The El-Hibri Peace Education Prize 2009 Award Winner this year is Dr. Mary Elizabeth King, “professor of peace and conflict studies at the United Nations-affiliated University for Peace, which has its main campus in Costa Rica, and distinguished scholar with the Center for Global Peace at American University in Washington, DC.” Learn more about The El-Hibri Peace Education Prize and Bethesda-resident Fuad El-Hibri.   To be considered for the 2010 prize, nominations must be received no later than June 6, 2010.

Dr. Mary Elizabeth King is professor of peace and conflict studies at the United Nations-affiliated University for Peace, which has its main campus in Costa Rica, and distinguished scholar with the Center for Global Peace at American University in Washington, DC. She is also a Rothermere American Institute Fellow at the University of Oxford, in Britain. Priorities of her work include peace education and nonviolent civil resistance.

Among Dr. King’s many publications, she is the author of the highly acclaimed, A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance, released in 2007. Her most recent book is, The New York Times on Emerging Democracies in Eastern Europe (2009), chronicling the peaceful transitions from Soviet rule that occurred in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine.

Dr. King has worked with President Jimmy Carter as a special advisor since the early 1970s, including working closely with him on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a presidential appointee in the Carter Administration, she had worldwide oversight for the Peace Corps and other U.S. volunteer service corps programs. In the U.S. civil rights movement, she worked alongside the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an experience that defined her life. In addition to her work in the field of peace education, she has been a practitioner of international relations for 35 years—requiring personal contact with heads of state and government ministers of more than 120 developing countries.

Dr. King earned a doctorate in international politics from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth in the United Kingdom.

In Photo: Fuad El-Hibri (Founder of the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize) and Dr. Abdul Aziz Said (First Laureate of the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize)

Purpose of the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize

To honor one peace educator annually with the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize in order to bring awareness of and to promote the expansion of the field of Peace Education.

Mission of the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize

The El-Hibri Peace Education Prize recognizes outstanding peace educators based in the United States by awarding $10,000 annually to an individual or organization making valuable contributions to peace education and social justice in the Middle East.

Goals of the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize

• Recognize outstanding peace educators who demonstrate
  successful and innovative efforts to promote peace
  and social justice
• Provide financial support for established and emerging
  peace educators to continue their work
• Promote the importance of peace education globally by
  affirming efforts to integrate knowledge about and for
  peacemaking into curricula at all levels of education

The El-Hibri Peace Education Prize

The El-Hibri Peace Education Prize is awarded each fall in Washington, D.C.

Winners will be selected based on nominations and interviews with references who can speak to their contributions to the field of Peace Education.

Who is Eligible for the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize?

Nominees can be individuals or organizations based in the United States making valuable contributions to the theory, practice, and teaching of
peace and social justice in the Middle East.

Notification of El-Hibri Peace Education Prize Award

El-Hibri Peace Education Prize winners will be recognized at the annual El-Hibri Peace Education Prize ceremony.

2008 El-Hibri Peace Education Prize Recipient

The El-Hibri Charitable Foundation and the El-Hibri family wish to congratulate Scott Kennedy, the second recipient of the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize. Scott Kennedy has been a Peace Educator for 40 years. He was instrumental in pioneering educational delegations to conflict zones, now a widely practiced form of peace education. He has personally led more than three dozen delegations to the Middle East since 1979. He also helped establish Witness for Peace, which brought thousands of US citizens to Nicaragua on short term educational delegations.

He co-founded the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz, California which is one of the most active community-based peace education centers in the U.S. The Center has been host to countless speakers, workshops, and programs focusing on the peaceful and just resolution of conflicts locally and around the world. Scott has actively served on the boards of many organizations that teach and exemplify peace and empowerment, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Middle East Witness, Refuser Solidarity Network, Middle East Advisory Committee of the American Friends Service Committee, Isla Vista Youth Project, Isla Vista Children’s Center, Thomas Merton Unity (Nonviolence) Center, the Isla Vista People’s Life Fund, California Youth Advocate Program, National Youth Advocate Program, and the Interfaith Peace-Builders.

Scott is a former mayor of Santa Cruz, California where he resides with his wife Kristin. They have 3 grown children.

2007 El-Hibri Peace Education Prize Recipient

The El-Hibri Peace Education Prize committee wishes to congratulate Professor Abdul Aziz Said, the First Laureate of this award.
He serves as the Mohammed Said Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace at American University in Washington, DC, and receives this honor in recognition of his dedication to the causes of peace, his preeminent role in educating about peace and Islam, and his 50 years as a faculty mentor and teacher at American University.

“… life is a path of learning where we are each constantly called upon to awaken ourselves and each other to search for freedom, truth, beauty, creativity, and above all, justice.”

