Diana Roose serves as the Friend in Residence at FCNL. Her particular perspective as a longtime Quaker activist is useful in strengthening FCNL’s advocacy and research. She comes to FCNL as a member of the Oberlin (Ohio) Friends Meeting, and the Lake Erie Yearly Meeting. An Ohio native, she believes in working for social change at the local level.
Diana has a variety of assignments at FCNL reflecting her many talents and experiences. She is helping the FCNL Advocacy Corps of young activists research the effects of federal programs in their home communities, such as the Department of Defense 1033 program that offers free military equipment to local police forces. This program has led to the “militarization” of local police that can cause serious escalation of violence in law enforcement.
She is also interviewing FCNL staff for an essay on the 75th anniversary of FCNL’s founding, highlighting the spark and ingenuity that young adults especially have added to its advocacy and lobbying programs. Throughout her career, Diana has focused on the issues of U.S. militarism and nuclear weapons. She worked for many years at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and as a researcher with NARMIC (National Action Research on the Military Industrial Complex). There she helped local activists research the role of corporations in their communities during the Vietnam war, and the role of corporations in the nuclear arms race. She also served as Peace Education Secretary at AFSC in 1999-2000.
As Research Director of the SANE Education Fund of Philadelphia, she developed a 12-part radio documentary series, “Shadows of the Nuclear Age,” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, about the effect of nuclear weapons upon American culture. Following this series, she was selected as a radio journalist to travel to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan to interview survivors of the atomic bombings. She later produced a play, Ghosts of Hiroshima, that toured throughout communities in Ohio at the height of the nuclear freeze movement in 1983-1985. The play won the Chairman’s Award from the Ohio Humanities Council as best local humanities project.
Diana has traveled often to Japan to re-interview the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She wrote a book, Teach Us to Live: Stories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Intentional Productions, 2007) that captures the narratives and lessons learned by the survivors as they have grown older. Diana has also hosted Japanese delegations who have come to the US to advocate for an end to nuclear weapons.
Diana also worked as research director for 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, and as Assistant to the first woman president of Oberlin College. She has been lucky to have worked with strong women who have served as role models for her work. Now retired, she remains active in peace work, as well as volunteering in her home community.
