World Beyond War, with your help, is expanding our staff, our organizing, and our activism. As we start the new year, I'll be staying on as director and we'll be adding a fulltime organizer and a part-time education coordinator (both already hired), as well as many volunteers -- including our growing global coordinating committee, chaired by Leah Bolger.
We've also just launched a campaign to divest public pension funds from weapons dealers. This will be a major undertaking. We've begun a campaign in support of international justice including moving remaining nations to join the International Criminal Court, and moving that court to apply the law equally. We're also working with allies around the world on closing military bases and restoring land to its people.
Please get in touch with us to let us know your ideas for the coming year and what you'd most like to be involved in. Are you ready to help start a chapter where you live? We can help you do it.
This past year we helped advocate for the right, now won, of 911 victims' families to sue Saudi Arabia -- and by extension of other war victims to sue makers of war. We've helped push successfully for a reduction, not yet a ban, on U.S. weapons shipments to Saudi Arabia. We've helped hold off the expansion of mandatory draft registration to women in the U.S. We've helped build opposition to participation in NATO wars in Germany.
World Beyond War participated in many events in 2016 and received much feedback to the effect that we are opening people eyes to the idea of war abolition. "I think of war totally differently now," people tell us after we make our case for ending it. We continue to develop new resources available on our website for people to use in creating their own events.
A conference we held in September called "No War 2016" was a huge success in terms of the number of people reached, the feedback, and the activism that has come out of it. Our new edition of our book A Global Security System: An Alternative to War has been widely praised and used.
Our list of supporters is growing with 50,000 people signed onto the Declaration of Peace from 136 countries, and new country coordinators being added all the time, along with other volunteers getting involved. How would you like to help?
The future of war or peace remains very uncertain in the world. World Beyond War must grow if we are to successfully mobilize for peace. We can only do so with your support. With your help, we can expand our educational efforts and our organizing. We can continue adding peace to numerous multi-issue coalitions that would otherwise leave it out. We can continue nudging opponents of particular wars or weapons toward a program aimed at war abolition. We can expand the development of alternative systems of conflict resolution that are laid out in our book.
It is time to mobilize. Which is why we continue to be thankful for your support.
Donations to World Beyond War are tax-deductible in the United States and can be made on our secure website here or by check to World Beyond War and mailed to AFGJ 225 E. 26th St. #1, Tucson, AZ 85713, USA.
Peace,