Georgia Kelly

Georgia Kelly is the founder and director of Praxis Peace Institute, a non-profit peace education organization that is focused on transforming society through a systems approach to peace, social and economic justice, environmental sustainability, and civic participation. She has created several multi-day conferences in California and Europe that deal with the intersection of these topics.

 She has developed educational seminar/tours in Italy, Croatia, Cuba, and at the Mondragón Cooperatives in Spain. From her experience at Mondragon, she has focused on cooperatives as an ethical and socially just economic model for the 21st century.

She is the editor and co-author of Uncivil Liberties: Deconstructing Libertarianism, a critique of libertarian ideas and laissez-faire capitalism, and author of The Mondragón Report, a profile of twenty-two participants from various Praxis-Mondragon seminars, which demonstrates how they have used their newly acquired knowledge in creating economic alternatives in the U.S. Available as a free PDF here: http://www.praxispeace.org/mondragon.php 

Georgia has also been a life-long activist, beginning as a peace activist during the Vietnam War and later studying conflict resolution and negotiation, which she teaches today. It was organizing teach-ins during the Vietnam War that laid the groundwork for the educational programs she produces today for Praxis Peace Institute.

 She has chaired and been active in many issue-based campaigns, including chairing the Marin County chapter of former Governor Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign in 1992 and serving as a delegate at the Democratic National Convention in New York that year. Addressing a wide swath of issues, she is also a founding member of Sonoma Calm, an organization that successfully banned gas-powered leaf blowers in Sonoma.

Since 1998, Georgia has spent many months in the Balkans and lived in Croatia during the onset of the Yugoslav civil war. This experience brought her back to peace work and, under the auspices of a Marin non-profit, she organized a peace-inquiry conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia in June 2000. Praxis Peace Institute, which was formed on the last day of that conference, was organized to continue the inquiry into the reasons for war and peace. She organized three additional conferences in Dubrovnik and maintains contacts in the Balkans.

 Praxis Peace Institute’s conferences have examined the influences of culture, education, civic participation, economics, and the climate crisis. Currently, she on the Advisory Board of Atelier for Community Transformation (ACT), based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The next Praxis conference, “Economics, Justice and the Climate Crisis,” will take place in Sonoma, CA, Nov. 30-Dec. 3, 2020.

Georgia is also a professional harpist, composer, and recording artist. Her record label and distribution company eventually signed on with CBS and Sony, and her albums charted in the top ten of Billboard’s classical cross-over and new age charts. They are still available on iTunes, Spotify and other online outlets, as well as her music website.

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Websites:
http://www.praxispeace.org

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