As the story of murdered United Nations armed group expert Michael J. Sharp continues to spread around the world, the endowed scholarship set up in his name by friends and family to support Congolese peacebuilders at CJP grows as well. Sharp was a 2005 graduate of 91����Ƶ.

David Nyiringabo, the first recipient of the scholarship, enters his second year of graduate studies in conflict transformation at CJP this fall.

One reason Sharp’s legacy continues to grow is a March 2019 trek up Kilimanjaro in Tanzania that helped to raise more than $136,000 and garnered international publicity. Climbing the mountain was always something the United Nations armed group expert had planned to do, but his work kept him from the goal. At the summit, MJ’s father John scattered his son’s ashes.

The 8-day effort earned the attention of former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki R. Haley and Nobel laureates Leymah Gbowee MA ’07 and Dr. Denis Mukwege, each of whom sent video greetings and encouragement to the hikers as they made the ascent. Actress and activist Jane Fonda also posted a message of support on her blog.

In the months following, more donors have been inspired by his story to help Congolese peacebuilders. Recent donors include a group of Amish youth, a former Central Intelligence Agency official who had worked in the region, and two couples who matched each other’s gifts.

Donate to the M.J. Sharp Scholarship: Visit emu.edu/dream-hike

In response to requests received over many years, this summer the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding is launching a specifically tailored to women who are oriented toward social change and who wish to develop their abilities to lead the cause of peace and justice in their regions of the world.

The women in this program will be scholarship-supported by donations and grants and will be grouped in cohorts with other women in their geographical area. The cohorts will move through the two-year program as a group, covering similar material and acquiring complementary skills while they together develop ways to maximize their impact on their home region.

This inaugural year the program will focus on women in three regions: Liberia, Somalia, and two South Pacific Island nations (Fiji and the Solomon Islands). The initiative is enthusiastically backed by Nobel Laureate . Her Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa secured funding from USAID for four women from Liberia to participate.

Like Gbowee herself, most of the women in the Women’s Peace Leadership Program will be drawn from civil society organizations. They have proven themselves to be eager, intelligent change-agents, but they realize they need a better theoretical foundation for their work, as well as more tools for analysis, strategic planning, monitoring and evaluation, and organizational leadership. And they need each other! All cohorts will be divided into small sub-groups that will be assigned their own experienced mentor for the duration of the program. Some of the work will take place in the classroom, but much will occur in the field, in the women’s home regions.

We are very excited about the future possibilities for these cohorts, viewing them as a form of “critical yeast” to help their societies rise from conflict and from unequal treatment of women.

Though the women’s leadership program is new, women graduates of CJP have been playing leadership roles around the world for more than a decade, as will be evident from the pages of this issue of Peacebuilder. The new program is simply building on the work already being done to reduce violence against women and children and to create a more just, peaceful society for everyone.

One week after Leymah Gbowee was named a winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, she returned to 91����Ƶ over the weekend of October 14-16 to be honored as 91����Ƶ’s 2011 Alumna of the Year.

During that weekend Gboweee, a 2007 graduate of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), spoke frankly about her fear of losing touch with the suffering women she desperately wants to serve, as she tries to handle the overwhelming attention emanating from the Nobel Peace Prize.

She told students, staff, faculty and alumni gathered in Lehman Auditorium that she prays every morning and every night to do God’s work with humility, because that is how she will do the most good for the most people.

Since that weekend Gbowee has been a keynote speaker at major international gatherings, such as a TED conference in March 2012. The had been viewed nearly 200,000 times as of April 19, 2012.

In her TED talk, Gbowee focused on her desire to educate and otherwise empower girls and women. This proved to be a curtain-raiser for her announcing in early April the launching of a new non-profit organization, the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa.

At 91����Ƶ’s Homecoming and at TED, Gbowee spoke of being a low-earning, single mother in the late 1990s and of having no choice but to ignore appeals to personally care for bright young girls who hungered for education but were abused instead. She spoke of a girl raped by her grandfather for six years and of villages where nearly every girl was exploited sexually.

She referred to Liberia’s teen pregnancy rate of three out of every 10 girls. “I was at that place and somehow I am at this place, and I don’t want to be the only person at this place. I am looking for ways for other girls to be with me.”

She spoke of traveling 13 to 15 hours per day on dirt roads throughout Liberia to hold meetings with groups of girls. “We go into rural communities, and all we do — like has been done in this room [at TED] — is create the space. When these girls sit … you unlock great leaders.”

She spoke about seeing 50 girls in one village become energized to the point of launching a voters’ registration campaign, with the slogan “even pretty girls vote,” which led to the defeat of an incumbent who had disparaged Liberia’s national legislation against rape.

