Dallas Peace Center Summer Dinner Lecture – June 10th
Posted By Scott Grey on May 3, 2010
REV. LUCIUS WALKER, FOUNDER OF PASTORS FOR PEACE, TO SPEAK
The Dallas Peace Center (www.dallaspeacecenter.org) is delighted to announce the first of its 2010 Summer Dinner Lectures, scheduled for June 10, when it will welcome Rev. Lucius Walker, the Executive Director of Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) and founder of Pastors for Peace. The event will be held at FunAsia in Richardson – 2010 Beltline Rd., Richardson.
In 1988, while on an IFCO study delegation in Nicaragua, Walker was wounded in a contra attack. The day after the shooting he conceived Pastors for Peace, a project that organizes humanitarian aid caravans as a way of assisting victims of U.S. foreign policy. Since its inception, Pastors for Peace has delivered aid to El Salvador; Guatemala; Honduras; Nicaragua; Chiapas, Mexico; and Cuba. The Cuba ”Friendshipment” caravans require caravanistas to challenge the U.S. economic blockade; this has resulted in delays, harassment and hunger strikes in past years.
Under Walker’s leadership, IFCO, the only national ecumenical foundation committed exclusively to the support of community organizing, became the national center to administer scholarships for students to study medicine at the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana. Students from impoverished areas of the U.S. can receive full scholarships at the school when they pledge to return to their underserved communities after they graduate.
Walker is an ordained American Baptist minister and the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award and the Thomas Merton Award.
The Summer Dinner Lecture Series is an annual event of the Dallas Peace Center that brings speakers to Dallas who present diverse ideas about peace and justice in a wide variety of areas.
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