EventsThe New Social Environment#62
Jennifer Jones Austin and JoAnne Page with Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Featuring Austin, Page, and Schaper
Wednesday, June 10, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Child and family advocate Jennifer Jones Austin and criminal justice activist JoAnn Page join Rail Editor-at-Large Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Trace Hoard DePasse.
In this Talk
Jennifer Jones Austin
A child and family advocate, Jennifer Jones Austin is Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (FPWA), an anti-poverty, policy and advocacy organization with 170 member human services agencies operating throughout New York City. Ms. Jones Austin has chaired and served on several influential boards and commissions, including serving as Co-Chair of NYC Mayor de Blasio’s Transition, Chair of the NYC Procurement Policy Board, and Co-Chair of the New York State Supermarket Commission. She currently is a Board Member of the National Action Network, the New York Blood Center, the NYC Board of Correction, and the Fund for Public Housing.
JoAnne Page
JoAnne Page has more than 45 years of experience in criminal justice, with the last 30+ at the helm of The Fortune Society, a non-profit organization that serves and advocates for formerly incarcerated individuals and people with criminal justice involvement. In 2018 JoAnne was honored by City & State New York as one of the top 50 nonprofit CEOs in New York City. In 2019 she was honored by City & State as one of the top 100 Nonprofit Power Leaders across New York State. A graduate of Yale Law School, and a former defense attorney, JoAnne Page is a frequent speaker at conferences about alternatives to incarceration, housing, and criminal justice issues.
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Community builder Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper served as Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church from 2006 to 2021. She was formerly at Coral Gables Congregational Church in Miami and before that at Yale University, and teaches leadership at the Hartford Seminary. As an elder, she is passionately concerned about leaving the next generation well-prepared for all they have to face. She has written over 35 books including Approaching End of Life: A Practical and Spiritual Guide (2015), Grace at Table: Small Spiritual Solutions to Large Material Problems, Solving Everything (2013), to her most recent book I Heart Francis: Letters to the Pope from an Unlikely Admirer (2016), among many others. She is an Editor-at-Large at the Rail.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.
Dao Strom
Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