About Anne Herbert
Anne was born in the Midwest, but claimed by the Bay Area. She is an award-winning author and activist, and has served as editorial staff for the Co-Evolution Quarterly and the Whole Earth Review. She is the author of Compassion 101 and the much-loved blog: Peace and Love and Noticing the Details, and co-author with Paloma Pavel of “Handy Tips on How to Behave at the Death of the World.” She is well known for the oft-quoted phrase, “Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.”
About M. Paloma Pavel
Paloma is an educator and international consultant for healthy, just, and resilient metropolitan communities. She is President of Earth House Center, co-founder of the Breakthrough Communities Project, and former Director of Strategic Communications for the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative at the Ford Foundation. Her most recent publication is Breakthrough Communities: Sustainability and Justice in the Next American Metropolis (MIT Press).
Paloma’s academic background includes graduate study at Harvard University and the London School of Economics. Her graduate activities and her subsequent life’s work have been deeply inspired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu: She was organizer for anti-Apartheid divestment on Harvard’s campus; and at the London School of Economics she conducted research on South African Economics in the pre- and post-Apartheid eras. Paloma went on to assist in Truth and Reconciliation processes in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia.
Paloma was the first North American faculty to circle the globe on the Peace Boat, offering support and technical assistance in environmental and humanitarian hotspots around the world. She has taught and trained community resilience in Costa Rica and South America, and participated and presented at the UN Conference on sustainable development in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has presented internationally including the 50th anniversary of the bomb in Hiroshima. Paloma is currently visiting faculty at UC Davis’ Center for Regional Change.
About Breakthrough Communities
Breakthrough Communities currently conducts local, national and international projects in a variety of print and visual media. We work with a series of environmental sustainability groups in the Pacific Rim, including Cambodia and Japan, and in the US supporting organizations working on issues of health, justice, education, legal services and metropolitan development.
Breakthrough Communities was co-founded with visionary African American community leader Carl Anthony. Anthony is an architect, author and urban / suburban / regional design strategist, and co-founder of the Breakthrough Communities Project. He has served as Acting Director of the Community and Resource Development Unit at the Ford Foundation, responsible for the Foundation’s worldwide programs in fields of Environment and Development, and Community Development. His forthcoming book, the Earth, The City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race bridges urban communities of color with environmental initiatives while reviving vital environmental cultural traditions.
Our 10 year project researching and cultivating the metropolitan regional equity movement in the US: Breakthrough Communities: Sustainability and Justice in the Next American Metropolis, was published in 2009 by MIT Press.
About Mayumi Oda
Known to many as the ‘Matisse of Japan’, Mayumi Oda has done extensive work with female goddess imagery. Born to a Buddhist family in Japan in 1941, Mayumi studied fine art and traditional Japanese fabric dyeing. In 1966, she graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts. Mayumi’s unique apprenticeship dyeing fabric for kimonos influences the color and composition of all of her works.
About Desmond Tutu
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu, a Nobel Peace Laureate, is one of the greatest living moral icons of our time who was a key role player in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. He was also the first black South African Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa and primate of the Anglican Church of South Africa.
In 1995 President Nelson Mandela appointed the Archbishop Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body set up to probe gross human rights violations that occurred under apartheid. In recent years Tutu has turned his attention to a different cause: the campaign against HIV/AIDS. The Archbishop has made appearances around the globe to help raise awareness of the disease and its tragic consequences in human lives and suffering.
About New Village Press.
New Village books serve the interdependent fields of social justice, participatory planning, community building, ecology, and community-based arts. The Press crosses boundaries between professional, academic and informal education with books that engage practitioners and community activists working together to rebuild neighborhoods. Most significantly, our books go beyond abstract policy and present the human story, the motivations that stir the soul to make a certain part of the world a better place to live.
Through illustrated stories, case studies, essays, interviews, educational tools, and guides, New Village publications celebrate the ingenuity and compassion of those people rebuilding society. We cover the creativity of community building, focusing on what works and what is culturally exciting. Our press is centered in the belief that inspiring alternatives are more useful than criticism, although we don’t shy away from reporting the nitty-gritty challenges that social and environmental activists face.