Jan Peterson, Honorary President of the Huairou Commission, was awarded the UN-HABITAT Scroll of Honor, one of the world’s most prestigious awards presented to those working on urbanization, in 2009 for four decades of activism championing the rights of grassroots women and their movements for better human settlements.
She is a founder of three organizations – the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, GROOTS International, and the Huairou Commission. Under her leadership, Huairou Commission’s membership has expanded to include organizations in more than 50 countries across the globe.
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Jan founded the National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW) in 1974, with the mission of empowering poor and working-class women to become community leaders, to give them a voice, and to raise their consciousness of their own power so they would be better able to define and solve problems facing their communities. The organization aimed to accomplish this through education, job skills and leadership training, always with an emphasis on preserving family and community cohesiveness. NCNW created the first Neighborhood College Program whereby community residents could receive Associates degrees by attending school in their own neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. In addition, NCNW developed a national network of grassroots women to share resources, experiences, and knowledge.
With and outside of Neighborhood Women, Jan has been a leading organizer on housing and neighborhood development issues in her own community of North Brooklyn. She is a longtime member of the Conselyea Street Block Association, a founding member of community development organization St. Nicks Alliance, and a member of Brooklyn Community Board 1, where she started New York City’s first Community Board Women’s Committee. She led advocacy for creation of a senior center and daycare center in East Williamsburg, and has been a key leader in the Greenpoint Enterprise Renaissance Corporation, advocating for the historic Greenpoint Hospital site to become a community resource – it is now slated for development as affordable housing and community facilities.
In the 1980s, Jan expanded NCNW’s work internationally, as a founding member of GROOTS International (Grassroots Organizations Operating Together in Sisterhood). GROOTS was successful at bringing grassroots women’s representation to the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and NCNW has gained consultative status with the United Nations. Through her strong advocacy, Jan has ensured that the global women’s movement incorporates grassroots women’s groups and community development priorities for sustainable human settlements. In addition to raising more than $4 million for work with grassroots women, Jan has supported pioneering initiatives that include the Local-to-Local Dialogue methodology and the Grassroots Women’s Academy held at each World Urban Forum. As a result of these efforts, global agencies such as UN-Habitat, UN Women, and UN ISDR have included women from poor communities in advisory and planning groups.
In her coalition-building work, Ms. Peterson draws on decades of experience in education, policy making, and community organizing. In the Carter White House, she worked as the Associate Director of the Office of Public Liaison, as well as in the Office of Policy and Planning in Action (Peace Corps/VISTA). She has most recently taught at the New School Graduate Program in International Affairs and was a member of the Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, chaired by Madeline Albright. She remains active locally in Brooklyn, as well as nationally and internationally through NCNW, GROOTS, and the Huairou Commission.
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