Meet the new director of PEP

by Jasmin Maurer, PEP Executive Director

It’s been a week since I stepped into my new role at the Peace Economy Project, and it appears that I haven’t burned the place down yet. I suppose I should thank everyone who trusted me to accomplish this, but I feel like maybe that should wait until we’ve made it a bit farther down the road.

All joking aside, this has been an exciting week for me as I get my feet wet with what it means to be the new PEP director. I joined the organization over the summer as a lobby intern, but had been connected with it through my work with Young Activists United St. Louis for awhile now. It’s always been an organization that I admired in the community. Who else is reminding us of the dangers of unchecked military spending? Not too many other places around here.

I’m glad that there are people promoting this cause, though. I didn’t intuitively know that our military spending was outrageous. This is a real revelation, right? What happened was I was interested in environmental concerns and ending wars, so I went to a workshop about how the military aids in environmental degradation, and this idea of the military-industrial complex was introduced to me there.

Of course, this wasn’t the end of it. I was all caught up in this social justice service-learning curriculum that I was working with at the time, and kind of forgot about how much the military spends. This happens. We all have a lot going on, and a lot to care about. (I still really like the environment by the way, and educating young people on how to become change makers.)

Luckily, military spending was reintroduced to me when I joined YSTL. Tila Neguse came in with a workshop about the military-industrial complex, and as I was frantically trying to understand where countries were on a world map (please forgive my crummy rural public school education), it became obvious to me that this information was important.

Working with PEP has given me such a wonderful opportunity to continue to learn about the military-industrial complex and educate others. It’s connected me to all of you, a group of wonderfully passionate people, some of whom have been working around this issue a whole lot longer than I have and could teach me a lot. That is so exciting to me.

And as this was my way of introducing myself to all of you, the members of PEP, I hope that you’ll introduce yourselves to me. Stop by, give me a call, send in a blog post, and tell me who you are and why you care. Let’s work together to continue to educate others about the dangers of an unchecked military budget.