Contact: Yael Petretti, Executive Director, Promoting Enduring Peace, 203-878-4769

Joining the ranks of peace activists Eleanor Roosevelt and Dr. Benjamin Spock, well-known activists David Cortright and Karen Jacob will be honored as recipients of the 2004 Gandhi Peace Award presented by Promoting Enduring Peace (PEP) on September 18, 2004, in a ceremony in New Haven, Connecticut.
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PEP, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the achievement of lasting world peace, cited Cortright and Jacob's relentless lifelong efforts to work toward achieving enduring international peace founded on justice, self-determination, respect for diversity, compassion, and harmony.

PEP, Based in Woodmont, Connecticut, has given the Gandhi Peace Award thirty-seven times since 1960. The award is presented to individuals who have made a significant contribution to such a peace, achieved through cooperative and nonviolent means in the spirit of Gandhi. In addition to Eleanor Roosevelt and Dr. Benjamin Spock, other past recipients have included Linus C. Pauling, A.J. Muste, The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., U Thant, Dorothy Day, Dr. Helen Caldicott, César Chávez, Marian Wright Edelman, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

Jacob grew up in Milford, Connecticut. As a young adult, she was secretary for nine years to Howard Frazier, PEP's Executive Director, and participated in three citizen diplomacy tours to the then Soviet Union as co-leader. Jacob grew increasingly involved in peace work, and met Cortright on the PEP Mississippi Peace Cruise in 1986. They were married three years later.

Today, Jacob is president of PEP, and chapter president of Women's Action for New Directions (WAND) of Northern Indiana with a membership of more than 80 women and men. She serves on WAND's national board of directors to promote the organization's mission of empowering women to act politically to reduce violence and militarism, and to redirect excessive military resources toward unmet human and environmental needs. Jacob is also a registered nurse and has worked as an emergency room and cardiac nurse, and presently volunteers in medical programs for the poor. Also an accomplished artist, she has been invited to display, and sell her artwork at the reception prior to the Gandhi Peace Award ceremony in New Haven, Connecticut (All proceeds will be donated to PEP).

Cortright has been a visiting fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame for the past fifteen years. He is also president of the Fourth Freedom Forum, headquartered in Goshen, Indiana, and a cofounder of the national Win Without War campaign launched two years ago to stop the war in Iraq.

While in the military during the Vietnam War, Cortright was active in the GI peace movement, and afterwards, during the 1970s and 1980s, was executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, (SANE), the largest anti-nuclear weapons activist organization in the country. Then and since, he has worked diligently to expose the shortcomings of the U.S. Missile Defense programs, and, through his work at the Fourth Freedom Forum and Joan Kroc Institute, has been a consultant to the UN Security Council and to the governments of Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland on aspects of alternatives to militarism. He is a renowned expert on the use of "smart sanctions" and has authored, coauthored, or coedited numerous books and reports on sanctions, incentives, and nonproliferation. Cortright has also authored five books on peace and nonviolence, his most recent being A Peaceful Superpower: The Movement against War in Iraq (Fourth Freedom Forum Press, 2004).

Cortright and Jacob reside in Bristol, Indiana.

To contact Cortright and Jacob for interviews, please contact Ruth Miller at 800-233-6786, ext. 10