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Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies
TRUSTEES
Chris Barfoot
Chris Barfoot is a retired real estate agent. His career has been in the family firm of Barfoot and Thompson where he started as a salesman and later became a branch manager and director of the company. He is married to Pat and they have three grown-up children and five grandchildren. He has history degrees from the University of New Zealand and the University of Oxford.
Though his father was in the British Army at the Third Battle of Ypres where 250,000 British soldiers died, Chris became a pacifist out of Christian conviction in his early thirties and has worked since then to ensure that similar tragedies never happen again.
He is active in his Anglican parish church where he has taught Sunday School for many years. In the local community he teaches Bible-in-Schools and has helped to establish the Tahuna Torea Nature Reserve on the Tamaki Estuary.
Since his retirement he has written a history of the family firm and another on Tahuna Torea as well as a series of Biblical and historical studies entitled Christ and War.
As one of the trustees he sees the National Peace Centre at Otago University as a place where the best minds in the country and from overseas will study the root causes of war and seek to develop practical non-violent solutions.
Anne Ackerman
Our newest trustee is Annie Ackerman. Annie comes to us with a strong background in running other charitable trusts in New Zealand and Australia. She has had a career as a Change Management Consultant and so is no stranger to developing strategy, governance and management systems.
Margaret Bedggod
Margaret Bedggood, QSO, is an Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Waikato, where she was a Professor of Law from 1994 to 2003 and Dean of the Law School from 1994 to 1999. For five years (1989-1994) she was the Chief Commissioner of the New Zealand Human Rights Commission, during the passage of the Human Rights Act 1993. She has been a member of Amnesty International since 1968, was previously Chair of the New Zealand section and was a member of its governing body, the nine person International Executive Committee, from 1999 to 2005.
She has taught in a variety of institutions and jurisdictions and has published in tort, employment law and human rights. She is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford, and has been a member of the Faculty of a Summer School Programme and a Masters Programme, of the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford on International Human Rights Law, and of a Summer School Programme in Theology.
She has been a member of the Refugee Council, of the Peace Foundation Council and has a long-standing interest in social justice issues within the Anglican Church as a member of the Third Order of the Society of Saint Francis and is currently chair of the New Zealand branch of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship.
She is the Chairperson of the Management Committee of the Human Rights Foundation of Aotearoa New Zealand, a broad based human rights NGO launched in December 2001.
(See www.humanrights.co.nz)
Dorothy Brown
Dorothy is the Co-Chair of the Trust.
She was a senior lecturer in the English Department of University of Auckland. Before that she taught science in schools and developed the diplomas in TESOL at the University of Technology Sydney.
She has worked in Wellington, Auckland, Adelaide, Sydney, Tianjin, Taiyuan and Beijing. Dorothy has received the N.M.Z.M for services to education.
She has for very many years wanted to see established in New Zealand an academic centre that will be a focus for peace and conflict studies so that more well informed New Zealanders can play an increasing role in peace thinking, making and peace keeping in the world.
She is also interested in Peace Education and schools and in teacher training. Dorothy lives in Auckland and was a founding member of the Trust.
Maui Solomon (Co-Chair)
(Moriori, Kai Tahu and Pakeha [English, Irish, French and German]).
Maui is a Barrister and Indigenous Rights Advocate with 24 years legal experience specialising in land and fishing claims, cultural and intellectual property, environmental law and Treaty/Indigenous Peoples rights issues and civil litigation.
He is a key legal and political advocate for the recognition of the identity and rights of his own Moriori people of Rekohu (Chatham Islands) and also Maori tribes in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Maui is currently Vice-Chair of Hokotehi Moriori Trust Board and Chairman of their commercial arm, Kopi Holdings Limited. He is also Co-Chair of the Aotearoa New Zealand Peace and Conflict Studies Centre Trust which is in the process of establishing a Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Otago University in New Zealand.
Maui has represented since 1994 three of the six tribes in the landmark Wai 262 claim before the Waitangi Tribunal concerning indigenous flora and fauna and cultural/ intellectual heritage rights of Maori under the Treaty of Waitangi, which claim seeks, among other things, to develop a unique system for protection and use of Maori traditional knowledge and associated resources. The tribunal report of that claim is due in early 2009.
Maui maintains an active interest in international Indigenous Peoples issues with particular emphasis on the Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Intellectual Property Organisation. He is currently the President of the International Society of Ethnobiology, a society dedicated to working in harmony and collaboration with indigenous and traditional peoples which seeks better recognition and protection of their resources and cultural and intellectual property rights. He has written and published many papers in the fields of his work and is regularly invited to attend and address international conferences.
Maui and his partner Susan live in Titahi Bay, Porirua, Aotearoa/NZ and have five teenage children.
Me rongo (in peace).
Peace may sound simple – one beautiful word – but it requires everything we have,
every quality, every strength, every dream, every high ideal.
Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999)
PO Box 56-719 Mount Eden Auckland New Zealand 1446 | Phone: +64 9 8150228 | email: info@peacetrust.org.nz
Thank you Peace and Disarmament Education Trust for funding website development.