Submitted by KAIROS
The annual Mother’s Day Rally for Peace will take place Sunday, May 12 at the Rotary Shelter at Lakeside Park, 2-4 p.m.
Local performer Toinya Fominoff, grandmother and mother of five, will be this year’s speaker. There will be music, singing, Dances of Universal Peace and a reading of the original 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation in Boston by Julia Ward Howe.
Musical performers will include The SAM Trio and Cetonaya Sammartino.
All are welcome to the event, sponsored by KAIROS, an interfaith group that works for peace, human rights and social and environmental justice in Canada and throughout the world.
“Mother’s Day began as a as a holiday that commemorated women’s public activism, and we want to honour that,” says Sandra Hartline, a local KAIROS representative. “Many middle-class women in the 19th century believed that they bore a special responsibility as actual or potential mothers to care for the casualties of society and to turn America into a more civilized nation. They played a leading role in the abolitionist movement to end slavery.
“In the following decades, women battled for improved working conditions for women and protection for children, public health services and social welfare assistance to the poor,” says Hartline. “To activists, the connection between motherhood and the fight for social and economic justice seems self-evident.”
A small donation will be asked for those wishing the white poppy for peace, a small pin to honor the KAIROS-sponsored Gaza Ceasefire Peace Pilgrimage to Ottawa May 22 and 23.
Please bring utensils, picnic items and finger food to share. For further information, call 250-352-9871.