Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Dec 2, 2006 - Skills Build 8 Speakers

Workshops Facilitators:
Trevor Balance, Educator and Textbook Developer, Josai International University, Chiba.
Trevor belongs to the department of International Exchange where he teaches courses on NGO activism and the NGO-business relationship. He is also a member of the university's NGO-NPO Support Center, which aims to both support local NGOs and provide opportunities for students to become more fully involved with them. He has been a member of Amnesty International for most of his life, involved in letter writing campaigns and event organizing, as well as, during his time in Japan, doing voluntary work for JUCEE, The Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA), Bridge Asia Japan (BAJ), and The Asia Foundation. Trevor has a Masters in TESOL and is currently working on a MA in NGOs and Sustainable Development. He is the author of "It's Your World...Get Involved: Reading and Talking About NGOs". Trevor spends some of his free time in Ho Chi Minh City at a school for blind Vietnamese where he helps students practice their English, joins them in their music making and, (while mangling the Vietnamese language), marvels at the students' enthusiasm for everything in life.

Under the Skin: Bringing Human Rights Awareness into the Classroom

In this workshop we will look at ways we, as activists interested in education, can raise the understanding of human rights among our students. Through a variety of stimulating activities the workshop will show that human rights issues can be introduced simply and effectively into most classroom situations. At the close of the workshop, participants will take away several lesson plans made during the session that they will be ready to try out at the next opportunity!

Sarajean Rossitto,
Nonprofit NGO Program and Organization Development Consultant
An activist committed to progressive social change, Sarajean is currently a Tokyo-based NGO and nonprofit consultant. Her current projects focus on three areas: Skills development (doing courses and trainings for JICA, Temple University Japan, The Japan Foundation, The Japan Foundation for AIDS Prevention) and linking organizations (the Asia Foundation CSR seminar series, Morgan Stanley Community programming development). She is the Tokyo representative for a number of US-Japan nonprofit projects and spent close to 4 years coordinating bilateral exchange of community-based nonprofit professionals between the US and Japan for Japan-US Community Exchange (JUCEE). In 2007, Sarajean aims to do more working connecting international corporations to local Japanese nonprofit NGOs and developing more skills training modules in both English and Japanese, while also doing more writing on the nonprofit NGO sector and advocacy in Japan. She founded the PSC in spring 2005 with the aim of getting more individuals involved locally to affect change from the grassroots up.

Creating Effective Letter writing campaigns
In this workshop we will discuss the basics of letter writing campaign development and then go through the development process in a step-by-step manner. Participants will have time to develop a letter-writing plan, after we review some good practices and common mistakes.

Panel Discussion Speakers:
Nozomi Bando, The International Movement Against all forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) http://www.imadr.org/
Nozomi is a Program Officer at The International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR). She joined IMADR originally as a volunteer in 2000 and participated in UN conferences related to human rights and racial discrimination later as an IMADR intern. She started working with IMADR as an administrative assistant in 2002. Nozomi is originally from Wakayama and graduated from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

The International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) is an international non-profit, non-governmental human rights organization devoted to eliminating discrimination and racism, forging international solidarity among discriminated minorities and advancing the inter- national human rights system. Founded in 1988 by one of Japan's largest minorities, the Buraku people, IMADR has grown to be a global network of concerned individuals and minority groups with regional committees and partners in Asia, Europe, North America and Latin America. IMADR's International Secretariat is based in Japan and maintains a UN liaison office in Geneva. IMADR is in consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

Nozomi (IMADR) will focus on Buraku discrimination and the Sayama Case as one of the cases of racial discrimination in Japan, exploring prospects of what both domestic and international solidarity can bring to the movement.
About The Sayama Case
On May 23, 1963, Kazuo Ishikawa, a man of Buraku origin from the town of Sayama, north of Tokyo, was convicted and sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit.
The sentence was later commuted to life with hard labor, and confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1977. After 32 years in prison, Ishikawa was released on probation in 1994. Since his conviction, three appeals for retrial have been submitted in an effort to clear his name. The latest, filed on May 23, 2006, offers a rich body of new evidence supporting Ishikawa’s innocence. His defenders remain optimistic that, this time, the courts will deliver Ishikawa a fair and just trial.


