Background on Carol Barton and elmira Nazombe
Background on Carol Barton and elmira Nazombe
The Partnership
In 1994 at the urging of their friend Ruth Harris, a United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries staff member, Carol and elmira began a partnership that has lasted to the present. Both were veterans of work with the United Methodist Office for the United Nations Seminar Program, which provided educational opportunities for local church members around the work of the United Nations and on international affairs in general. Over the years they have created educational programs for secular and religious women’s groups, organizing in the US, Europe, Latin America and Africa. These popular education efforts have focused on women’s economic justice issues, human rights and racial justice. They were active in a number of women’s groups focused on developing an intersectional feminist perspective on both popular education and economic justice advocacy.
Together, the team has worked in a variety of venues: the United Nations, non governmental and faith-based organizations. The joint collection documents Barton and Nazombe’s involvement in a wide range of popular education and activism both nationally and internationally.
The Team
Carol Barton is passionate about building coalitions that link gender, race and class, working to build women’s power for social justice. This passion grew partly as the daughter of a United Methodist pastor engaged in social justice work. Her interest and understanding of popular education grew out of her four years in Lima, Peru, working in human rights and organizing in the late 70s. Carol has worked with faith-based women’s groups, philanthropy, and feminist coalitions including Peru Solidarity, Church Women United, Women in Philanthropy, the UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service, the Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice and the Women in Migration Network.
elmira Nazombe believes that she came to the work of social, economic and racial justice and popular education from the lessons learned growing up as an African American girl and woman. She was Inspired by her faith and the courageous activism she learned from her grandmother. Influenced by participation in student Methodist and ecumenical Christian organizations during the 1960s, she expanded her horizons through work in the 1970s and early 1980s with East and Southern Africa for church and secular organizations. Returning to the US she worked in US Congressional advocacy in Washington DC and United Nations advocacy in New York. elmira later served as Director of Human Rights Education at the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University. She coordinated an international women’s human rights summer training event which developed leadership for women’s human rights economic justice advocacy at UN events. She has taught Social Justice at Rutger’s University for over a decade.
Popular Education
Both Nazombe and Barton were drawn to popular education, particularly based on their experiences in the 1970s in Africa and Latin America. The approach, introduced by educator Paolo Freire of Brazil, became generalized in Latin America and then around the world, as a means of building critical analysis for organized collective action for justice. Canadians who had lived and worked in Latin America brought these tools to the North American context. Several Canadian collectives including GATT-fly and the Catalyst Center disseminated the use of popular education in community and labor organizations. Barton, Nazombe and many US colleagues learned from this body of work, and have adapted tools and approaches to their own work, bringing a feminist perspective. The evolution of this work, from their early experiences with the United Methodist Seminar Program to pop ed for international advocacy and building international coalitions, to pop ed as an approach with grassroots groups in the US, has always been informed by their work with local groups. Feminist popular education helped to build collective analysis across deep differences within international women’s advocacy settings, to assess the moment and strategize for change.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, working in separate organizations, the partnership grew. Both women had the opportunity to work together with other women who were building feminist analysis and creating organizations to promote popular education and feminist pedagogy. Especially influential was participation in discussion groups shaping a critique of dominant development approaches and offering gendered alternatives. These groups brought together a variety of women from different organizations to think and strategize together about building feminist understanding and analysis and using it to influence development advocacy organizations that were largely controlled by men.
The 1990s and early 2000s was an era of UN world conferences. elmira and Carol were concerned about how large North-based organizations dominated international advocacy spaces, and the relative lack of voice of grassroots, working class, women of color and Global South organizations. They saw the need to bring small and large women’s organizations from around the world together, across class, race and region to amplify these diverse perspectives in international policy arenas. In addition, there was a need to bridge a large divide between organizations working on “women’s human rights” (then focused primarily on bodily integrity) and those working on “development” (then focused on economic rights), including trade unions. This led to the creation of the Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice (WICEJ) in 2000, which bridged North & South, large and small organizations, both “women’s human rights” and “development” groups, and included migrant, domestic workers, women of color, trade union, progressive faith-based, and other organizations. The work was to reframe women’s human rights to include this broad spectrum of economic, social and cultural rights, including addressing multiple oppressions. The coalition focused on feminist economic justice, including macro-economic policy, debt and trade, at a critical moment in the context of neoliberal globalization. Carol served as WICEJ Coordinator between 2000 and 2004.
Through WICEJ, elmira and Carol were active in the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the World Conference Against Racism (Durban), and the Financing for Development Conference (Monterrey), often using popular education methodologies to enrich the advocacy experience. Carol represented WICEJ on the Feminist Dialogues planning group. The Feminist Dialogues were linked to the World Social Forums in India (2004) and Brazil (2005).
elmira and Carol partnered with Women In Development Europe (WIDE) to conduct several workshops on economic justice and to facilitate an International Gender & Trade Network feminist international popular education training event. The collection includes samples and reports of this work.
The team’s popular education work was further advanced by active participation in the Economic Literacy Action Network (ELAN )- which brought together popular educators and social justice organizations from around the US to share and create new popular education methodologies, and the Women’s Economic Literacy Collaborative (WELC) organized by the Women of Color Resource Center (Oakland, California). Many of the methodologies developed during this period are included in the collection.
Church institutions like Interfaith Action, Church World Service, Church Women United and United Methodist Women served as platforms and created opportunities to work on policy and systems-change through the lens of intersectional feminism. In 2004, Carol and elmira were invited to share responsibility for the Racial Justice Program of United Methodist Women (UMW). They used a variety of strategies to help the organization understand the centrality of racial justice in the organization’s identity. This gave them a chance to bring global understandings to the realities of US women working locally on racial and economic justice. Evolving UMW roles included racial justice, economic inequality, peacemaking and a Living Wage for All campaign.
Nazombe and Barton are active in the US Grail, a faith-based women’s social justice organization which is part of the International Grail. In the Grail, Barton and Nazombe have worked to strengthen the role of a women’s organization in developing an antiracist way of working. Such collaborations are included in the collection.
Nazombe holds a doctorate in Education (Ed.D) from Rutgers University, a Masters of Adult Education from Rutgers, and a Masters in Urban Planning from Hunter College. Barton holds a Masters in Political Economy from the New School for Social Research.
