Youth and young Iraq Vets are working together for peace. It is indeed an exciting and timely alliance that needs to be strengthened and supported. To this end, smartMeme’s youth program, STORY (Strategy, Training, and Organizing Resources for Youth), is convening a gathering this July at the historic Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee to bring young Iraq Veterans and youth anti-war leaders together to strategize about ending this war.
Join Doyle Canning and Lovella Calica at the White Dog café in Philadelphia for a report back on the findings of this exciting Collaborative, to learn the story about STORY, and hear the insights coming from this next generation of peace movement visionaries.
The STORY Collaborative to End the War in Iraq is a partnership of the War Resisters League, the Student Farmworker Alliance, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and the smartMeme STORY program:
Doyle Canning is an educator, collaborator, and architect of story-based strategies for social change. She co-founded smartMeme’s STORY program (Strategy, Training and Organizing Resources for Youth) and works to build a culture of strategy in youth-based movements for peace, justice, and ecological sanity. Doyle works as communications coach, trainer, and facilitator with youth-based activist networks across the country. She believes in the infectious power of courageous imagination and grassroots organizing. She recently published an essay in Letters from Young Activists (Nation Books, 2005). Doyle is 4th generation Irish-American, and lives in Vermont.
Lovella Calica organizes with Iraq Veterans Against the War from a place of love and hope for a more beautiful world. She is a member of the smartMeme STORY Board, and a core organizer of the Collaborative. Lovella also works with the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (NYSPC), and the National Network Opposing Militarization of Youth (NNOMY). She believes that we all have more potential and worth that we give ourselves credit for and she challenges everyone to push themselves for what they believe in. She loves long skirts, poetry, new (and old) friends, the Philippines, leaves and bright colors.
