Members: Please check your email from October 6th to access discount codes that enable you to receive a reduced membership registration price and/or charge your registration to your membership account. If you have any questions please contact Pat Fitzgerald at pfitzgerald@democraticwoman.org.

On the Radar: See our events scheduled for next month and beyond. Details and registration will follow soon.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Thursday, July 29
Evening Speaker Reception
Alyse Nelson, President Vital Voices

Alyse Nelson, President, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Vital Voices Global Partnership, has worked for the organization for twelve years, serving as Vice President and Senior Director of Programs before assuming her current role. She has worked with women leaders to develop training programs and international forums in over 120 countries and has interviewed more than 200 international leaders. Prior to Ms. Nelson’s work with VVGP, she served as Deputy Director of the Vital Voices Global Democracy Initiative at the U.S. Department of State. Ms. Nelson helped design, coordinate, and implement Vital Voices conferences, projects and initiatives throughout the world. She worked with the President’s Interagency Council on Women at the White House and U.S. Department of State from July 1996 to July 2000. She attended to UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in 1995 and has served as an advisor to the US Delegation to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. She completed her graduate degree work at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and she is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She serves as a Board Member of Running Start, which helps young women and girls in the United States get involved in politics and their communities. In 2006, she was named one of “Ten Women to Watch” by the Washingtonian Magazine and in 2007; she was honored by Emerson College with the Distinguished Leader Award.

The nonprofit Vital Voices Global Partnership grew out of the U.S. government's successful Vital Voices Democracy Initiative. The Vital Voices Democracy Initiative was established in 1997 by then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright after the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing to promote the advancement of women as a U.S. foreign policy goal.

Under the leadership of the Vital Voices Democracy Initiative, the U.S. government, in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nordic Council of Ministers, the European Union and other governments coordinated Vital Voices conferences throughout the world, bringing together thousands of emerging women leaders from over 80 countries.

Time: Bar service and Hors d’ oeuvres 6:00 p.m. Presentation and Q & A 7:00 P.M. – 8:00 P.M.
Price: Members $18, Nonmembers $23

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Join your WNDC friends on an EF-sponsored foray to Staunton, VA!

Join your WNDC friends on an EF-sponsored foray to Staunton, VA over the Halloween weekend, Oct 29-31! Tour Woodrow Wilson's birthplace and Presidential library, and spend an autumn weekend in this charming, historic town in the Shenandoah Valley.

Itinerary
The Augusta County Historical Society has put together a wonderful three day, two night itinerary for us. We will stay in the historic and beautifully restored Stonewall Jackson Hotel, a downtown Staunton landmark. Included in the trip's cost will be two breakfasts, three lunches, and one special dinner. One dinner will be on your own, during time left free for exploring Staunton's Wharf and Beverley Street shops and galleries, including Sunspots for a glimpse of glassmaking.

Travelers will have the option to attend a performance of Othello Saturday evening at the Blackfriars Playhouse, an authentic recreationi of Shakespeare's indoor theater, using its original staging. Tickets for this play are not included in the tour price.

In addition to the Wilson birthplace tour, we will enjoy a trolley tour of Staunton, with time to admire the beautiful Tiffany windows at Trinity Church and a possible walk through Staunton's Victorian Cemetery, Thornrose. We will visit the R. R. Smith Center for Art and History to learn more about
historic Staunton and August County. Finally, as we depart Staunton, we will have a guided tour (by tram) of the Frontier Culture Museum, with homes built by pioneer immigrants from England, Ireland, and Germany and a replica of a West African farm from the 1700's, depicting the life left behind by many of the slaves who were brought to the United States.

Cost
We are still working out costs. The hang-up concerns the cost of transport to and from Staunton, and we are considering using carpools instead of a bus for the three hour trip, because buses are surprisingly expensive to rent. Depending upon a bus will not only add substantially to the cost of
the trip, but would bring some insecurity about whether we can secure enough participants to bear that expense. I will issue an e-mail blast with the final price as soon as possible, but we are hoping to keep the costs under $700 in a double room, $800 for a single room.

What's Next:
Now that you know the likely date and potential cost of the trip, please call or write Judy Olmer, 301 320 4237, olmerj@aol.com with declarations of serious interest (not commitments, but practical interest. Please do so even if you indicated earlier that you'd be generally interested in this or another trip. Although I don't yet require firm reservations or down payments, I do need to get an idea soonest about whether there is sufficient interest to continue to plan the trip. We need at least 12 and no more than about 24 to make this work.

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Tuesday, October 12
Christina Lamb
“The Ultimate War Correspondent”

Christina Lamb, the U.S. editor of the Sunday Times (London) comes to talk to us about juggling her roles as a war correspondent and a working mother. In 2006 she narrowly escaped with her life from a Taliban ambush of British troops in Helmand and in October 2007 she was on Benazir Bhutto’s bus when it was bombed. She returned repeatedly to Zimbabwe, making 15 undercover trips since the murder of the first white farmer in 2000, remaining secretly in the country even after being declared an “enemy of the state” by the Mugabe regime for her expose of rape camps of teenage girls.

Now based in Washington, after 22 years of roving the world's hotspots, Christina is Britain’s leading female war correspondent. She has won numerous awards: the Young Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards for her coverage of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1988 and has been named Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times for reporting on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. Judges described her as “the ultimate foreign correspondent”.

She was last year’s recipient of the Prix Bayeux, Europe’s most prestigious award for war correspondents and chosen by Britain’s top-selling women’s magazine Grazia as one of its Icons of the Decade.

She spent a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She is the author of the best-selling book “The Africa House” as well as “House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe”; “Waiting For Allah: Pakistan’s Struggle for Democracy”; and “The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan,” which was runner-up for Best Nonfiction book in the Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Awards. Her most recent book is “Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands,” a collection of her reportage.

She is a regular commentator on Sky and BBC TV and radio and has lectured all over the world from the Royal Geographical Society and Imperial War Museum in London and the Edinburgh Festival to NATO summits and the National Library in Wellington, New Zealand. She was featured in Andy McNab’s series Ambush and Oliver North’s War Stories and in the new movie Bhutto.

A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Lamb received a degree in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University. She is on the board of Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) and a patron of the charities Afghan Connection and Hope for Children. She is married with a young son.

Time: Bar opens at 11:30 a.m. Lunch 12:15 p.m., Presentation and Q & A 1:00 P.M. – 2:00 P.M.
Price: Members $25, Non-Members $30, Lecture Only (no lunch) $10

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On the Radar (More details coming soon)