual meetings become official US Conference of Mayors policy. So in 2021, the resolution that the US Conference of Mayors adopted is named calling on the United States to welcome the treaty and the prohibition of nuclear weapons and to act now to prevent nuclear war and eliminate nuclear weapons. And this, okay, nevermind. This one calls on relevant to the costs of war. It calls on the president of Congress to cancel the plan to replace the entire US nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons and to redirect funds currently allocated to nuclear weapons and unwarranted military spending to address decades of inaction on infrastructure, poverty, the growing climate crisis and rising inequality. And it urges all US mayors to join mayors for peace to help reach the goal of 10,000 member cities. The 2020 resolution, which was entitled Calling for Human Centered Security in a Time of Global Pandemic actually affirmed support for the back and the brink campaign for the third year. There's a mayor of Des Moines who is the US Vice President of Mayor's Peace has said, if you don't think nuclear weapons are a local issue, ask the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So to help Mayor's Peace reach its goal of 10,000 member cities, find out if your mayor is a member of Mayor's Peace. Click here for information about how to register, examples of member city activities and a letter of invitation from the mayor of Hiroshima. And then most importantly for the purposes of networking tonight, if you're planning to ask your city council to adopt a back from the brink resolution or the ICANN Cities Appeal or some combination, ask your mayor to join Mayor's Peace at the same time. Now let me see if this link works on the back from the brink campaign. Why are these not working properly? All right, never mind. But you will find in there under the, in the back from the brink advocacy tools, you'll find this same toolkit because we've been working together. The ICANN Cities Appeal also links to Mayor's Peace. If you are submitting a resolution, proposing a resolution, include an operative clause in your resolution making it city policy for the mayor to join Mayor's Peace. You can also use language from the US Conference of Mayor's Resolution to draft and incorporate into your city council resolutions. Here's some other ways you can use the resolutions which I think are a very underutilized resource. You can take copies of recent US Conference of Mayor's resolutions to meetings with members of Congress or their staff or use it in your correspondence. Time, okay. So let me just say that, I'm sorry. So we will get all of, I mean, all of these materials are up on the UFBJ website. You can go there. Right, and there's other lists of things that mayors can do. So I urge you to take a look at this and see if how you can work it into what you're already doing. Thank you. And now I'm gonna turn to Helen Jackard who's with the Veterans for Peace rule, which has been an incredibly moving, powerful effort. to historically build understanding about your policy and is now has traveled around the world and is now clearly involved with developing local actions that I think many of our communities can join in. Helen is also, the project is also part of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and many other anti-nuclear organizations supported. Helen, can I ask you to come to the floor? Are you muted? Am I muted now? That's better, I hear you now. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you very much for these great presentations. And we work both at the local and national level and Veterans for Peace has just started a nuclear abolition working group which is putting out a new nuclear posture review. You should see it within the next few weeks and think that it's something that some of your organizations would like to sign on to. But I'd like to first go back to the very topic of this conversation, the cost of war at home because it affects veterans so much. As a consultant for Veterans for Peace, I work with veterans every day and those who saw combatter, the heaviest burden of war, they're all around us and the toll on their physical and mental health is enormous and their families are affected as well, often experiencing abuse at the hands of their loved ones that they care for. Veteran suicide is rampant, averaging 22 per day. And so the moral injury of killing takes quite a toll. Even military training is an insult to your soul. It's hard to kill somebody that you don't hate. And so what the military has to do is teach people to hate others, which is racism. Veterans, when they come home, they're often working as police and a lot of times the police are dressing in military uniforms and they're using military surplus equipment in the city streets. So the combination of racism and military-style policing has quite an impact on our divided society. But beyond the effects on veterans, war has a big effect on people and the environment. So let me just go over some of the things that you probably already talked about. Over half of our US income tax dollars go to war-making. 