“I am troubled when I see there’s no hope [among village girls], but I’m not pessimistic because I know it doesn’t take a lot to get them charged up.”

With USAID funding, the Gbowee Foundation is providing scholarships to four women to be part of the Women’s Peace Leadership Program, beginning at the 2012 Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI).

The Gbowee Foundation has also secured two full scholarships for Liberian women to Vassar College and two one-year scholarships for graduate study at the University of Indianapolis. In Liberia, the foundation is funding scholarships for four young Liberian women to study at the Mother Patern College, Cuttington University and the University of Liberia.

Gbowee shares the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize with a fellow Liberian, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and women’s rights activist .

Gbowee’s honor was in recognition of her leadership of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, which brought together Christian and Muslim women in a nonviolent movement that had a key role in ending Liberia’s 14 years of civil war in 2003. The movement is chronicled in her memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers, and in the award-winning documentary, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.”

Gbowee’s journey from being a destitute and depressed mother of four to being an assertive campaigner for peace began in the late 1990s when she received training in trauma healing and reconciliation from Lutheran church workers in Liberia during that country’s civil war. These workers had been trained by Barry Hart, a Mennonite peace worker in Liberia in the early 1990s and now a professor at CJP.

Encouraged by close colleagues in West Africa who had been educated at CJP, Gbowee first came to CJP in 2004 for SPI and returned in 2005 for a session of Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR). In 2006-07, she was in residence at 91����Ƶ as she finished her master’s degree in conflict transformation.

In her memoir, Gbowee credits another Liberian, Sam Gbaydee Doe, who earned a master’s degree from CJP in 1998 – along with CJP professors Hizkias Assefa, John Paul Lederach, and Howard Zehr – with particularly influencing her journey to peacebuilding.

“91����Ƶ opened my eyes that I was not the only crazy person in the world… It brought in a perspective of global conflict,” said Gbowee. Meeting fellow students of peacebuilding from around the world “put a face to those conflicts.” She added, “It has made the world a village for me.” Now when she hears about oppression and violence in other regions, she asks herself, “How I can help and how I can get helped by some of my other colleagues in this area?”

Gbowee co-founded Women, Peace and Security Network (WIPSEN) in the spring of 2006, with a fellow SPI alumna, Thelma Ekiyor, and a third woman, Ecoma Alaga, who previously worked for an organization founded by two CJP alumni, the West African Network for Peacebuilding. Due to the growing demands on her time, Gbowee has announced that she will relinquish her position as executive director of WIPSEN in December 2012.

Gbowee is now the mother of six. Her first-born son, Joshua Mensah, is a rising junior at 91����Ƶ.

(Photos by Jon Styer.)

On Friday of last week, I had the most fun day at work ever. I had the fortune of being the web & social media nerd for the alma mater of a Nobel Peace Prize winner! Liberian nonviolent peace activist, Leymah Gbowee, was one of three women to win the . She is also a  of 91����Ƶ’s  (CJP), where I have been studying and working for the past three years. Leymah has been back on campus a time or two since I arrived in 2008, and I even got to hang around behind the camera while one of my teacher-colleagues, Paulette Moore, filmed  with Leymah about her time at 91����Ƶ. She is truly an amazing person and commands a powerful presence when you’re around her.

In my 10+ years as a professional web nerd, I’ve never been involved in anything that’s “gone viral,” until Friday. We weren’t caught completely off-guard at CJP, as we’d been hearing rumors of Leymah’s being considered for the prize for months. But that still didn’t prepare for me for riding the social media tidal wave on Friday morning, when the winners were announced. It was the quickest 5.5 hours of my professional life, keeping track of the activity on Facebook and Twitter, watching with amazement when at one point on Friday morning, “Leymah Gbowee” was one of the top-trending phrases in the U.S. on Twitter. When the digital dust settled by Monday morning and I checked stats, I saw that the 91����Ƶ website as a whole doubled its traffic on Friday alone, not to mention the thousands of “likes” on the 91����Ƶ News article which .

Making this all the more exciting for folks at 91����Ƶ is the fact that Leymah is coming to campus this weekend – which is homecoming – where among other things she will be named 91����Ƶ’s Alumnus of the Year. Here are a few links which document the online “Leymah mania” which has taken hold at 91����Ƶ:

• New today: 
• From Friday: 
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Brian Gumm is Web & Information Systems Coordinator for 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). A licensed minister in the Church of the Brethren, he is also in his final year of graduate studies at 91����Ƶ, finishing an MA in Conflict Transformation from CJP and an Mdiv from Eastern Mennonite Seminary. He blogs on theological peacebuilding at , where this post originally appeared.

