ROADS LESS TRAVELED
Participant Backgrounds
After Harvard, Peter Adams spent two years in Korea as a Peace Corps volunteer. In 1971, he began an apprenticeship in carpentry and cabinet making in Alaska. This led him to study fine furniture at the Penland School of Crafts, eventually staying on as the resident woodworker. In 1985 Adams moved to Tasmania to lecture in design at the University of Tasmania. He elected to leave his tenured position in 1991, to focus on the creation of what has turned out to be his life’s legacy: Windgrove — a Refuge for Learning. Windgrove occupies 100 acres on the wild shores of southeast Tasmania. It hosts residential workshops, school groups on day trips, and has an artist-in-residence program.
Adams’ art is in six museums internationally including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He has been writing about life at Windgrove for 15 years in the online blog: Life on the Edge www.windgrove.com. Videos about Peter Adams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMcYCIxYJH4&feature=share (~8.5 mins) and https://vimeo.com/133123923 (~6 mins)
Judith Bruce has worked in international development, impacting more than 50 countries, for 47 years, 40 of which have been at The Population Council. She currently guides a global community committed to building the health, social, economic and cognitive assets of the poorest adolescent girls in the poorest communities.
Through policy analysis, theory development, evidence-based intervention design, advocacy, and capacity building, Bruce is credited with influencing the world, including China, to think about quality of care from the client’s perspective. Her Quality of Care Framework directs programs away from target-driven approaches to a focus on quality and effectiveness as defined by the client, factoring in the power and potential of the poorest, most excluded girls. Early foundations of this work were established through investigations of contrasting male and female economies, investment patterns, and the internal power dynamics of households. See a book Bruce compiled and edited, A Home Divided: Women and Income in the Third World.
Bruce was among the first to point out the extremely disproportionate share of H.I.V. infections among young, excluded females and identified how economically driven sexual exchanges were a major cause. She has illuminated the scope and negative impact of child marriage—including violence and discrimination. She has served in an advisory capacity with The World Bank, State Department, USAID, European Parliamentarians and served as co-chair of the UN Expert Group Meeting on the elimination of all forms of discrimination and violence against the girl-child.
Paul Shapiro is Director of International Affairs at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. From 1997 to 2016 he designed and developed the Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, leading the effort to promote research and teaching about the Holocaust and establishing the Museum as the most fertile generator of new Holocaust scholarship anywhere in the world. Before the Museum opened, Shapiro volunteered for weeks each year to negotiate access and acquire Holocaust-related archival collections from the countries where the greatest crimes occurred.
His first career at the United States Information Agency, 1975-1997, focused on combating communism. A manifestation of the antisemitism that was a common feature of the Soviet and East European communist regimes was an effort to write the Holocaust out of history. Combating communism thus led Shapiro to focus on the Holocaust, to pursuit of its perpetrators, and to preservation of the memory of its victims. In the 1970s he did the research that led to the denaturalization and deportation of the Romanian Archbishop of the United States, once a leader of the fascist Iron Guard movement in Romania.
Shapiro served on the task force that required U.S. government agencies to declassify their Holocaust-related records. In 2003-4, in response to denial of the Holocaust by the Romanian president, he wrote major sections of the final report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel. He also personally spearheaded the effort to convince 11 governing countries and the International Committee of the Red Cross to finally open the archives
of the International Tracing Service—the largest and last major inaccessible collection of Holocaust-related records anywhere. For his commitment to preserving the legacy of the Holocaust, Shapiro was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, Romania’s Order of Merit, and the B’nai B’rith Humanitarian Award.
Since the late ‘70s, Alex Shoumatoff has written 11 books and more than 100 long pieces for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, and other magazines. He has profiled dictators, actresses, politicians. His literary talents, now firmly dedicated to advocating for embattled species like elephants and giraffes and indigenous people like the Baka "pygmies" of Cameroon and the Penan hunter-gatherers of Borneo, make him “a genuine citizen of the world”. He immerses himself in the actual locations where injustices are occurring. Shoumatoff’s writing about a murdered conservationist in Rwanda inspired the movie Gorillas in the Mist. His website, Dispatches from the Vanishing World, contains rich advocacy for preserving the earth’s biocultural diversity