CCPJ Annual Report: May 2025 – April 2026

CCPJ marches in the Batesville Day Parade, May 2026.

By the most conspicuous measures we have, during the past twelve months the prospects for peace and justice have flickered dim. International warfare has intensified around the world, as has the zeal of national governments to address problems by unilateral military aggression, at which the targets of that aggression have predictably fought back in kind.  Witness (to look no further) Ukraine, Sudan, Iran. Within nations, armed schism has ranged from outright civil war, through insurrection and assassination, to police belligerence.

In the United States violent eruptions of this kind used to be rare, but now they appear commonplace, being the extreme manifestation of entrenched and seemingly irreconcilable conflicts over our nation’s identity and the histories that have shaped it.  Witness the border with Mexico, Minneapolis, and nearer to home, Washington D.C. State brutality, the politics of intransigent polemic, self-righteous demonization of the other, and suppression of dissent have emerged as the order of the day.

Living as we must within that order, we at the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice nevertheless work to sustain another way.  Since the 1980s we have aimed to model and teach a different order centered not on victory but on actively shared community.  We have met the rule of force with nonviolence, countered winner-take-all triumphalism with patience and dialogue, and practiced an inclusiveness rooted in the ethics of care. From the open structure of its internal governance to the priority it places on outreach, coalition, and mutual support, CCPJ seeks every opportunity to compass just ends by peaceful means.

While pursuing a set of ongoing initiatives that the following calendar of events will itemize, we steadily collaborate with dozens of groups in central Virginia. All these groups have, as is right, focused agendas of their own. But they also come together with CCPJ to sustain the progressive momentum, and larger synergy, of a dynamic heritage of globally-minded local activism that shines against the lurid backdrop cast by most of what passes so discouragingly for the news.

"Minority views, with perseverance, can eventually make for long-term change."

This broad picture of our work finds a first illustration in the earliest item in our annual survey. During the late spring of 2025, CCPJ accepted an invitation from the People’s Coalition to sign a letter decrying a proposal, not just to renovate the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, but significantly to expand it. At a time when public mental health facilities were struggling, we opposed the replacement of curative measures by carceral ones. Our argument did not prevail – not for the last time in this report! But we have learned that minority views, with perseverance, can eventually make for long-term change. In something of the same spirit, but with a lot more flamboyance, CCPJ took part with Indivisible in the huge No Kings demonstration along Route 29 North in mid-June, as well as the smaller display of theater and song that took place on Charlottesville’s downtown mall earlier on the same day.

CCPJ was back on the mall twice over the summer months. We tabled at Central Place in late June with the Charlottesville Coalition for Gun Violence Prevention, and then in early August we returned to observe the grim 80^th anniversary of the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Eight tall panels displayed information about those devastating nuclear attacks and about the exponentially more dire toll predicted in the event of a nuclear assault today.  On these tabling dates, CCPJ as usual distributed free message buttons drawing attention to an array of causes and garnering support.

Meanwhile, in a late June observance of World Refugee Day, CCPJ co-sponsored with the International Rescue Committee an evening at the Vinegar Hill Theater featuring refugees’ stories that gave substance to their experience relocating in our area from strife in countries worldwide. And a month later a similar theme energized an inter-congregational brainstorming session on “faith and immigration” planned by a Charlottesville Friends Meeting working group with CCPJ support. Well over a hundred people packed a room at the Northside Library branch; their ideas helped precipitate a local ecumenical movement, Love Thy Neighbor, that will appear again in this report. Our organization, while resolutely secular, often works with the Charlottesville Clergy Collective and area congregations, some of which underwrite CCPJ with a yearly contribution.

In mid-July CCPJ’s mandatory annual meeting (stipulated in our bylaws as a 501[c]3 nonprofit) considered the state of the budget and elected our official Board – Bob Diamond, Bob McAdams, April Heyward, Jason Obergfell, Steve Wilson. We also received a treasury report from Secretary Virginia Rovnyak. As in recent years, the CCPJ budget remains in good trim: we stay lean by successfully spending on matters planned and arising about as much as we take in from individual and institutional donors.  Readers will find at the end of this report a form inviting such contributions as they may be moved to make at this, our chief fund-raising time of the year. 