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Fourteen years ago, Sam Gbaydee Doe came to CTP from his native land of Liberia, where about 10% of the population had died, or would die, in one of Africa’s bloodiest civil wars, from 1989 to 1996, followed by a shorter war, from 1999 to 2003.

Liberian warlords used child soldiers to commit atrocities – rape and murder people of all ages and genders, including members of the children’s own families. Liberia’s civil war claimed lives from nearly every Liberian family, displaced most from their homes, and reduced the country’s economy to rubble. The strife also spread to Liberia’s neighbors, contributing to the destabilization of all of West Africa.

Sam needed a place to recover personally from the trauma he had experienced, as well as a place to explore ways to prevent such barbarity from occurring again. Encouraged by Barry Hart (a future CJP professor) – whom Sam met while both were doing conflict transformation and trauma awareness workshops in Liberia – and financially assisted by the Mennonite Board of Missions, Sam came to 91����Ƶ in May of 1996.

In October 1998, at the end of his MA studies, Sam teamed up with a later graduate of CTP, Emmanuel Bombande (MA ’02) to launch the West African Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP). Sam became its first executive director.

“I left 91����Ƶ fired up to translate a dream into a reality,” Sam said in a September 2010 interview. “I dreamed of a regional movement of civil society that would collaborate with regional intergovernmental bodies to restore not just stability in Africa but democratic freedom and prosperity. I dreamed of establishing an early-warning system throughout civil society that would head off violent conflict. Those dreams became reality in just five years. The profound thing was the speed at which ordinary people mobilized for peace.”

As an example, WANEP provided support to a Liberian social worker Leymah Gbowee, who organized the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. This grassroots women’s organization was instrumental in ending Liberia’s war in 2003 and facilitating the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president of an African nation. (Leymah is a 2007 MA grad.)

With seed money of $90,000 from the Winston Foundation, WANEP grew in two years from grouping 13 organizational representatives from six countries to 300 member groups from 14 countries. By 2000, WANEP’s annual budget was $1.2 million. By 2004, its budget had doubled. Sam incredulously asks himself: “How did we get from no organization in 1998 to being the largest peacebuilding organization in Africa in 2004, with 22 staff members [at its headquarters in Accra, Ghana] and offices in 14 other countries?” WANEP now runs its own version of SPI, the West African Peacebuilding Institute.

Few people or organizations make headline news for civil wars prevented, numbers of child soldiers quietly rehabilitated and reintegrated into society, or elections held without major violence. Yet WANEP and its partner organizations deserve much credit for their contributions to the growing stability of the majority of the countries in West Africa.

In 2004 Sam began working toward a doctorate in peace studies at the University of Bradford in England. The next year, he went to work for the United Nations as a consultant to its Liberia Mission, followed by a one-year stint with the UN Development Programme Pacific Regional Office in Fiji.

Since 2007 Sam has worked for the UN in Sri Lanka. He completed his doctorate in the spring of 2010. “After my intense work in West Africa, I felt I needed another opportunity to retreat, reflect, and reengage,” he explains.

His doctorate dissertation was on “indigenizing post-war state reconstruction,” a topic that links building peace to building a stable, democratic state. As an advisor and analyst in a country emerging from 30 years of civil war, Sam oversees trainings on conflict-sensitive development, dialogue and reconciliation, and other topics in Sri Lanka. Sam is the 2002 recipient of 91����Ƶ’s annual Distinguished Service Award.

Leymah Gbowee, , recently received two major awards for her peace work in Africa. In October 2007, she received the annual Blue Ribbon for Peace Award from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In January 2008, Gbowee was named “Leader for the 21st Century,” an annual award conferred by Women’s eNews based in New York City. “Leymah Gbowee was selected for her work of organizing women in Africa to work toward peace and ending regional conflicts, including the civil war in her native country of Liberia,” says Jennifer Thurston, associate editor of Women’s eNews.

Gbowee is the executive director of the , which she helped found in May 2006. Based in Ghana, the network seeks to ensure that women’s concerns are integral to peace and security initiatives in African nations.

Five years ago in Liberia, Gbowee decided to rouse women out of their despair over 14 years of warfare in which family members were “maimed, raped, abused, misused and killed.” Gbowee led Liberian women to refuse to be further manipulated by politicians and warlords and to declare “our children will never again be drugged up and used as sex slaves and killing machines.”

Gbowee organized hundreds of women to carry out 26 non-violent (but dangerous to themselves) protest actions between April and October 2003. Gbowee and her networks also mobilized women across Liberia in the fall of 2005 to help elect Harvard-trained Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as the first female president of an African nation. Liberia is now at peace, slowly rehabilitating itself.