Abdul Aziz Said

The Actual El-Hibri Peace Education Prize

• $10,000
• Promotion and publicity through media activities, speaking engagements and other important networking opportunities to raise awareness of peace education and the honoree’s contributions within the field.

Timeline for 2010 El-Hibri Peace Education Prize

June 6, 2010: Nomination deadline

July 11, 2010: Prize winner notification

September 21, 2010: Prize presented annually on the International Day of Peace

The El-Hibri Peace Education Prize Nomination Process

Complete the nomination form and submit by email or mail.

Nominations must be received no later than June 6, 2010.

Nominations, questions, and financial contributions may be sent to:

Email: nonviolence@igc.org

Mailing Address:
The El-Hibri Peace Education Prize
PO Box 39127
Friendship Station
Washington, DC 20016 USA

Phone: +1 (202) 244.0951

I am happy to announce that I am a newly-minted member of the Woman’s National Democratic Club of Washington, DC, as you’ll see as evidenced in my membership card below.

Women's National Democratic Club (WNDC) Membership Card

I am very much looking forward to spending time socializing and working from the club in the near, middle, and long-term.  I also look very much forward to taking you for luncheon and drinks there.

What is the Women’s National Democratic Club, you ask?

Welcome to the Woman’s National Democratic Club, the meeting place for Democrats in the nation’s capital. WNDC engages members (women and men) in public affairs and serves as a forum for Democratic leaders.

Club membership benefits include outstanding speaker programs with legislators, first ladies, ambassadors, authors, and other public figures – as well the opportunity to study key issues, advance public policy, serve on task forces and network with other Democrats.

WNDC’s Educational Foundation sponsors selected programs which are open to the public. (See our Calendar of Events) The Foundation also supports the club’s historic preservation, scholarship of women’s history, and community outreach with DC public schools.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places and located in the heart of DC’s Dupont Circle, the club is an ideal setting for private parties, weddings and special events. Its gracious rooms are available for conferences and meetings.

Our Washington DC Museum houses a collection of antiques and political memorabilia and is open to the public through scheduled tours and to scholars by appointment.

Here’s some information about the history of WNDC:

Founded in 1922, the Woman’s National Democratic Club (WNDC) was the first meeting place for Democratic women in Washington, DC. When WNDC opened its doors in rented quarters near the White House in 1924, members recruited influential Washingtonians to speak at club luncheons. The twice-weekly events have endured for nine decades and provide a lively forum for discussion with speakers such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, E. L. Doctorow, Madeleine Albright, Jim Lehrer, Vernon Jordan, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Loretta and Linda Sanchez and oher prominent national and local figures.

The historic clubhouse, located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of nineteenth-century and Beaux Arts mansions, is also a museum with beautifully appointed rooms for meetings, receptions, weddings, and other private events. Designed by Washington architect Harvey Page, and built in 1892-94 for a descendent of the noted Adams family of Massachusetts, the house is a unique transition between Victorian and Arts and Crafts architecture. WNDC bought the former residence in 1927. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

The WNDC Educational Foundation (EF) opens club facilities, programs, and activities to the public. The EF oversees the club’s museum collections and archives, sponsors an oral history and publication program and conducts community outreach projects. The foundation maintains an historic preservation fund to help conserve the landmark clubhouse.

Our Proud Heritage
From the right to vote, the power to lead

Two years after the 19th Amendment granted voting rights to women, WNDC was founded as a socially acceptable meeting place for women to engage in political dialogue. Emily Newell Blair, the most prominent Democratic woman in the country in the 1920s, was the club’s principal founder. As the Democratic National Committee’s vice chair for women’s affairs, Blair oversaw the organization of more than a thousand clubs for Democratic women throughout the country. She also established political schools, hoping to revitalize the party through a well informed women’s electorate.

Florence Jaffray “Daisy” Harriman, a Washington and New York socialite, recruited prominent political and social figures for WNDC membership and financial support. Harriman had entered national politics in 1912, eight years before women had national voting rights, to campaign for her friend Woodrow Wilson in his first presidential bid. Harriman also launched a series of bipartisan Sunday night suppers that raised the Democratic Party profile and quickly became a Washington institution.

Through the decades WNDC has been in the forefront on national issues. In the 1930s and 40s, Eleanor Roosevelt advanced her social reform measures from the club podium. At WNDC’s Diamond Jubilee in 1998, then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton received the club’s first Eleanor Award, presented in honor of Eleanor Roosevelt. Former President Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter received the Eleanor Award in 2003, in recognition of their outstanding contributions to humanitarian causes.

Over the years, many distinguished women have received WNDC’s Democratic Woman of the Year Award: Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Secretary Madeleine Albright and the District of Columbia’s congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton among them. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s WNDC embraced women’s issues, at times to the dismay of its more conservative members. Men were granted full voting membership in 1988. Today, like many volunteer organizations, the club is adapting to twenty-first century social change.