4.4 million people in the United States work for either the military or those contractors you were talking about that profit from war. The US military is the largest single consumer of fossil fuels in the world and therefore has the most responsibility for climate change. The US has 800 military bases internationally and another 450 bases within the United States. A lot of these bases are EPA Superfund sites. Problems are toxic chemicals getting into the drinking water, explosives on the firing ranges and noise pollution. And another problem with militarism in the United States is aggression. We are aggressive towards other countries. We don't cooperate with them. And so the military industrial complex only exists for war. And so this aggressive aspect finds itself into every aspect of our lives. I'm gonna share my screen here. So I managed the Veterans for Peace Golden Rule project. Sorry, I'm not seeing my page down, but I'm working. Okay, we'll do it this way. And it's a small boat with a big mission. And the mission is to sail for a nuclear free world and a peaceful, sustainable future. In 1958, the Golden Rule was sailed towards the Marshall Islands in an attempt to interfere with nuclear bomb tests. And they were stopped and arrested in Honolulu. And there was a huge public outcry over their arrest because this is a very publicized, well-publicized event. The huge public outcry led to a big anti-nuclear movement at the time, which gave President Kennedy the cover to sign the 1963 Nuclear Test Bound Treaty. In 2010, Golden Rule sank, and Veterans for Peace found her, restored her. And in 2015, we started sailing up and down the US West Coast. We participated in five fleet week protests. This is where the Navy brings their big machines of war into our cities. In 2016, we participated in a water action against the banger nuclear submarine base, which is 25 miles from Seattle. Eventually, we made our way back to Honolulu, where we were protesting against RIMPAC, which happens every two years and brings dozens of militaries from around the world to blow things up and practice working together. We learned a lot when we were in Hawaii. That was where we learned most about the cost of war and militarism on the people. 25% of the land in Hawaii is occupied by the US military. One island was completely destroyed, Kaho'olawe, and the cleanup is gonna take millions of dollars in decades to complete. Hawaiians are well aware of the nuclear threat from all directions, and they had this nuclear scare about three years ago that people are still talking about. I wanted to say that the golden rules next stop is going to be San Diego. We'll be there from January 11th to February 14th. If you live there, I encourage you to get in touch with us. And then after that, in September next year, we want to start the Great Loop. And this is a picture of our route. We'll start in Minneapolis and go south along the Mississippi River around Florida, as far as Portland, Maine, back to New York City, up the Hudson River and the Erie Canal, all around the Great Lakes, and back down the center of the country. We're going to need a lot of... Okay, thank you. This is a voyage that will be 10,000 miles in 15 months, and we're looking for help partners to help us with scheduling events to find crew and help us with fundraising. So we always could use some financial help. Our website is vfpgoldenrule.org. Helen, thank you so much. And to everyone who's been asking about how we all get in touch with one another, we will be definitely sending out that information in the follow-up to this webinar. I now have the great pleasure of introducing the Reverend Liz Theoharis, who is co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, a national call for moral revival. And we at UFPJ are very happy to be supporting this. I'm not gonna read her entire biography because I know that what she has to say is far more important for us to hear from. Reverend Theoharis, welcome to United for Peace and Justice's cost of war at home. Well, thank you so much. It's great to be with you all. I was raised in a family that was dedicated to working for peace, doing anti-nuclear organizing, doing all kinds of international connection. And so I feel absolutely right at home. Anytime I'm with UFPJ as well as Code Pink and all the different groups that are here. And so thanks for having me. And thanks also to so many of the activists that are on here for the work that you're all doing and the work we're doing together in the Poor People's Campaign and in so many other movements in the country right now. I wanted to start with a favorite quote of mine from Mrs. Coretta Scott King from more than 50 years ago. She said that, I must remind you that starving a child is violence, that neglecting school children is violence, punishing a mother and her family is violence, discrimination against a working person is violence, ghetto housing is violence, ignoring medical need is violence, contempt for the poor and apathy towards action is violence. This was just about a year after her husband, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, was a junior called the US, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. And one of the things that I find most powerful about Coretta Scott King's quote is how it pulls us out of our silos which we often comfortably sit in and reminds us