Cora Weiss
Cora Weiss has spent her life in the movements for human rights, civil rights, women’s equality and peace. She is the UN Representative of the International Peace Bureau (Nobel Peace laureate 1910), which she led as President, 2000-2006; she was a NYC public school volunteer, is among the founders of the Global Campaign for Peace Education, and was a civil society drafter of what became UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security unanimously adopted in 2000. She is an Honorary Patron of the Committee on Teaching About the UN, and an International Honorary Member of Delta Kappa Gamma, the Society of Key Women Educators.
Weiss has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000, 2001 and together with her husband Peter they were nominated in 2012. Her dedication to education includes being the Executive Director of the African American Students Foundation (1959-63) which ran the Airlift for students from East Africa to the US for education to prepare for becoming nation builders in the newly independent countries of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and more. Wangari Maathai, who became the first African woman Nobel Peace laureate, was among the Airlift students. The AASF also supported Barack Obama Sr., while a student at Hawaii University. She was a leader of the Vietnam anti-war movement and of Women Strike for Peace.
She was co founder and Director of The Riverside Church Disarmament Program; Non governmental representative to the World Conferences on Women, Nairobi, 1985 and Beijing 1995. In the 1970’s she had her own radio program, Cora Weiss Comments- a Microphone for Women
In 1996 she became a founder and President of the Hague Appeal for Peace which developed the Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st Century UN ref A/54/98 and brought 10,000 people together from over 100 countries on the centennial of the world’s first peace congress. For many years she chaired the Board of Directors of the DCTV, Downtown Community Television, which trains young people in videography, mentors them for college and helps them get jobs in the industry.
She received the Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Adelphi University in 2015