Action Team Leader Guidelines & Responsibilities
Action Team Leadership will call on you to be your best – to be available, accountable, and devoted. Please read […]
Entries by Matthew
Start an ACTION TEAM in your Community!
Have you raised your voice for peace, but yearned to be part of a more unified, powerful chorus? Organize a Peace Alliance or Student Peace Alliance Action Team in your community! At a time of great challenge and opportunity around the planet, it’s time for a peacebuilding constituency to build political will that will help take our communities, nation and world to a new level of peace.
Syria: Some Deeper Perspective
As the President builds up his case for military strikes on Syria, here are a few informative articles you may want to read, looking at the pitfalls of such an action — and more peaceful alternatives. Read on for links…
High Level Forum on The Culture of Peace
This day long event is an opportunity for UN member states, UN system entities, and civil society, all of whom are interested in the ways and means to promote the Culture of Peace. A special focus will be on the implementation of the UN Programme of Action on the Culture of Peace, adopted, unanimously, by the UN General Assembly on 13 September 1999, 14 years ago.
My emotional “reality check” moment this morning… by Matthew Albracht
This morning I had an emotional “gut punch” reality check moment that really got to me — and I felt had to write about it. I was listening to a local-based story on NPR’s Morning Edition. The segment was about the low graduation rate for at-risk African American males in hard hit parts of the San Francisco Bay Area (my home). About halfway through the story, the reporter rather casually shared that the mentors and students in one school had set up an “altar in their classroom” to honor all their friends who’d been murdered. That was the first heart-wrenching moment. Then the story ended with a statement that really got to me. The reporter shared that in many of these schools the death rate, from homicide, for African American male teenagers was higher than the graduation rate. Here is what I think we need to do…
Growing political recognition that mass incarceration carries tremendous social and economic costs
Increasingly, politicians, “both liberal and conservative”, are realizing that mass incarceration has tremendous costs, both monetary and social. Our communities suffer, our children suffer, our state budgets suffer, and we still aren’t safer. We need to focus our attention on healing our communities. Many programs have been shown to proactively prevent crime and dramatically reduce justice system costs.