One welcome new use for our funds arose with a solicitation from the “Elements of Peace” day camp that CCPJ, joining the Mindfulness Institute, Love No Ego Foundation, and other organizations, helped launch in mid-August for youth aged 11-15.  This program gave a diverse roster of 30 young people an environment in which to rest and learn about mindfulness outdoors, just before they returned to school for a new year.  At the end of August, CCPJ members were interviewed on Charlottesville Public Access TV about the Peace Center and the Activists’ Guide

Autumn into Winter ... Peace and Democracy Drew Us Together with Others

The autumnal equinox proved an especially busy time for progressive activists in central Virginia. The International Day of Democracy occurred on 9/15, U.S. Constitution Day on 9/17, and then the International Day of Peace on 9/21. Just before that full week, CCPJ staffed a table on 9/14 at the Vegan Fest – an annual event where (who knew?) we acquire more new contacts than at any other time of year. And shortly after that date, we held the annual event that brings us together once every year with many sister organizations old and new: the CCPJ Community Gathering at Westminster Presbyterian Church.  Representatives from a large number of local activist groups attended, renewing familiar acquaintances and making fresh ones over supper and at breakout tables where CCPJ facilitators led discussion on the theme “What can we do to protect our democracy?” This was by design a fully participatory evening, right up to a performance by the Charlottesville Women’s Choir that had us singing along. 

We joined again with Indivisible for a follow-up No Kings protest in October and then a Democracy Fair and Jazz Parade on November 1. As Election Day approached, we put up a sign, highlighting the late John Lewis’s exhortation to vote, that was viewed by thousands of drivers daily where Hydraulic Road meets the Route 250 bypass. CCPJ supported a mid-November march organized by Cville United for Palestine to lament and protest the relentless killing in the Middle East. Shortly thereafter CCPJ acted as co-sponsor for a Vinegar Hill screening of the Argentinian film “Sometime Somewhere,” about the condition and prospects for Central American migrants to our part of Virginia. Other sponsors included Sin Barreras, the newly convened Keep Growing Together, and the Central Virginia Community Support Fund, which provides bail bond for arraigned immigrants. The Love Thy Neighbor coalition hosted winter screenings of the film as well, with our blessing.

As fall cooled toward winter, CCPJ renewed its campaign against the military indoctrination of children via war toys. We bought radio spots on nine area stations urging parents to buy peaceful and creative toys instead, and spread the same message with a holiday sign replacing the October one about getting out the vote. We also showed up in person on a crisp December morning outside Walmart with placards on the same theme. 

At the approach of 2026 we united once more with the CCGVP at their downtown vigil for those slain by gunfire, and in January promoted a bus trip to Richmond to rally and lobby for the cause on the birthday of a most prominent victim of shooting, Martin Luther King Jr.  CCPJ was also glad to help defray costs for an iftar supper held by Welcoming Greater Charlottesville during Ramadan with our Muslim neighbors.

At the end of March, CCPJ lent its name and support to a pair of events that responded in two distinct keys to the national miscarriage of justice. One was another massive No Kings rally that thronged a long commercial block north of town to the tune of incessant honks of solidarity from passing traffic.  On the next day, Palm Sunday, at the invitation of Love Thy Neighbor and CCPJ, over a hundred opponents of US immigration enforcement policy processed down the city’s pedestrian mall with intervals of prayer, meditation, and group singing.

We suffered the loss of our own leader, Bob McAdams, who served as CCPJ's president for many years.

We suffered this winter the loss of our own leader in Robert McAdams. Bob had served as CCPJ’s president for many years, and among many other responsibilities he was the author of a long line of annual reports before the one you are reading now. As the end of his life approached, Bob did all he could to facilitate the group’s transition to a new leadership and redistribution of duties. One of the last CCPJ decisions in which he took part – having become an increasingly outspoken defender of American democracy under mounting siege – was the creation of another roadside sign quoting Lincoln in defense of government of, by, and for the people.

That sign stood at the highway intersection from Presidents’ Day until the long winter ice melted and our Earth Month sign took its place. This formed part of a three-pronged effort that also included tabling downtown to mark Earth Day in April, where CCPJ gave away 50 redbud seedlings to plant, and paid radio spots, voiced by none other than Bob McAdams, delivering a perennial message about how the way we live bears upon  the health of the planet we depend on.

Our Ongoing Activities - Please Join Us!

The past year’s chronology leaves unmentioned a number of things that CCPJ conducts on an ongoing basis all year long. We maintain a web site with numerous resources and updates:  https://www.charlottesvillepeace.org/. The Activists’ Guide, created several years ago with CCPJ’s sponsorship and continuing support, provides among other resources a curated calendar of local meetings and actions within the central Virginia peace and justice community. Nearly 500 members on the CCPJ mailing list receive monthly email blasts that record or forecast events recent or imminent. And our monthly steering sessions take place either remotely or in person (with hybrid access) at the Quaker Meeting House on Forest Street. These sessions – which are where CCPJ decides where to spend its energy and money – are open to all comers. There is no better way to have a say in CCPJ, and to learn about the network of allied organizations it fosters, than by attending. Please join us!