of the importance of connection, of networks, of intersectionality. And as Jackie said at the very beginning, we can't win with the peace people over there and those committed to civil rights over here and people concerned for a living wage over there and adequate housing and education and all everyone kind of divided. But so just like in the Poor People's Campaign and in UFPJ and in Code Pink and so many of the different kind of efforts and networks and groups here, this quote and Coretta Scott King's life and legacy shows us that these issues are connected. And so then we must be, right? We know that the military as we just heard is the biggest polluter in the world. We know that war and the war economy is fueled by a poverty draft because poor and low income people are compelled to enlist because of a lack of living wage jobs or opportunities for higher education. We know that the wars being waged across the world are racist and imperialist wars and these intersections keep going and they keep going and they keep going. And that's why we are and must break through these silos and come together across all the lines that divide us and build a movement from below. None of this is anything different than what has been said all evening. If it wasn't clear enough, if we already didn't all agree with this, if we just look at what's happening in Congress right now, we see why this is so important, right? Folks might have seen that this evening or today the Congressional Budget Office just came out with a scoring for the Build Back Better agenda and that scoring basically says that it's gonna be a deficit, right? We know that that agenda has already been stripped down and that it started out many, many, many times less than what economists have been saying that the country needed to even just get back to where we were before the pandemic hit and as all of us on this call know, with 140 million people who were poor and low income, when we had the level of military spending and military engagement all over the world, the level of racism and injustice, things weren't good then. And so to not even kind of build back a little bit towards that is absolute catastrophe. But then for weeks and for months, the nation and mostly in Congress, especially in the Senate has been debating whether we can afford to expand healthcare and to lengthen the child tax credit and to increase the earned income tax credit and to provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrants or to have early childhood education and raising wages for essential workers and having a care economy. And politicians as we all know on both sides of the aisle have just been saying over and over again, we just can't do it. It'll cause inflation. It will add to the deficit. It'll hurt the economy. But we in the richest country in the world can't believe the lie and the lies that we don't have the resources to lift from the bottom so that everybody can rise. We on this call, we in the poor people's campaign have been crying that poverty and inequality, the lack of living wage jobs, the kind of military investment that we have are what's really costing too much, costing too much and lost lives and livelihoods and actually even hurting our economy. And folks here, I'm sure know that Congress is gonna soon vote on a defense bill, right? And that that defense bill at this moment stands at $778 billion. Even though the war in Afghanistan is over, the bill includes $37 billion more than Trump's last military budget and $25 billion more than President Biden even requested, right? And that that bill actually has this nation spending more on the military than the next 12 nations combined. And it's more money than in real inflation adjusted dollars than was in our military at the height of the Cold War or during the Vietnam or Korean War, right? And we know that this money is gonna go to the Department of Defense, the only federal agency that hasn't been able to pass an independent audit in decades, right? I mean, we know all of this. And yet somehow what's the debate in our country right now is about not being able to afford healthcare for our people and no debate about this kind of military. And so this is where organizing, this is where networking, this is where mobilizing and movement building comes in. And so I go back again to another Dr. King quote who he talks about kind of power because that's what we need, we need power. And he said that power for poor people, right? Will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of the nation say yes when they may be desirous of saying no. And so that's where we and movements come in. So this June, June 18th, 2022, the Poor People's Campaign and all of our mobilizing partners are gonna be holding a mass poor people and low-wage workers assembly, a moral march on Washington. We're seeing this as not a day, but a declaration, a generationally transformative event, the largest gathering of poor and low-income people in US history, right? And we're hoping that we're gonna get to partner with all of you to build this assembly and this moral march, right? And so I think many folks here already know some about the Poor People's Campaign. Many of you are very active in it, in fact. But the Poor People's Campaign