Jodie Evans is the co-founder of CODEPINK and has been a peace, environmental, women’s rights, and social justice activist for over 50 years.
Latest by this author
Join us in practicing "21 Days of Divesting From the War Economy" to explore where the war economy might not be serving your life, and share ways that we can all reinvest our time, heart and energy to create conditions conducive to life.
Understanding the Local Peace Economy and how to divest from the war economy that is destroying life and well-being on this planet.
By April M. Short, Jodie Evans, Judy Wicks and Medea Benjamin in Local Peace Economy | CODEPINK | English | Guide to Local Peace Economy
Jodie Evans is the co-founder of CODEPINK and the after-school writing program 826LA, and serves on the CODEPINK board of directors. She has been a visionary advocate for peace for several decades. An inspired motivator, Jodie invigorates nascent activists and re-invigorates seasoned activists through her ever-evolving, always exciting methods to promote peace. Whether in board rooms or war zones, legislative offices or neighborhood streets, Jodie’s enthusiasm for a world at peace infuses conciliation, optimism, and activism wherever she goes.
As director of administration in California Governor Jerry Brown’s first administration, Jodie championed environmental causes, resulting in breakthroughs in wind and solar technology. Jodie also managed Governor Brown’s 1991 presidential campaign and instituted a cap on financial contributions that resulted in a stronger push for campaign finance standards. Jodie remains active in these areas, and dozens more, serving on the board of directors of numerous organizations that foster environmental, charitable, educational, sociopolitical, and health care causes, including: the Drug Policy Alliance, the Foundation for World Arts, Global Girl Media, the Hereditary Disease Foundation, the Institute for Policy Studies, Motion Institute, and Rainforest Action Network.
Jodie is primarily focused on sharing a global vision for peace and social justice. In 1999, she co-created the Peace Conference in Dubrovnik centered on Imagining Peace in the 21st Century, and she continues to produce the multi-event World Festival of Sacred Music that takes place in Los Angeles every three years.
Since the start of the 2003 Iraq War, Jodie has traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Jordan on several occasions. On her most recent visit to Jordan, Jodie traveled with a peace coalition to meet with delegates from the Iraqi Parliament to institute an action plan for peace and reconciliation. She has also traveled to Cuba to protest the prison facility at Guantanamo, and in 2015 she was one of 30 women activists from 15 countries who crossed the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, calling for peace and reconciliation between the two countries.
Jodie is a revolutionary whose commitment to social change is evidenced through several documentary films she has produced over the years, starting with the 1999 film Stripped and Teased: Tales from Las Vegas Women, a very personal look at the real women who work and live in Jodie’s hometown of Las Vegas, Nevada. She has also produced The People Speak, based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and the Oscar-nominated documentary The Square, which vividly captured the profound 2011-2012 democratic uprisings in Egypt. In 2015 she executive produced the climate change documentary This Changes Everything and also The Brainwashing of My Dad, a film that turns the lens on the rise of the right-wing media apparatus.
Jodie spent her youth on her great-grandfather’s farm in the Missouri Ozarks, which instilled in her a deep love of farming and farmers. In partnership with Andrew Beath at Ocean Song, a farm and wilderness center in Northern California, she has witnessed how a community gifted with land can thrive, turning the land into rich soil for the growth of human beings. Inspired by the success of Ocean Song, Jodie partnered with Paul Hawken and Lekha Singh to become a caretaker for Two Rivers and Mohawk Love Farms in Springfield, Oregon. She is also on the board of directors of the Center for New Economics and she is a tireless advocate of the slow food and slow money movements, supporting local production and local consumption and encouraging economic development in the local regional economy.
Jodie is the co-editor of two books, Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation and Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism, and a contributor to Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. She is currently writing a book about divesting from the unjust, extractive war economy and building a just, sustainable peace economy.
