Advocates for a Better World: the UNA and Our Youth
A special UNA forum on Zoom – May 14TH, 2022 (Saturday) 10 am – 12 noon
With a special report from the April 19 MPS/United Nations Schools of International Learning World Fair
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86742837350?pwd=SnVEYmFtbDBvbjJzRGswWmUxbHBXUT09
Sponsor: The United Nations Association of Greater Milwaukee
The World Needs the United Nations, The UN needs YOU
What the UN is doing now and how grassroots advocacy can promote its goals
Rachel Bowen Pittman
The World Needs the United Nations, The UN needs YOU
What the UN is doing now and how grass roots advocacy can promote its goals
Rachel Bowen Pittman will talk about how she, the UNA-USA, the chapters, and young members have advanced the work of the UN and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Meet our national Executive Director of the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA). Rachel leads a grassroots advocacy movement of more than 20,000 Americans in 225+ chapters who are dedicated to supporting the work of the United Nations in their communities and on Capitol Hill. She works regularly with UN and U.S. government officials.
Youth Advocacy for Social Change
Margaret Rozga
Margaret (Peggy) Rozga will talk about her experience with the youth leadership and participation in Milwaukee's 1960s open housing marches, with the middle and high school students she worked with on Arts @ Large projects, with taking young people to historic civil rights sites, and with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Peggy will also read poems about the teenagers important to those marches.
Legendary Milwaukee activist, professor and former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Peggy writes poems, plays, and essays reflecting her ongoing concern for social justice.
For more information: Steve Watrous, watrous@uwm.edu or 414.429.7567 or https://www.unamilwaukee.org/
To join by phone only: +1 312 626 6799
Meeting ID: 867 4283 7350 Passcode: 26490
More about
Rachel Bowen Pittman
UNA-USA Executive Director, Rachel Bowman Pittman, cultivates relationships with officials at the United Nations, U.S. Mission to the UN, and U.S. Department of State to align the group’s mission with its work. She oversees UNA-USA’s outreach to the U.S. Congress and Administration to advocate for full U.S. funding for the UN and strong U.S. leadership in the UN. To advance the ideas of the UN and accelerate progress towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Rachel forges partnerships with like-minded civil society organizations.
Rachel guides the UNA-USA’s strategic work, oversees the hugely successful youth membership expansion, and spearheads important advocacy initiatives to help the U.S. advance the goals of the UN. She has led the organization to taking strong stands on urgent issues such as Black Lives Matter and the war in Ukraine.
Within UNA-USA, Rachel works closely with the National Council and chapter leadership to promote youth engagement, community partnerships, volunteering, and grassroots advocacy. She leads the UNA-USA’s Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion Task Force. Rachel represents the UNA-USA at programs and conferences including the UN Civil Society Conference and the World Federation of UNAs.
Rachel has been with the UNA-USA for six years. Previously, she served on the leadership teams of several professional associations with work in China, Korea, Argentina, India, Peru, Egypt, and Mexico. Rachel holds a B.S.B.A in international business from American University and an MBA in marketing from Johns Hopkins University.
More about Margaret (Peggy) Rozga
Margaret (Peggy) Rozga has studied and written about the youth leadership and participation in Milwaukee's open housing marches and how that activism continues to inspire youth today. Those marches were organized by the NAACP Youth Council and Father James Groppi, drew national attention, and won the fight for open housing.
Her poems and essays reflect her ongoing concern for social justice issues. Her first book, 200 Nights and One Day, presents the story of Milwaukee’s open housing marches. She was a participant in those marches and has coordinated events commemorating their anniversaries. The poems she will read from that book foreground some of the teenagers important to those marches. She will also weave in details about the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Wauwatosa.
Wisconsin Poet Laureate Dr. Margaret Rozga is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Waukesha. She and Madison Poet Laureate Angie Trudell Vasquez co-edited a poetry anthology, Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems, with the wonderfully diverse voices of Black, Latinx and white poets from throughout the state.
Rozga’s current work-in-progress is Restoring Prairie, a volume of poems inspired by her 2021 term as Artist in Residence at the UWM-Waukesha Field Station.
She married civil rights leader James Groppi in 1976. They had three children, now adults, two of them living in Milwaukee.