takes on these five interlocking injustices. We see the connection between systemic racism and poverty, ecological devastation, militarism in the war economy and this false moral narrative of religious nationalism. Our theory of change is that we should nationalize state-based movements, that we should shine a light on what's possible, not just pointing out everything that's wrong, that we have to shift the narrative, the narrative of what is going on and what's possible and then build the kind of power, compelling power to make it so. We're organized in almost every state across the country and we are organized, much like many of the groups on this call are organized into coordinating councils that are led by impacted people and moral leaders and clergy and activists and advocates. And just like everyone here, we're persistent, we're intrepid, we're indefatigable, right? And we know that we have to kind of create peace, we have to work for justice. We follow the idea that Dr. King laid out that the Achilles heel, that the weak point of racism and poverty and militarism is actually to unite poor people, low-income people, marginalized people across all the lines that divide us, especially race and geography. And that it's by kind of uniting people, organizing people that we can kind of become a new and unsettling force that can disrupt this kind of national complacency on war and on militarism and on racism, on low wages and on so many injustices. So I want us to get to discussion and to conversation and to questions, but I also am a pastor and a biblical scholar. And I know that not everyone and not maybe even many people on this call are people of faith, but I still feel like this moment calls for a little bit of story. And a favorite one of mine from the Bible is this woman who is persistent until she's able to win justice. And I think it's a kind of model for the work that we're all doing here, whether it's caravans and inbarkments and whether it's anti-Ratheon campaigns. But in Luke 19, we have a woman, a widow, who keeps on confronting this unjust judge, kind of demanding justice. And the story is clear that this judge, this powerful man, this wealthy man, someone who's caught up in war and empire, he doesn't care about any other human being and he doesn't fear God. But this woman enters and enters and enters and enters and enters and keeps on coming. And she's a person who's been abused and used by violence and poverty and empire. And she probably starts up pretty small and then she starts bringing others with her. Her first demonstration might be one or two, but then moves up to 20 and 30. And through that kind of work, she wins justice, right? The judge never kind of has a aha moment. Like we never hear that, that he changes his ways and he finds the error of his position, right? The text tells us that the judge figures out that this woman is just never gonna stop. And it says that in the Greek, that even though he doesn't care about people, she's gonna give him a black eye. Now, I think this woman was nonviolent. So I don't actually think she was trying to beat him up. I think the story is saying that her persistence, her organizing makes him look bad, tarnishes his reputation, makes his corporation a little less shiny. And so in the wind, she wins and she wins justice. She doesn't win a pittance. She doesn't win crumbs. She doesn't win like a little tiny concession. She wins the justice that she goes seeking for. And I think that that is the message of networking, of movement building, of organizing, and of the work that we're all doing here this evening. We have to keep at it. We have to keep coming and coming. We have to network and bring others in. And we have to pray with our feet. And when we do this, we win. And it means that we can win, not just be right, not just try, but we can actually achieve justice. And so, I'm so encouraged by the work that people are doing and so honored to be in this movement with you all. And so looking forward to moving, as we say in our work, moving forward together and not one step back. So thank you so much for having me here with you this evening. Oh, Reverend Thea Harris, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy, busy life. And thank you for everything, The Poor People's Campaign has been doing and will do and will achieve. I heard, I heard two overarching concerns. One was the strategies and the techniques for building really broad, effective local coalitions for getting out of the silos and creating structures that are going to have power and the second big issue I was hearing was taking on those who profit from war and really questioning and knowing how to speak truth to their very, very immoral power. So I would, this seems, we'd hoped for a half hour of conversation, we don't quite have that. I don't know if people want to raise hands, call a stack in the chat. I'd like to recognize people who haven't spoken yet. Cynthia. Oh, I'm going to ask everybody their comments to do about a minute so that we can get things moving. But Cynthia. Yeah. Oh, hello everybody from Olaani Territory in Berkeley, California. I'm with Code Pink, as you can see. Yeah, we are gearing up as part of this new national anti-war industry alliance and Ken is