Organizations and boards
Evans is a member of a number of organizations and boards, including:
- CODEPINK: Women for Peace (co-founder)
- California Arts Council
- The People’s Forum
- Drug Policy Alliance
- Rainforest Action Network
- Institute for Policy Studies
- World Festival of Sacred Music
- 826LA
- Office of the Americas
- Sisterhood is Global Institute
- Women’s Media Center
- Global Girl Media
- Schumacher Center for a New Economics
External
Avoiding the Climate Catastrophe Starts With Divesting From the War Machine
Jodie Evans wrote this article, published in Common Dreams and many other outlets, about climate disaster and why now is the time to divest from the war machine and withdraw public dollars from weapons corporations.
October | 2019
Jodie Evans wrote this article, which was published by Common Dreams and many other outlets. It details her decision to confront Sigal Mandelker's cruel policies, which cost too many lives to ignore.
January | 2019
Jodie Evans wrote this article, which was published by Common Dreams and many other outlets.
November | 2011
Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin co-wrote this article, which appeared in TruthOut and elsewhere. She writes:
As we watch the Egyptian police and military viciously attack democracy activists on the streets of Cairo, using U.S. weapons, it is outrageous that the Obama Administration has failed to issue a strong condemnation of this latest attempt to crush a revolution that has inspired people around the world, including millions of Americans. During the fateful 18 days in January and February when Egyptians took to the streets by the millions to topple the brutal Mubarak dictatorship, President Obama remained largely silent, refusing to call directly for democracy until it was clear that young Egyptians were about to topple the dictator’s three-decade-long rule.
Jodie Evans and Charles Davis co-wrote this article, which was published in TruthOut and elsewhere.
June | 2015
Jodie Evans wrote this article which was published in Common Dreams and many other outlets.
Thirty peace activists from 15 countries arrived in Beijing on May 17th. I knew 11 of the women before arriving but most of the women knew maybe one or two others and a few knew no one. Our work for peace and justice had taken very different paths and it was striking that many of those paths had not crossed. We spent the first day in the hotel conference room meeting each other and learning what we could about the Koreas
June | 2018
Jodie Evans co-wrote this article with Andrew Behar, which was published in Common Dreams and many other outlets.
Publications by this author
Co-authors: Dave Oswald Mitchell and Andrew Boyd | OR Books | December | 2016
From Cairo to cyberspace, from Main Street to Wall Street, today’s social movements have a creative new edge that’s blurring the boundaries between artist and activist, hacker and dreamer. But the principles that make for successful creative action rarely get hashed out or written down. Until now.
Beautiful Trouble brings together ten grassroots groups and dozens of seasoned artists and activists from around the world to distill their best practices into a toolbox for creative action.
Co-authors: Alice Walker, Arundhati Roy and Medea Benjamin | New World Library | 2005
How can we humanize each other and act as responsible global citizens? What are appropriate and effective responses to terrorism? How should media figures report on terrorism and war? How should elected officials respond? What can ordinary citizens do?
Stop the Next War Now, edited by renowned CODEPINK peace activists Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, shares expert insight on the issues and powers-that-be that can lead us to war—including the media, our elected politicians, global militarization, and the pending scarcity of national resources. It aims to educate and reflect on the effectiveness of peace movement activities and offers hope, through shared ideas, action steps, and checklists to transition from a culture of violence to a culture of peace.
Full of practical, proven suggestions to promote education, awareness, activism, and political change, its ideas are drawn from experts from every walk of life who have passionately devoted their lives to peace. Contributors include elected officials, media personalities and reporters, public intellectuals, and ordinary citizens, all who are eager to find the most appropriate and effective responses to terrorism (other than bombing the hell out of third-world countries). Includes short essays, interviews, poems, illustrations, Q&As, action tips, and more.Co-authors: Howard Zinn, Anthony Arnove, Dennis J. Kucinich, Amy Goodman, Mike Davis, Tiosha Bojorquez Chapela, Naomi Klein, Amir Hussain, Sandra Fu, Nadia Yassine, Eman Ahmed Khammas, Medea Benjamin, Omid Safi, Joseph Wilson, Lauren Sandler, Anne E. Brodsky, Tahmeena Faryal, Yanar Mohammed, Christian Parenti, Mark Levine, Fadhil Al-Azzawi, Viggo Mortensen and Jerry Quickly | Perceval Press | August | 2004
Now that the Bush administration's occupation of Iraq has become more about enforcing the economic and political objectives of a corporate elite and less about disarming a dictator that used to be an American ally and had nothing to do with the tragedies of 9/11, a spirited and informed analysis of the conflagration—and its various casualties—is needed more than ever. Twilight of Empire fulfills that growing hunger for desperately needed on-the-ground truth and context far from the talking-head misinformation offered by conventional media outlets.
