On April 8, Brooklyn College will welcome 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Leymah Roberta Gbowee to campus. This event is free and open to the public. Gbowee will discuss her life and activism on gender, law, transitional justice, reconstruction, and human rights and talk about her life as an activist whose leadership of a nonviolent women’s peace movement played a pivotal role in ending Liberia’s 14-year civil war. “We are thrilled to have Leymah Gbowee on campus to allow our community to hear from one of the most important human rights leaders of our time,” said Brooklyn College President Michelle J. Anderson. An unceasing champion of human rights and an advocate for peace, Gbowee is the founder and president of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, established in 2012 to provide quality education and leadership opportunities to women and youth as a path to economic security and peace. Born in central Liberia in 1972, Gbowee was living with her family in the capital of Monrovia when the First Liberian Civil War broke out. The brutality that she witnessed against her fellow Liberians—particularly women and children—spurred her to train as a social worker specializing in trauma counseling. Gbowee’s dedication to bringing peace and security to troubled areas of the world has never been better illustrated than by her work in her home country, where she led a movement of Liberian women, both Muslim and Christian, to call for peace through nonviolent protest. The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace played a crucial role in ending civil war in Liberia in 2003. Gbowee was the founding head of the Liberian Reconciliation Initiative, a forum for the victims and perpetrators of human rights violations to bring about healing and produce a more accurate accounting of the country’s devastating civil war. Today, she is the executive director of Women Peace and Security Network Africa, established in Ghana in 2006 as a nongovernmental organization to advance women’s leadership in the governance of the continent’s peace and security. As an experienced social worker and women’s rights advocate, Gbowee has counseled refugees at the Ministry of Health Displaced Shelter and is the founding member and former Liberia coordinator of the Women in Peacebuilding Program/West African Network for Peacebuilding. She served as a member of the High-Level Task Force for the International Conference on Population and Development and on the board of directors of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, the Federation of Liberian Youth, and the PeaceJam Foundation, a youth organization led by Nobel laureates to mentor future leaders in global peace. In addition, Gbowee is a member of the African Women Leaders Network for Reproductive Health and Family Planning and an Oxfam Global Ambassador. In 2014, Gbowee received the Women’s Refugee Council’s Voices of Courage Award and in 2016, the Lifetime Africa Achievement Prize for Peace in Africa by the Millennium Excellence Foundation. In 2018, she was appointed to the Gender Equality Advisory Council for Canada’s G7 Presidency. Gbowee holds a Master of Arts in conflict transformation from Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia and was a Distinguished Fellow in Social Justice at Barnard College from 2013 to 2015. This event will be held on April 8 at 11 a.m. in the Woody Tanger Auditorium. It will also be livestreamed on the Brooklyn College YouTube page. It is co-sponsored by the Women’s Center, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the Department of Africana Studies, and the Department of History.