part of it and other people on this call are part of it, Carly. We want to look at Lockheed, we want to look at Boeing, we want to look at all the local facilities of the war industry right here. And they're everywhere. So I'm sure you have something in your community as well. And I'd like to really encourage people to join the campaign, it's going to build towards something in the spring, something national. But meanwhile, locally, we're going to go after Lockheed, we're going to go after Raytheon Boeing, whoever we can find, especially their CEOs, not their workers. We're in solidarity with their workers. They need those jobs. But we want to highlight how the war profiteers are making billions on these forever wars and won't let them stop because that's their business model. Thank you very much. Thank you for having us, Raytheon. Jonathan King, I want to recognize you. And I would like to ask other people, if you can just type stack in the chat, it'll be easier for me because I don't have a gallery view, but Jonathan, let me recognize you. Thank you very much. Very exciting to hear about these programs. One thing I'd like to add to Brian's report that we've done in Massachusetts, which I think could be done in many other places in the country is we found friendly state legislators and introduced into the state legislatures bills that would have the state pension fund divest from companies that manufacture nuclear weapons and also divest from companies that sell weapons to Saudi Arabia. So when you have a bill in the state legislature, any resident of the Commonwealth can contact their state legislator, their state senator. There's public hearings. It allows a certain amount of education just like the back from the brink with the municipalities. But in almost every state in the union, one or two legislators can introduce the bills. They all have state pension funds. And so this is something we believe could be picked up across the country. Brian, maybe you could put in the chat the link to the two divestment bills because they're kind of templates. You can use the same language in Minnesota that you use in Massachusetts. Thanks so much. Way ahead of you, Jonathan. Jonathan and Vicki, I'm gonna call on you next. Vicki Ryder. Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to pick up on Revin Liz's mention of June 18th, 2022. We're organizing a filiboss campaign and that just means that every one of you needs to be thinking about filling a bus to bring your people to Washington so that we can all be there and manifest our power. Every one of our groups can at least fill one bus. Every church, every labor union, every campus. Please do what you can to fill a bus so we can be all together. And as I said, manifest our power at the Poor People's Campaign. We want to see you there. Vicki, thank you so much. Very important. Carolyn, Carolyn Scar? Got to unmute. Since some of us are growing older and looking at our retirement funds, how do we find out whether the county retirement fund or possibly a retirement fund that just had them privately through an investment company is? Who are they invested in? How do we shake them loose? Thank you for that question, Carolyn. Carly, I'm wondering if you can help answer that, but you're also next in the staff. Yeah, if I understand your question correctly, Carolyn, we can look up investments in that weapons free fund. And I'll drop my email in the chat and we can, I'm always happy to go over with people individually because I know that that's so helpful. And sometimes these financial documents can be difficult to read through. So we're happy to help you with that. And just another comment I wanted to make about sort of coalition building generally, we worked on a campaign in Vermont, Code Pink and World Beyond War did, and we initially started by looking at the Vermont state pension fund as a potential target because we thought that they might be invested in weapons manufacturers, but with the recognition that a recent divestment campaign had attempted to divest from fossil fuels and failed because of a lack of real connection with labor unions in the state, we decided not to go after the state pension fund and instead go to municipal pension fund in Burlington and deliberately try to reach out to the local unions in Burlington and the workers center there and say, hey, we wanna work on this together. And they showed up for us at the city council meeting and now we're working with some of the other local unions who are staging a potential protest and maybe an upcoming action at the medical center there. So we'll be working with them. How can we stand in solidarity with you? So we're trying to build from the ground up in Vermont. And I think that that's a model that we're trying to work on across the country because having the support and working in coalition with unions whose workers obviously are affected by pension fund divestment I think is really crucial. So just wanted to mention that. Thank you so much. I'm just gonna ask, especially some of our presenters, Janice, Ken, Helen and Brian, if you wanna think about contributing to this question that so many people are asking which are what are the keys to organizing a local coalition that is really broad and diverse