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Senior Women Web Interviews: Nancy Flowers
... educator, facilitator, and eloquent advocate for Human Rights
by Julia Sneden
Nancy Flowers is a woman who has had the good fortune (or good sense) to combine two of her lifelong passions to create a new career. For more than twenty years, she was an English teacher and administrator at a fine girls' school in California. During that time, she was also an active volunteer with Amnesty International. Eventually, the two interests merged and she became a fulltime consultant/educator in the field of human rights and co-founder of Human Rights USA, a national human rights coalition.Born in Mississippi, Flowers had a peripatetic childhood as the family followed her career-military father around the globe. Apparently being in thirteen schools before she graduated from high school didn't do her any harm: she went on to become a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Georgia, where she majored in English Literature. She holds impeccable academic credentials: a second AB from Cambridge University in England and an MA from Columbia, both in English Literature, and graduate work in theology and history at Theological Union/UC Berkeley. She has also held a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of to study German Literature.
Since 1995, she has worked as consultant to UN agencies as well as to government and non-governmental groups, both foreign and domestic. She has helped to establish national and international networks of educators who develop methods and materials to teach the principles of human rights. The educators work with groups as diverse as journalists, judges, prostitutes, police forces, military personnel, social workers, government officials, lawyers, teachers, trade unionists, and ministries of education. Ms. Flowers has participated in conferences, held workshops and seminars, given speeches and served as consultant all over the world. The list of her presentations, consultancies and related activities fills several pages, and the majority of those have been accomplished just since she began fulltime Human Rights work in 1995.
Although her work encompasses the rights of all human beings, Flowers is particularly concerned with the rights of women and children. Among many other activities that advocate for those rights, she held a series of workshops at the World Conference on Women in Beijing; wrote a manual for UNIFEM on educating about the human rights of women and girls; moderated a session on using technology for Muslim women's human rights advocacy at the Beijing-Plus-Five conference; taught seminars for sex workers in Bangkok; conducted advanced training for women activists in East Africa; and she spent last summer in Sudan, training teams of grass-roots educators to bring a simple understanding of human rights to the women of Sudan, whose culture oppresses them cruelly.
Flowers also has a long list of publications to her credit, including articles, books, pamphlets, essays, monographs and editorials. She is editor of The Human Rights Education Series of the University of Minnesota Human Rights Resource Center.
In a recent issue of Full Circle, the alumnae magazine of
"Americans know their rights. You can't graduate from any high school in the USA without a course in American history, and ...people...know with certainty that they've 'got their rights' as guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
"But what about human rights? Where are they defined and guaranteed? If you can name that document, you are in a tiny minority of the American public. A recent survey showed that 93% of people in the United States had never heard of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundation stone of international human rights. As the first legal document in history to express the aspirations and needs of all human beings, it is perhaps the most significant achievement of the United Nations. Its Preamble states: '(R)ecognition of the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.'
"The Declaration also exhorts 'every individual...to strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms.' "
Herewith, excerpts of Senior Women Web's telephone interview with a remarkable woman who is indeed using her talents as teacher and educator to promote the rights and freedoms of all people, everywhere.
SWW: Can you tell us a bit about Human Rights USA? How did it come about?
Nancy Flowers: Human Rights USA was formed as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was a partnership of four organizations: Amnesty International USA, the national Street Law Project, the University of Minnesota HR Resource Center, and the Center for HR Education in Atlanta. The Ford Foundation gave us our initial funding to launch a national Human Rights education project with a focus on four cities (Atlanta, St. Louis, Minneapolis and San Antonio), where we worked with both schools and community groups. Since then, our focus has broadened.
Our research showed that 93% of people in the USA have never heard of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We Americans tend to think we know all about our rights, because of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, but are you aware that our rights to things like education and health care are not mentioned in the Constitution?
In 1948, when the Universal Declaration was written, it wasn't to the US government's advantage to push human rights education. We had our own apartheid in Jim Crow laws. We were waging a Cold War. Universal health care wasn't even considered. But now the world has grown smaller, and things have begun to change. The years 2000-2010 have been declared the UN Decade for Human Rights Education.
We at Human Rights USA have found working through schools to be very difficult in this country. In other countries, you may be able to deal with one central ministry of education, but in America, you have fifty different departments of education. Our work now tends to be more in adult education, often through faith-based groups or issue-related social justice organizations.
It's interesting to note that there really hasn't been a great deal of Human Rights education going on in this country. It can be a bit embarrassing: people in other countries where I work often say: "And what about human rights education in America? It must be a great!" Well, not yet.
SWW: How did you get into this work?
NF: During the period of the Vietnam War, I was living in Cambridge, MA, where there was a great deal of student protest and disruption. I'm not a street fighter, although if you were there, you were affected by the chaos. I remember having to take my babies up a few floors to get away from the tear gas. But when I discovered Amnesty International, I thought to myself: "There's something I can do." For several years, I worked with AI as a community volunteer. As a teacher, I believe that my political activities have no place in the classroom, so I tried to keep the two parts of my life really separate. About the mid-80's, however, Amnesty International started a focus on education, and I took on the volunteer job of National Director of Education. By then my children were in high school and becoming increasingly independent.
The work proved to be thrillingly right for me. Finding other organizations that could be allies in our work was really fun.
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