The Chicago Network for Justice and Peace assists individuals and organizations in their efforts to promote literacy and the use of the literary arts for creating effective communication between and among cultures and groups within cultures; in doing so, we seek to foster community building and the common cause for justice and peace.

To fulfill its mission, CNJP supports:

• Volunteer tutoring programs in schools and in prisons;
  
• Cross cultural literary conferences;
  
• Collaboration with International PEN’s International Women Writers Committee, Linguistic Rights Committee, Writers in Prison Committee;
  
• Library development;
  
• Collaborative publication projects;
  
• Literacy programs;
  
• Collaborative artistic projects involving the literary arts;
  
• Scholarship programs for students of merit who would otherwise be denied appropriate education for financial reasons.

To view the current list of projects, please see our Service Program.

Dear friends of Chicago Network, for some weeks now we have been sending you information on the deadly campaign against journalists and other writers in Mexico working to investigate and publish the facts about the destructive effects of drug trafficking on Mexican society. Our board member Lucina Kathmann has just completed a fact finding trip to Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, a city right across from El Paso, Texas on the USA border.

For the past two years the Chicago Network for Justice and Peace (CNJP) has given support to the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (Frayba) Center for Human Rights, a non-profit civil organization located in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. Frayba was founded in 1989 through an initiative of Samuel Ruiz Garcia, then Catholic bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbol de las Casas. Serving very poor indigenous communities and villages in Chiapas, Frayba works in defense of and promotion of human rights.

Guayaquil, Ecuador, S.A., Proyecto Saleciano Chicos de la Calle de Guayaquil – Salesian Project Street Children in Guayaquil.

Ecuador’s port Guayaquil is a bustling city that has attracted tens of thousands of people from the country side in search of work and a better life. However, these hopes, in many cases, didn’t materialize, creating a large underclass in which children became the greatest casualty.

Mexico, like all of Latin America, suffers from being overly centralized. Over-centralization has been blamed for Mexico’s underdevelopment, inflation and almost every other economic evil; it is also responsible for problems in the literary world. For as long as anyone can remember, almost all the publication, attention, sales, distribution, critical notice and publicity for literature have been concentrated in the capital. If you wanted to write, you had to go to the capital. Yet not everyone can.

The San Miguel PEN Scholarship Program focuses on students who do well in school and want to continue their education but cannot for economic reasons. Such scholarships have proven themselves effective for enabling students to pursue their educational goals and for improving the general economic and social situation of their families. Please contact Pat Perrin or Wim Coleman at wim.pat@gmail.com, for detailed information about the program and the students. Checks in support of this program should be made out to Chicago Network for Justice and Peace and mailed to:

1132 W. Lunt #3B
Chicago, IL 60626