Many of the contributors have seen the devastation of American imperialism in Iraq first-hand. Code Pink's Jodie Evans, who traveled to Baghdad directly before and after the war, explains the stratification between American economic interests and Iraqi helplessness that is the occupation's chief characteristic. Yanar Mohammed, Anne Brodsky and RAWA's Tahmeena Faryal chronicle the abuse of Muslim women by both American occupiers and the increasingly fundamentalist Middle East citizenry. Ambassador Joseph Wilson—no stranger to the Bush administration's wrong-headed execution of the invasion, as well as the last American official to meet with Saddam Hussein—condemns the secrecy, shortsightedness and subterfuge at the heart of the president's campaign for war in Iraq.
Twilight of Empire also widens the scope of the occupation, connecting the dots and spotting the disturbing trends of economic opportunism at the heart of America's current foreign policy. Mark LeVine finds troubling similarities between the occupation of Iraq and Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, award-winning journalist Kristina Borjesson explains the invaluable hijacking of American mainstream media that made executing the war politically feasible, Naomi Klein breaks down the administration's alarming war profiteering through multinationals like Halliburton and Bechtel, and more.
The book is filled with harrowing narratives from photographer Lynsey Addario. Twilight of Empire refuses to shy away from the disconcerting state of Baghdad's infrastructure, the architectural and cultural devastation of Iraqi cities, and the mounting dissatisfaction with an American provisional authority seemingly disinterested in the safety, health and well-being of the society which it aims to liberate and democratize.
Twilight of Empire is ultimately an unflinching look at the corporate greed and manipulation at the bottom of what may be the most bungled foreign policy project in United States history. With the bodies piling up and no success in sight, Americans can no longer and sit idly by while their elected (and unelected) leaders gamble their future away. Twilight of Empire is a call for transparency and truth from an esteemed assemblage invested in putting the chaotic Iraqi puzzle together for those who are interested.Media by this author
Interview
An interview with Jodie Evans on “What Could Possibly Go Right?” with Vicki Robin.
Jodie addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?” with thoughts including: - That the war economy is in the structures around us that are violent, oppressive, extractive, and destructive. “We won't end war until we end the war economy”. - That we need to lean into the peace economy, which is life, community, planet Earth, parenting, the commons, healing. - The war economy thrives on alienation and self direction. The peace economy is about connection and community engagement. - That we should not get caught in the “folly of fretting”. “Everything is about action, because if we don't act, we let the banality and the brutality of it undermine our capacity to act.” - The peace economy examples of sharing and abundance found in supporting homeless youth in Venice Beach and creating land trusts for commons to reemerge. - That we should ask, “How do we use our wild imaginations together to create something absolutely fresh and new? What am I doing today to create the conditions conducive for life?”
Interview | November | 2022
In the midst of managing Jerry Brown’s 92 Presidential campaign the Rodney King verdict came down and Los Angeles was on fire. We closed the campaign down and Jerry came back to LA which pivoted my attention to what was happening in my own city. The next 10 years ...
Interview | November | 2022
This Changes Everything
Jodie executive produced the "This Changes Everything" (2015).
Jodie co-executive produced the film "Always in Season" (2019).
Jodie was featred in the film "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" (2013).
Jodie was the executive producer of the film "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" (2009).
Jodie was the executive producer for the film "The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends" (2006).
Jodie was executive producer of the film "South Central Farm: Oasis in a Concrete Desert" (2008).
Jodie was producer of the film "The People Speak" (2009).
Jodie Evans produced the film "Stripped and Teased: Tales from Las Vegas Women" (1999).
Jodie was featured in the film "Rooted in Peace" (2012).
Jodie executive produced the film "The Square" (2013).
Jodie executive produced "The Brainwashing of My Dad"(2015).
Jodie was co-executive producer of the film "Shadow World" (2016).
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