Press Release

From: Peace House, Ashland

Contact: Elizabeth V. Hallett, Board Chair

541 482-9625 (Peace House)

Subject: Peace House Annual Peacemaker Awards

Peace House is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2016 Peacemaker Awards, to be presented at our annual awards dinner November 6, 2016 at six pm in the Inn at the Commons, Medford.

The nationally recognized Peacemaker Award goes to Fr. Roy Bourgeois, founder of the School of the Americas Watch in Ft. Benning, GA. Local recipients include:

Grandmother Agnes Baker Pilgrim

The Rogue Valley Peace Choir

Dr. Alan Bates, former senator in the Oregon State Legislature, a Posthumous Award

Peter Buckley, Oregon State Congressional Representative, District 5

Awardees are chosen for their contributions to the quality of life they have brought to bear on our local, state, national and international communities as activists for peaceful and creative change. Awardees are recognized for their abilities to use the values of nonviolence and harmony in the interest of peace, by applying open dialog, an ability to work across varying cultural contexts, spiritual discipline, and, in some cases, nonviolent protest or civil disobedience in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Father Roy Bourgeois, the Peace House nationally recognized awardee and keynote speaker at the Awards Dinner is the leader of the campaign to end U.S. Military support for repressive governments in Central America. He first learned of the deadly nexus as a missionary priest in Bolivia, then under a dictatorial regime that had him arrested and expelled. In 1983, the deadly repression in El Salvador prompted Fr. Bourgeois to commit civil disobedience at Ft. Benning, Georgia, where its military were being trained in counter-insurgency. Following imprisonment, he founded SOA Watch. For his work, he received the 1994 Gandhi Peace Award, the 2005 Thomas Merton Award, and, in 2010 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

More information is available on-line at www.peacehouse.net or by calling

Peace House at 541-488-9625.