Refugee Women's Network Inc.

RWN will be participating at the UNIFEM/USA 2008 Annual Meeting and Conference: Creating Change...Improving Lives, Saturday, June 21 and Sunday, June 22. It will be held at the SunTrust Conference Center, 303 Peachtree Street, NE, Atlanta, Georgia.

RWN's executive director will participate on the panel Microfinance: Empowering Women Worldwide. Additionally 6 of RWN's Microenterprise clients -- refugee and immigrant women entrepreneurs -- will have vendor booths at the marketplace.

Board member Anne Olson was honored at the 5th Annual Georgia's Legacy: Older Women Active and Alive Past Sixty-Five Awards Luncheon. It was presented by the Georgia Commission on Women, the Georgia Women's Institute, and the Georgia Osteoporosis Initiative.

As described in the program, the luncheon honors

ten outstanding Georgia women who, though past the usual age of retirement, are
still significantly involved and productive

RWN is very happy to introduce our newest board member, Ms. Sabrina Shams DeJoannis, engineering and financial analyst at the Georgia Power Company.

Ms. DeJoannis has been a trailblazer from a very early age. She is the first woman in her Bangladeshi family to leave home without being married. She immigrated to the US to pursue her education, and now she works as a woman in the male-dominated engineering field.

Ms. Ruth Lomo will be honored Sunday at the 24th Women of Achievement Awards Celebration in Memphis, Tennessee for her work with the the International Community of Refugee Women and Children.

RWN is quite proud of Ms. Lomo, a refugee from Sudan, and a graduate of our Leadership Training program and we extend our congratulations to her.

An article about Ms. Lomo and the award celebration can be seen at http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/mar/27/outstanding/ and is copied below.

(February 29, 1892 - March 26, 1962)

Augusta Savage was an African American sculptor, the first director of the Harlem Community Art enter (1937) and exhibitor in the 1939 World's Fair. Her sculpture "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was destroyed when the Fair closed because no money could be found to cast it in bronze.

(March 27, 1945 -- her murdered body was discovered on February 24, 1976)

Anna Mae Pictou Aquash was an American Indian Movement activist murdered by the US Government. Her hands were cut off and sent to Washington for "identification."

(March 26, 1877 - Januarty 10, 1948)
Kate Richards O'Hare was an European American birth control advocate, prison reformer, leading socialtih in Debs' era of the Socialist Party.

(July 16, 1862 - March 25, 1931)

Ms. Wells was an African-American anti-lynching crusader, social activist, journalist, and race woman, and founding member of the NAACP. She published A Red Record, the first book to document lynchings of African Americans.

(March 24, 1855 - December 11, 1920)

Ms. Schreiner was a white South African opponent of apartheid and European colonialism ism Africa. She was also an anti-capitalist Victorian Age feminist. Her book Woman and Labor became a central text in the early 20th century feminist movement.

(August 1909 to ?)

"I always believed in fighting for the underdog"
Eva Lowe was a Chinese-American anti-imperialist, "soap box" street agitator, organizer of unemployed Chinese American workers, and the only woman member of the Huaren Shinyi Hui (Chinese Unemployment Alliance).
On March 23, 1931, she gave a speech presenting the demands of the Chinese unemployed: food and shelter, free hospital services, free education for unemployed women, and an office for the Alliance.