and representative of diverse income and identities. But in the meantime, Jackie is in the stack. So Jackie, I'll give you a minute to say a little more. Okay, actually that's the question I was gonna answer. Well, you can start then and we'll hear from everyone. Okay, so I said this earlier but in these short presentations it wasn't really time to elaborate much. I think the key to organizing at the local level and at any level really at this point in time is to organize around common values and common vision which needs to be articulated. So what that means in practical terms is that if we articulate and agreed upon set of those things and my favorite example to use is Haiti. I work mostly on nuclear weapons. I know that Haiti is important and complicated. The Haiti Action Coalition was a member of the People's Nonviolent Response Coalition. When they needed help, I would know I could trust them because they were going in the right direction and we would all pull together for Haiti. And then when we need something on nuclear weapons, everybody will pull together for nuclear weapons. I've seen it work. But that means you give up the primacy of your issue. You don't stop working on it but you don't try to shove it down everybody's throat. You say, we're all in this together, I'll help you. Can you help me? I think that actually the Poor People's Campaign is doing that. That's why I'm so excited about it. And I think that one way people can start working together is to join your state Poor People's Campaign regardless of whether you're a member of another organization that's not an issue. And one thing that is coming up that would be a very good local network building opportunity is on April 4th, the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's Beyond Vietnam, a Time to Break Silence speech. In Oakland, we have organized public participatory readings every year starting in 2003. Had to stop because of the pandemic this year. We're gonna start again in front of the federal building. I took it to the California Poor People's Campaign. They're gonna put out a statewide call for those actions and we're gonna approach national. So this is a heads up, Reverend Liz. And we have on UFBJ, we have a how to do that toolkit so you can do it in your own community. So you're bringing together people who are reading Dr. King's words together, not allowed to change the words and then talk together about what it all means for today. Thank you, Jackie. I wanna just invite anyone of our former presenters who wants to address the same question about building broad local coalitions, getting out of our silos. Jackie said so much of what I wanted to say about speaking to common values. These issues seem complex, but they're really not at their heart. And the strength that we have on our side isn't billions of dollars. It's the fact that our message resonates with people and they can feel it in their hearts. And I'll just second again what Jackie just said because I just had this experience with the Poor People's Campaign and the National Union of the Homeless where folks were talking about extremely local issues at Boston City Hall. And then they were talking about the military budget in the same breath. The Poor People's Campaign does this so well with how they describe the war economy in this country. Right from that speech, when you spend more on military defense year after year than on programs and social uplift, you're approaching spiritual death from that speech beyond Vietnam, which is a speech that also helped to bring me into the work. When you spend this amount of money on war and destruction, it touches every issue. It's because of the opportunity it costs. And I'll just say, yeah, Jackie said it better than I did. So I'll just pass it off. Well, everyone's words are contributing, I think, to inspiring us. Helen, and then Ken after Helen. Well, what we do is we invite guest speakers to talk with whoever we're talking with. So we hold a lot of presentations and so we can invite PSR or Black Lives Matter or anybody to talk about not just their own issue, but it's also important to talk about how they're connected. So we show up at other people's events and talk about our issues and help bring nuclear matters to the poor people's campaign or help bring the matter of war to somebody else. And so, you gotta show up and it takes a lot of work, but then you also have to invite others to speak. And I think that's how we can lend a better voice to people of color and youth and indigenous people that are often excluded from our little discussions. So that's what we would like to do. Thank you, Ken. You certainly had very inspiring photographs of very broad participation. What have you done that's made that really work for you and Asheville? Yeah, I wanna reiterate what everyone else has said about go-to-each-others events and meetings. That's one thing we've done, but I have a story to tell about how we actually coalesced into a group, which is when this was announced, this Pratt and Whitney coming to our town, there was a Buncombe County Commission meeting and a number of people showed up to speak against it. And we found each other there. I took down everybody's name. I emailed everybody. Sunrise Coalition was