Leading advocates for Sudanese women to speak at March 22 SoJust Lecture Series event
Gloria White-Hammond
Gloria White-Hammond, chairwoman of the Save Darfur Coalition’s “Million Voices for Darfur Campaign,” will be joined by colleagues and women from the Sudanese diaspora Monday, March 22, for a talk about the work of My Sister’s Keeper, a faith-inspired multiracial collective co-founded by White-Hammond that provides humanitarian assistance to communities of women globally, with a focus on Sudan.
The presentation, the latest of the Social Justice Lecture Series, is entitled “Building Pathways to Peace in Sudan: Why We Can’t Wait.” It will be held in room G2 of The Heller School for Social Policy and Management from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Light supper will be provided.
The discussion will focus on the development work My Sister’s Keeper does in southern Sudan, and how this ties in with the group’s engagement with women in the Sudanese diaspora.
This work is especially important now, as a referendum has been set for 2011 on independence for oil-rich southern Sudan. White-Hammond also will discuss how she transformed a career as a physician and her commitment to social justice into My Sister's Keeper.
White-Hammond is co-founder and co-pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston, and founding co-chair of the Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur. She is a pediatrician, serving at the South End Community Health Center since 1981.
White-Hammond has a long history of involvement in community service. She is the founder of the church-based creative writing/mentoring ministry called “Do The Write Thing” for high-risk black adolescent females. The project, which began in 1994 with four girls, now serves over 550 young women through small groups in two Boston public schools, two juvenile detention facilities in Boston, and on-site at Bethel AME Church. In 2003, she became co-convener of the Red Tent Group, which brings together Christian and Jewish women for small group Torah/Bible study.
White-Hammond has worked as a medical missionary in several African countries including Botswana, Cote D’Ivoire and South Africa. Since 2001 she has made seven trips into war-torn southern Sudan, where she has been involved in obtaining the freedom of 10,000 women and children who were enslaved during the two-decade-long civil war there.
My Sister's Keeper, which was founded in 2002, operates under the auspices of Bethel AME Church. Organizers say that religious faith is neither a prerequisite nor a mandatory feature of the organization’s programs, but that faith “is the bedrock upon which the work was formed, is sustained, and through which community transformation through sisterhood becomes possible.”
For more information, visit the Social Justice Leadership Series Web page or contact Jessica Berns. The lecture series is cosponsored by the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life and the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism.
