Successes of Other Honorees

The work of other California Peace Prize honorees has been recognized by many influential individuals and institutions. The examples cited below are just a small sampling of the public acknowledgments received.

Barbara Aragon (1998 honoree) is a consultant for the National Native American AIDS Prevention Center who helps Native American organizations learn how to better serve their constituencies. Aragon, who is Laguna Pueblo and Crow, facilitates organizational development and strategic planning sessions throughout the United States. She was formerly director of training for the American Indian Training Institute in Sacramento. As a Violence Prevention Initiative fellow of the Epidemiology and Prevention for Injury Control Branch of the California Department of Health Services, Aragon recently developed a community intervention approach utilizing storytelling to assist communities cope with unresolved issues of grief and loss.

Karen Bass (2003 honoree) is the founder and former executive director of the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles, which leads community-based campaigns that help root out the causes of crime. After the 1992 civil unrest, her group helped liquor store owners transform their businesses into grocery stores, laundries, family counseling centers and other beneficial enterprises. The Community Coalition has closed motels that were known as drug trafficking centers, improved the quality and selection of foods in local supermarkets, and secured millions of dollars in repair funds for local schools.

Bass worked with the Los Angeles City Council to provide youth in the 10th District with summer recreation and short-term employment opportunities. She also helped establish the 8th District Empowerment Congress, a model for the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council program. Elected in 2004 to the California State Assembly, where she represents District 47, Bass has been instrumental in reframing the issues of crime, violence and poverty as public health issues.

Father Gregory J. Boyle (2000 honoree) is a Jesuit priest and executive director of Los Angeles-based Homeboy Industries, which helps at-risk and formerly gang-involved youth to become contributing members of the community through employment training and job placement. He is currently a member of the California State Commission on Juvenile Justice, Crime and Delinquency Prevention and serves on the National Youth Gang Center Advisory Board. Father Boyle, nationally renowned for demonstrating the importance of adult attention and guidance in preventing youth from joining gangs, is a frequent speaker at conferences for teachers, social workers and criminal justice professionals.

Azim Khamisa (2003 honoree) is founder and president of the Tariq Khamisa Foundation, which teaches youth in San Diego about the consequences of violence and provides methods for addressing conflict in nonviolent ways. The foundation was created in memory of his 20-year-old son Tariq, who was murdered in January 1995. In an amazing act of forgiveness, Khamisa reached out to Ples Felix, the grandfather and guardian of his son’s killer. Now working together, they are committed to “stopping children from killing children” and breaking the cycle of youth violence.

After receiving the California Peace Prize, Khamisa was selected to participate in the third annual “Synthesis Dialogues” in Rome in 2004. He was one of 14 Americans in a group of 30 delegates from a dozen nations, including religious leaders, scholars, elected officials and researchers recognized worldwide for their efforts to increase human understanding. Among the participants was the Dalai Lama.

David Lewis (1994 honoree) is co-founder of Free at Last, a community-based recovery center in East Palo Alto. He was invited to participate in a peace conference convened in San Francisco in 2000 by Tibet House, an organization dedicated to preserving the principles of peace, compassion and harmony.

“I actually got to sit onstage with the Dalai Lama,” Lewis said. “And I got to sit down with Bill Clinton and have a serious conversation with him about violence and the incarcerated population and substance abuse. And he heard me. I think it was because I was a California Peace Prize winner.”

Chea Sok Lim (1997 honoree) escaped the bloody civil war in his native Cambodia only to find gang violence and poverty threatening young immigrants and refugees in his new home in Orange County. In response to these challenges, he helped organize The Cambodian Family, a community-based nonprofit agency that provides supportive services for immigrants and other low-income residents, to strengthen their chances of life without violence. Because of Lim, children who would have been lost to gangs or fatally caught in the crossfire are now college-bound.

Beckie Masaki (1998 honoree) is the founder and executive director of the Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco, a multilingual, multicultural program designed as a refuge for Asian battered women and their children. Ten years after Masaki founded the shelter, she received the California Peace Prize. The resulting attention she and her agency received from the ethnic press has helped her expand the scope of her violence prevention work and connect it with a growing national and international nonviolence peace movement.

Bo Taylor (2003 honoree) is the founder of Unity One, a South Los Angeles program that negotiates truces and cease-fire agreements with gangs while helping to prevent violence by offering positive alternative activities and job opportunities. The program has served as a catalyst for a range of efforts that have kept policymakers, the media and the general public aware of gang violence and its toll on the health of Los Angeles neighborhoods.

Since receiving the award, Taylor has visited Africa with Harry Belafonte, actor, singer, activist and Jim Brown, former NFL Hall of Fame inductee, to meet with leaders in the region who have long championed nonviolence as a means to create peace and justice. Taylor has also hosted a weekly talk show, “Reality Talk,” on Los Angeles’ KKBT-100.3 FM, where he encourages listeners to participate in community dialogues to reduce gang violence. Taylor has been cited by the Los Angeles City Council for his commitment to prevent violence and promote peace.

- continue -