Chris Pitts, Amnesty International Japan http://www.aig78.org/,
http://www.amnesty.or.jp/

Chris is a volunteer and member of Amnesty International Japan (AIJ) working full-time job as an English "professor" at a women's junior college. He has been organiser of Group 78, Tokyo's English-speaking Amnesty group, for about ten years. Chris joined AIJ as a way of being active in Japan without needing to speak or read Japanese. He found that his previous experience of involvement in trade union work and single-issue campaigns (e.g. against British military action in Ireland, cruise missiles, the Malvinas War) was relevant and transferable to building an active and diverse AIJ group.

Amnesty International is a worldwide campaigning movement that works to promote internationally recognized human rights. Amnesty International's vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards. Our mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of our work to promote all human rights. Amnesty International has more than a million members and supporters in over 140 countries and territories.

Amnesty International's nerve centre is the International Secretariat in London, with more than 350 staff members and over 100 volunteers from more than 50 countries around the world. The Japanese section of AI was established in 1971, and as of 2005 had more than 6,500 members in about 110 groups nationwide. Group 78 is one of two English-language AI groups (there are also 22 Japanese-language groups) in Tokyo.

Chris will talk about the AIJ and human rights as a growth industry. Human rights abuses occur as a result of war between and within nations, as a result of the scramble for profits internationally (globalisation), as a result of the drive to control and suppress working people's attempts to organise, and as a result of poverty and despair. When Amnesty International was founded over 45 years ago, its work focused on individual cases -- the so-called prisoners of conscience. AI still deals with individual cases, over 45,000 and counting, but nowadays our work is more and more focused on campaigning on issues.
Chris will review both individual cases, and campaigns in his talk:
- Cases: Gen. Gallardo (Mexico), Amina Lawal (Nigeria), Menda Sakae (Japan).
- Campaigns: Stop Violence against Women; Control Arms; Political Killings in Philippines.
How can you get involved? Join, donate, organise and/or publicize events, administer the website, write letters, join Urgent Actions.

Yukiko Kaname & Akie Takeda , Non-Japanese Sex-workers Research Project/SWASH
http://swash.sakura.ne.jp/

Akie participated in an international meeting against commercial sexual exploitation of children in 1999 and then worked on HIV prevention awareness-raising for Japanese youth. She feels it is very important to link services and people. This year she started doing outreach for a group called Mittkusu, which does HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness projects in Tokyo. The research she is currently doing is also related to her outreach work.

Yukiko has been concerned with the right movement for sex-workers since 1997 and became a SWASH(Sex Work And Sexual Health) member in 1999. From 1999 to 2003, She was involved in various research projects, including a study on the work habits of women in the sex industry, and the awareness and practices related to HIV/STI prevention. Since 2004, she has focused on activities aiming to developing the community and services for people in the sex industry. Yukiko’s main publications include: "Uru urunai ha watashi ga kimeru"(2000, joint worked, Potto Publications) "Sei wo rikangaeru"(2003, joint work, Seikyu Publications) "Fuuzokujyo ishikichousa" (2005, joint worked, Potto Publications).

In 2006 SWASH started research aiming to support Non-Japanese sex workers who work in Japan. The people involved in this project include activists, researchers, NGO members involved in HIV/STI prevention, and writers, all of whom tackle issues related to the sex industry and sex-workers. SWASH is also working in cooperation with overseas organizations that support sex-workers. Besides this project, they are also planning to provide services such as distributing HIV/STI prevention information, teaching Japanese and massage as well as other skills for people working in the sex industry.


TOKYO AMAZONS is a new bilingual (Japanese/English) group aimed at lesbian women, which welcomes women of all sexual orientations and backgrounds to meet together in a fun and safe environment. Our focus is to encourage women to work towards locating and enhancing their inner strength and to develop further skills for supporting themselves and others in their quest to become true warrior women in their daily lives. We meet once monthly usually on the first Sunday, and aim also to serve as a networking service for women's communities within and eventually outside Tokyo.