Vednita Carter is the founder and former president of Breaking Free, a non-profit agency helping women and girls escape systems of prostitution and sexual exploitation through advocacy, direct services, housing, and education.  Founded in 1996, Breaking Free is a non-profit focusing on social justice and social change.

Every year, Breaking Free helps hundreds of women escape systems of prostitution and sexual exploitation through direct services.  The organization actively and directly serve the people who have been impacted by trafficking and prostitution through advocacy, housing, education, and immediate action. This includes ending the demand through a program called Men Breaking Free.

Breaking Free provides support to serve women of color who are disproportionately represented in the trafficked population.  Breaking Free supports partial decriminalization of prostitution, under the Nordic model.

Robert Jensen is Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He collaborates with the Ecosphere Studies program at The Land Institute in Salina, KS.

Jensen is the author of The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson: Searching for Sustainability (University Press of Kansas, 2021). His other books include The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (2017); Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully (2015); Arguing for Our Lives: A User's Guide to Constructive Dialogue (2013); All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (2001).

Jensen is co-producer of the documentary film "Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing" (Media Education Foundation, 2009), which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. An extended interview Jensen conducted with Osheroff is available online.

Jensen is associate producer of the forthcoming documentary film Prairie Prophecy: The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson.

Jensen can be reached at [email protected] and his articles can be found online at http://robertwjensen.org/. To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html. Twitter: @jensenrobertw.

Hilla Kerner has been an activist in the women's liberation movement since the mid 90's.  Her efforts are focused on male violence against women and include front line work, grassroots organizing and public education.

She has been a member of the Vancouver Rape Relief collective since 2006.  Vancouver Rape Relief Society was incorporated in 1975.  Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is a non-profit organization, a registered Canadian charity and the oldest rape crisis organization in all of Canada.

Purpose:

Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is committed to advocating for women’s equality.  Our centre works as an active force dedicated to challenge the social attitudes, laws and institutional procedures that perpetuate male violence against women and children.

To meet these goals Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter:

• Operates a 24-hour rape crisis centre and provides services for victims of rape.
• Operates a shelter for women and children trying to prevent or escape male violence.
• All services are free and confidential.
• Works to be an educational force for progressive changes in attitudes, laws, and institutional procedures, and to work for the prevention of male violence against women..
• Works with other social services groups, institutions and community groups towards the prevention of male violence against women. Develops and builds relationships and alliances with other rape crisis centres, transition houses and women’s groups to further women’s equality.
• Operates as a feminist collective, providing opportunities for women to participate in ending male violence against women.
• Works towards and garners support from communities and men in ending male violence against women.

Women's rights activists have observed November 25th as a day against gender-based violence since 1981, choosing this date to honor the Mirabal sisters, three political activists from the Dominican Republic who were brutally murdered in 1960 by order of the country’s ruler, Rafael Trujillo.

Despite the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979, of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), violence against women and girls remains a pervasive problem worldwide. The Platform of the Green Party of the United States urges that the United States Senate ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination, so that this nation might join the global community in the pursuit of the important goals set out in this document. On December 20th, 1993, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women through resolution 48/104, paving the path towards eradicating violence against women and girls worldwide. On 7 February 2000, the General Assembly adopted resolution 54/134, officially designating 25 November as the International day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and in doing so, invites governments, international organizations as well as non governmental organizations to join together and organize activities designed to raise public awareness of the issue every year on that date.

The Georgia Green Party is grateful for the opportunity to cosponsor with Los Altos Institute, of British Columbia, a virtual panel presentation and conversation on the theme:

Ending men’s violence

against women with this generation

The Georgia Green Party is an independent political party, accredited as a member of the Green Party of the United States, and organized to advance a platform of public policy reforms grounded in the Ten Key Values of the party.  Georgia residents have organized as Greens since 1989 and files paperwork with the Georgia Secretary of State in 1996 to qualify to nominate candidates to contest public elections for public office.  In 2020, besides participating in the nation-wide campaign to elect the Hawkins-Walker ticket to the white house, the Georgia party ran two candidates for the U.S. Congress, including Jimmy Cooper for Georgia's 8th Congressional District and John Fortuin for the U.S. Senate.

The Georgia Green Party holds the following ten key values in common with other Greens:

• Ecological Wisdom
• Grassroots Democracy
• Social Justice
• Peace and Non-Violence
• Decentralization
• Community Based Economics
• Feminism
• Respect for Diversity
• Personal and Global Responsibility
• Future Focus on Sustainability

Founded in September 2012, Los Altos Institute is a small non-profit institute or “think tank” based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Geographically situated at an intersection between the US and Chinese imperial spheres, Los Altos seeks to engage with both global and local issues with an eye to the dynamics of empire and its accidents at this particular place and time. Los Altos seeks to create a space that encourages and facilitates lay dialogue on major contemporary political and cultural questions, while respecting the principle of empiricism and practices of peer review. Looking away from knowledge-creation that all too often becomes elite technocratic discourse, we aim to generate and mobilize ideas that will be available to all citizens.

The Los Altos Institute has three overlapping purposes:

• to create a social and institutional space to support people without advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences participating in advanced, scholarly exchange in the humanities and social sciences;
• to gather a left-leaning intellectual and social community engaged in a broad and dynamic discussion of the project of creating a post-capitalist society that is not tied to any specific anti- or post-capitalist ideology; and
• to engage in shifting public discourse about politics, knowledge and culture in the long-term, rather than focusing on issues of the moment, except insofar as these serve to dramatize or expose deep, structural issues.

The Los Altos Institute currently has three spheres of operation:

• producing scholarly articles and delivering papers at academic conferences offering a left analysis of key issues; and
• hosting reading groups, book clubs and salons to facilitate substantive, sophisticated engagement with major issues from a theoretically-informed perspective; and
• seeding strategic interventions in electoral politics, both through established political coalitions and through new political organizations.