Partners ...

Mary Novak
Danny Malec
Harold Burns
Kate Foran
Steve Borla
Patty Adams

Board of Directors ...

Jackie Allen-Doucot

James Hubert, Treasurer

Jim Hubert is a CPA and a small business owner.  He has served on a number of non-profit boards, was a member of the Finance and Development Committee of a hospice in Haiti and has worked on a number of committees to promote educational opportunities for inner city children.

Judith McKenna, Chair

Judie McKenna, originally from Lexington, Massachusetts holds a BA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  Upon graduation she took the position of Development Director for the Newman Center in Amherst under the direction of the late Fr. J. Joseph Quigley.  After five fun filled years of fundraising, she spend the next ten years in the wacky world of Television Production.  In the end, she was an award winning commercial producer.  She and her husband moved to Manhattan’s Upper West Side for five years and now with two Golden Retrievers, they make their home on a boat on the Hudson River and in a house on the Connecticut River.  

The Voluntown Peace Trust is a nonprofit education center dedicated to social change and sustainable living. We offer programs, workshops, and retreats, as well as hospitality and resources, to people constructing alternatives to the violence of our age.

At the Voluntown Peace Trust (Peace Trust, VPT), we are committed to those who benefit least from the current structure of society—especially people struggling against racial, sexual, gender, environmental, and economic injustice. These struggles guide all Peace Trust activities, which include retreats, workshops, summer camps, agricultural projects, community organizing, and campaign building. Our work emerges from three aspects of social transformation: personal change to find healthier ways of being and relating; political action to challenge oppressive structures; and constructive programs to foster alternatives to those structures.

Individuals pursuing a just society frequently face isolation and exhaustion. They lack space for reflection. Groups seeking social change also lack facilities in which to gather to exchange ideas and experience. In addition to these needs for place, people need the tools and preparation essential to sustain them as they engage in personal change, political action, and constructive programs. The Voluntown Peace Trust is a context for conversation, a staging ground for action, and a network of resources to equip people working for social transformation.

The Peace Trust rests on 57 acres in Voluntown, Connecticut, centrally located between New York, Hartford, Boston, and Providence. For nearly 50 years this land has been the site of nonviolence training and action, cooperative living, and equity-based economics. With this history, along with wooded trails and streams, gardens, and retreat and conference facilities, VPT is poised to strengthen movements and build coalitions across issues. Our experiments in sustainable living, organic agriculture, and community building invite people to explore practical responses to global and bioregional concerns, both on site at the Peace Trust and in their own lives. Our aim is to work alongside people in movements that can persist apart from VPT.

VPT understands that “building a new society within the shell of the old” starts here—in our garden and our community, in our actions and our rest, in our work and our relationships. Trusting the power that arises when people gather to share their lives and labors, the Voluntown Peace Trust invites into collaboration those who long for a just and peaceful world.

HISTORY OF THE FARM...
In 1962, the property, historically known as the Campbell Farm, was purchased by Mary Meigs for $12,500 from Homer and Helena Herbert.The family was unaware that Meigs' intention was to turn the property over to Robert and Marjorie Swann. The Swanns were an activists couple that had been doing anti-militarism work as part of the New England Committee for Nonviolent Action (NECNVA).

The Swanns met Meigs through her then partner Barbara Deming in the summer of 1960. That summer Deming, a journalist, had attended a sixteen day Peacemaker training session held at their apartment house in New London. Deming, then a reporter for the Nation magazine, had become a pacifist after traveling with Meigs through India in 1959 and reading the writings of Mohandas Gandhi. She was further politicized after traveling earlier that year to Cuba where, after interviewing both ordinary citizens and Fidel Castro, she came to see the extent to which the US government was demonizing both Cuba and Castro.

Deming, Meigs and the Swanns were friends for many years and the Swanns were frequent summer visitors to Meigs and Deming's home on Cape Code in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Although Meigs was primarily an artist and author, she and Deming were deeply involved in the development of NECNVA, both served on the Regional Committee and Deming on the Executive Committee.

CAMPBELL FARMHOUSE...
Built ca. 1750, the Farmhouse was built for Dr. John Campbell, the local physician, and is the central building as you enter the VPT property from Beach Pond Road (CT-165). The farmhouse is said to have been a stop on the underground railroad, with slaves hiding in the secret rooms built into the central stonework of the basement. The farmhouse features a traditional central chimney with a main hearth in the kitchen and fireplaces in a number of the bedrooms. The Farmhouse has been renovated on numerous occasions, most recently in the mid-90s under the direction of Chuck Matthei, Equity Trust president. The Farmhouse now hosts the central office of VPT as well as the intentional community that lives and works there.  The farmhouse is not available for rent although guests are welcome.  Please call ahead to receive a tour.
[Click for center/rental details]