Jan Peterson (born 25 April 1941, South Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American local activist, long- time organizer of neighborhood-based, grassroots, working-class women’s organizations, Global Honorary President and Founder of HUAIROU Commission. She has lived for sixty years in New York City.
She is the founder of many organizations, most notably the National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW, 1974), GROOTS International (1985), and the HUAIROU Commission (1995), all three of which have consultative status with the United Nations. NCNW has worked with grassroots women, including public housing leaders, across the country to provide the frameworks for them to learn from and support each other. Under her leadership, HUAIROU Commission’s global membership has expanded to include organizations in more than 50 countries.
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Peterson is a long-time resident of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she is recognized as a key community leader. She is a 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 Issues Committee. She led advocacy for the creation of Swinging 60s Senior Center and Small World Daycare 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.
In 1993, one of the four buildings developed in the Neighborhood Women Renaissance project, an affordable family housing on the grounds of the former Greenpoint Hospital in was named after Jan Peterson, recognizing her community leadership.
Peterson received the United Nations Habitat Scroll of Honour1 in 2009 for “championing the rights of grassroots women and their movements for better human settlements”2.
She was a member of the Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, chaired by Madeline Albright. She is also a founder and member of the Advisory Group on Gender Issues (AGGI) for UN- Habitat.
She has taught in the faculty of Adelphi University, at the School of Social Work, the Pratt Institute, La Guardia Community College and the New School Graduate Program in International Affairs.
As New York Times’ journalist Matt A. V. Chaban wrote in 2016, Peterson “fits into a long tradition of women who have guided, and rebelled against, aspects of the city’s development for more than a generation, from Jane Jacobs and Ada Louise Huxtable to Majora Carter and Christine C. Quinn. Though most go unrecognized, it is the neighborhood women who lead many of the community fights around the city.”3
Jan Peterson has spent her lifetime as an organizer with the mission of empowering poor and working-class women to become community leaders on housing and neighborhood development issues locally in New York City, nationally, and globally.
1 https://unhabitat.org/scroll-of-honour
2 https://mirror.unhabitat.org/content.asp?typeid=19&catid=827&cid=7291
3 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/nyregion/with-plan-for-greenpoint-hospital-neighbors-may-finally- get-their-way.html
Early years
Peterson spent her early years in Cedarburg, Ozaukee County, a rural farming town, in the Milwaukee metropolitan area. Her father, of Dutch origins, was an electrician, and he was killed in the job when she was ten years old. Both her father and mother described themselves as “FDR democrats”4.
She was the first person in her extended family to go to college and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1963. She spent the following year (1963-64) in New York City, where she became involved with CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality). After a brief time in Wisconsin in 1964, she returned to New York in 1966, where she became involved in Mobilization for Youth (MFY).
She was inspired by a Martin Luther King’s speech in Washington D.C. in August 1963, and she refers to it as the beginning of her activist career5.
Career
Local impact
In 1969, she moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she began the work that eventually resulted in the founding of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW). During those years Peterson was also involved with the women’s movement in New York City, including NOW, the October 17th group, and New York Radical Feminists. In 1977, she went to Washington, D.C., serving as an assistant to Midge Costanza in the Carter White House, Associate Director of the Office of Public Liaison, as well as in the Office of Policy and Planning in Action (Peace Corps/VISTA).
Since the 1980s, Peterson has been involved in a variety of community-based and women’s community development organizations, and has increasingly moved into the international arena, becoming active in UN and UN-related organizations.
International work
In the 1980s, working with NCNW and GROOTS International, she was successful at giving grassroots women a voice at the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. 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. 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 addition to raising more than millions of dollars for work with grassroots women, Jan has pioneered methods and tools including the Leadership Support Process, the Local-to-Local Dialogue methodology, and the Grassroots Women’s Academy held at each World Urban Forum. HUAIROU Commission is now part of the UN’s Platform for Action, leading the Economic Justice Action Coalition for the Generation Equality Cluster.
Personal life
Jan Peterson has a son and a granddaughter.
4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJdcv4WAREw
5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf0qvDGHNcw
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