UFPJ elects Wis. organizer to Steering Committee

Steve Carlson of Trego, in Washburn County, has been elected to the national steering committee of the nation’s largest antiwar coalition, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ).

Carlson was elected by delegates to UFPJ’s National Assembly in Chicago on Sunday as a representative of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, a statewide organization with 165 member groups.

Carlson, social worker and educator who is a member of Peace North in northwestern Wisconsin, has a long history of social justice and peace activism.

As a member of the national Iraq Moratorium core committee, he has organized events on the third Friday or every month in a number of northern Wisconsin communities to call for an end to the war, and is currently working to expand the movement into new areas in western Wisconsin under a “health care not warfare” theme.

Last fall, he worked with Wisconsin Citizen Action to help organize health care referendums in a number of counties and municipalities, all of which passed overwhelmingly.

Earlier, Carlson had worked as an advocate for the Ho-Chunk nation, and an instructor at the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation. He also has worked with disabled people and the elderly.

At its weekend National Assembly, hundreds of UFPJ delegates laid out an action plan for 2009, a campaign of organizing and protest tentatively entitled "Yes We Can!...End the War!", leading up to a major mobilization in New York on the April 4 anniversaries of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s antiwar speech at Riverside Church in 1967 and his assassination the following year.

Carlson follows Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice staff member Steve Burns of Madison, who served on the UFPJ Steering Committee from June 2007 to December 2008. The UFPJ Steering Committee includes representatives of local, state, regional and national organizations working on peace and justice issues.