there. I went to their meetings. They came to Veterans for Peace meetings. And the point is that we went to each other's meetings and then we shared leadership. We don't have just one leader. And especially the young people tend to be the ones who speak to the press, who speak out against climate change in particular. So it is shared leadership too. I just wanna really thank everyone who's spoken and everyone who's put questions in the chat. We have recorded this webinar. It will be available. There were many questions about how you might quote from it or share it. We will have it on our YouTube channel. We'll also be really careful to record everything that went into the chat. And I will make an effort over the next day or so to go through and edit it and provide the links that people were supplying for all of you. Before we close, I wanna take, I wanna turn over to George Friday, who is UFPJ's national organizer. She has just launched what is really exciting us at UFPJ, the Seeding Young Peacemakers Program, Looking to the Future, and really in teaching and mentoring young people to do exactly the kind of organizing we've been talking about. But more than that, mentoring them through organizing an event in their local communities. And we hope this is something that other UFPJ groups will be interested in and can profit from. So George. Alrighty then. So I know that I'll go a few minutes, which will put us right at 9.30. So our apologies for being a little past 9.30 as our stop time. So Seeding Peacemakers. I'm so excited about this. You know, if we think about folks who are in college or folks who are under 30 and what their reality has been like for the last 20, 30 years, hmm, constant war, escalating fascism, the environment being destroyed, not a lot that really inspired us to be peacekeepers and not a lot about the history of the movement for peace and justice in the U.S. So Seeding Peacemakers is a way that through UFPJ we can do some work on that. I have the privilege, I live in North Carolina and I have the privilege of also working with North Carolina Peace Action, which is awesome. And we, in Seeding Peacemakers, we identified teams of two or three young people per campus or for city or organization that were interested in both organizing training, focused on peace and justice issues and ending oppression dealing with white supremacy, racism, colonialism, empire, combining those to really pass on, I've been doing this y'all since I was about 13 and I'm 62. So there are a few things I know and I can pass those on and I'm really excited about that. So we have here in North Carolina, Elon College is a site in Western Mass. There is an organization that has a site and in New York and Niagara University is a site. At Niagara University, they're doing a fantastic project that y'all will be able to read a newsletter story about next month or yes, next month because they've taken a building on their campus that was a police station. I thought it was a military recruiter station, I was wrong. It was a police station with no authority from the university, but on their campus, they closed it, shut it down through the summer, these students that are working with us and now they're gonna turn it into a student hub and the student is writing up that story and you'll see the story and their photo in our upcoming newsletter, that's fantastic. One of the things that's great is of the six students that we're working with from three sites, they're all people of color, all BIPOC folks and that was a surprise, especially when you think of the peace and justice world to do a project and all the participants, none of the participants are white. I was like, this is awesome. So it's fantastic work. Stay tuned because we'll have more to tell you about it coming up in the months to come. Basically we are doing about 24 hours of training over nine sessions and those in early January and then by March, each of the sites will do a project that they're choosing. I told you the one that they're doing in Niagara and the other two folks sites haven't figured out yet exactly what they're doing. Although in Springfield Mass, we have some idea. You'll just have to stay tuned to find out more details. Terry? Yeah, well, I hope that's an invitation to you all to stay tuned to read the UFPJ newsletter which always includes information about any member organization that wants to send in a report on what they're doing locally. We regularly report on the Poor People's Campaign and I think, you know, tonight just shows that we probably have a great deal more exciting work going on at the local levels that we can be including in future communications. As I said, we will make a real effort. You will all be receiving, as will everyone who signed up for this webinar, a link to the recording of this and we will be working over the next day or so to extract the most important information that showed up in the chat and share it with all of you. I wanna thank you for being here. I wanna thank all of our presenters for really being incredibly inspiring and I hope you all are going home with great ideas for organizing locally, focusing on the cost of war at home but realizing that we need to be united for peace and justice. So good night all.