Kali Akuno to Receive Gandhi Peace Award

by Stanley Heller, PEP Administrator

On Saturday, May 13, Kali Akuno, co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, will be given the Gandhi Peace Award. The Gandhi Peace Award has been given out since 1960 by the Connecticut-based organization Promoting Enduring Peace (PEP). This peace, environmental and social justice organization was founded in 1952 in New Haven. Cooperation Jackson was created in Jackson, Mississippi in 2013 to foster a solidarity economy in Jackson anchored by a network of cooperatives and worker-owned, democratically self-managed enterprises.

The Gandhi Peace Award ceremony will take place in the Q House, the Dixwell Community House, 197 Dixwell Avenue in New Haven at 2 p.m. The Q House, founded in 1924, is now in a new state-of-the-art building that opened last year. The ceremony is free. There will be a musical performance by Michael Mills and bountiful refreshments. Parking for the Q House is in back of the building off of Foote Street.

Laura Schleifer, Program and Development Officer of Promoting Enduring Peace, said, “Kali Akuno and his fellow members of Cooperation Jackson are creating a model for how we might be able to transform our communities on the local level and then linking them together to create a new system that both provides for human and ecological needs, and also recognizes the interdependence between the two.”

We also admire Akuno’s writings, how he developed ideas on worker self-management and strategy on how to move the cooperative movement forward. He wrote “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi in 2017,” and this month released a book he co-edited with economist Richard Wolff, “Jackson Rising Redux.” We also admire his bold ideas on the climate crisis and his call for ecosocialism.

For more information visit PEPeace.org, email [email protected], or call 203-444-3578.