africa

From VRJA:

The Vermont Racial Justice Alliance is happy to have the opportunity to bring the 2022 Vermont First African Landing Day program “We’ve Come This Far By Faith." There has been nothing more vital to the persistence and tenacity of American Descendants of Slavery than their faith. Through trials and tribulations and unimaginable adversity, embracing faith has often been the only way forward. Black folks have depended on the church as a place of refuge and a headquarters from which a movement that would change a nation would operate. When we look back over our lives and think things over, most American Descendants of Slavery would agree that nothing short of a miracle has brought us as a people to this point in time. This year, Vermont First African Landing Day highlights and celebrates our faith with the words that echo through the generations, “We’ve Come this Far By Faith!"

This year Vermont First African Landing Day features “Reflections, Acknowledgements and Aspirations,” a panel discussion on where we have come form and where we agree we should be going, 403 years after the landing of the White Lion at Point Comfort!

For more information visit: firstafricanlandingvt.org/2022-program

Host Dr. Jules Wetchi discusses his recent trip to Africa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Alison Simonds interviews Lisa Espenshade, the director of donor relations at Grounds for Health, about funding relations, the Starbucks grant and Grounds for Health's 2020 plans.

Senator Patrick Leahy Leahy, Champlain College student activists and a representative of Invisible Children discuss the KONY 2012 campaign, aimed at bringing African war criminal Joseph Kony to justice. A documentary on the issue, KONY 2012, has gone viral on the internet, netting nearly 50 million hits on YouTube since Monday, March 5. Leahy, chairman of the Senate’s budget panel for the State Department and Foreign Operations, is a longtime U.S. leader on issues relating to war crimes and criminals and the innocent victims of war and conflict. He recently included funding in the U.S. foreign aid budget to help Kony’s victims – many of them children -- and he has long supported efforts to capture Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has terrorized the people of northern Uganda, the Congo and elsewhere in Central Africa for more than two decades. The victim assistance funding secured by Leahy will be discussed in Leahy’s annual budget hearing for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which will implement those efforts. Kony and his forces have kidnapped children and forced them to become soldiers and to kill and mutilate members of their own families. Adonga Quinto, a northern Ugandan who was kidnapped by the LRA, discusses his experiences. Also speaking, Sadie Stone, a Champlain College student who has joined the effort to bring Kony to justice.