Tag: Mennonite Central Committee

Talk on Mennonites, Canada, and the founding of Disabled People International on October 1st

Henry Enns (left) and Jim Derksen (right), DPI First Assembly, Singapore, 1981.

The Carleton University Disability Research Group (CUDRG) is pleased to announce an upcoming talk by member Dr. Ryan Patterson, “Transnational Representation: MCC Canada and the founding of Disabled Peoples’ International, 1981”. The talk will be held online along with two others as part of the MCC@100 Conference panel “MCC as Incubator and Catalyst” on Friday, October 1st, 2021, 7pm-9pm. Attendees are asked to register (free) here

Based on participant interviews and archival research, this talk will explore how, in 1981, the Winnipeg-based Mennonite Central Committee of Canada (MCCC) became pivotal to the founding of the worldwide non-profit Disabled Peoples’ International (DPI). Along with material funding, the MCCC offered contacts and credibility in the non-profit world and, most importantly, sustained support for talented individuals at the heart of the early DPI. 

Dr. Patterson has also published an article on this subject, available on the CUDRG website: “Transnational Representation” (Carleton University Disability Research Group, open access, February 2020). 

Canada postage stamp issued in May 1980 in recognition of the upcoming Fourteenth World Congress of Rehabilitation International planned for June in Winnipeg.

Call for Papers: MCC at 100: Mennonites, Service, and the Humanitarian Impulse

October 23-24, 2020.

In 1920 Mennonites from different ethnic and church backgrounds formed the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) to collaboratively respond to the famine ravaging Mennonite communities in the Soviet Union (Ukraine). Over the ensuing century, MCC has grown to embrace disaster relief, development, and peacebuilding in over 60 countries around the world. MCC has been one of the most influential Mennonite organizations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It has operated as a mechanism for cooperation among a wide variety of Mennonite groups, including Brethren in Christ and Amish, constructing a broad inter-Mennonite, Anabaptist identity. Yet it has also brought Mennonites into global ecumenical and interfaith partnerships.

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