Introduction to the Board of Directors
of the Washington Peace Center
August/September 2004
Volume 40, Number 2
Mark Andersen is a community organizer and outreach worker with Emmaus Services for the Aging and co-founder of punk activist group, Positive Force D.C. He is the author of two books, Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital and All The Power: Revolution Without Illusion and a member of St. Aloysius Catholic Parish.
Kit Bonson has been an activist/organizer for 25 years and on the Board for 5 years. She has worked extensively on peace and justice issues, as well as reproductive rights issues, in Iowa City, Buffalo and Washington DC. Kit envisions a Peace Center where supporters feel ownership of the center’s activism and community involvement.
Arturo Griffiths is a longtime DC community activist committed to social justice issues in a multi-cultural, diverse setting. He immigrated from Panama as a child. He co-founded the Latin American Youth Center, and has been President of the DC Latino Festival for several years. He’s worked for various unions as an organizer, including the Justice For Janitors campaign, and currently is field representative for SEIU Local 500.
Jane Henderson is a human rights activist who has worked for 15 years against the death penalty. She was a co-director of the Quixote Center for 16 years, and founded the Equal Justice USA program, a grass-roots campaign for human rights in the criminal justice system.
John Judge is a Washington, DC native. An outspoken critic and opponent of war and militarization, he is an independent researcher, author and lecturer. Author of “Judge for Yourself,” he co-founded the Committee for an Open Archives in 1989 to free the JFK and MLK assassination files, and served as Executive Director of COPA until 1998. He has served on the Board of the Peace Center for eight years and was Acting Coordinator during 2003-04.
Paul Magno is Director of the Fr. McKenna Center, a church-based community service ministry focused on homeless men and low-income neighbors of St. Aloysius Church in downtown Washington. He has worked with the very poor in Washington for almost three decades, dating back to his college days. He has been a long-time local participant in the Catholic Worker movement. He spent 20 months in prison for an act of disarmament in the 1980s.
Roger Newell, co-chair, D.C. chapter of Jobs With Justice, is a native Washingtonian who is active on community and labor issues. Newell previously served as a member of the Peace Center board in the early 1990s. Currently, he is employed as a senior staff member at a D.C.-based international labor union.
Polly Stamatopolous is a DC community activist who has worked on pro-choice, feminist, LGBT, civil rights, and peace and social justice issues, to name a few. She has volunteered with the Washington Peace Center since 1992. She is a professional fundraiser with more than ten years experience and is a twelve year resident of the Shaw community.
John Steinbach has been an activist and organizer in the Metropolitan Washington Community for over twenty years. He is a member of Gray Panthers, Committee of Indigenous Solidarity (DC area Zapatistas), and is incoming Chair of Unity In the Community in Prince William County, VA. He is the coordinator of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Peace Committee of the National Capital Area.
Ellen Thomas is co-founder of Proposition One Committee, Peace Park Antinuclear Vigil, and NucNews. See http://prop1.org and http://nucnews.net
Mike Zmolek has served as the national outreach coordinator for the
National Grassroots Peace Network (formerly the National Network to
End the War Against Iraq) since fall 2002. He is currently finishing
a doctoral dissertation for the Dept. of Politics at York University
in Toronto. He lives in Takoma Park MD.
