David Goodner was born February 1, 1981, at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City, Iowa. He graduated from Iowa City City High School in 1999, worked full-time at a dead-end office job for six years until he could afford to go to college, and finally graduated from the University of Iowa in 2009 with a degree in international studies and human rights.
David moved into the Des Moines Catholic Worker community on July 1, 2009 after several years as a campus organizer and human rights activist at the University of Iowa. David says that he was a rebel without a cause until he awoke from his apolitical slumber on September 11, 2001. He credits socially conscious rap music and the book, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, for helping to form his early political beliefs, an awareness that was cultivated more fully after he helped found the University of Iowa Antiwar Committee and was taken under the wing of his mentor, the radical former priest and co-founder of the Des Moines Catholic Worker Frank Cordaro.
David first risked arrest alongside the Des Moines Catholic Worker in February 2006 at a direct action outside of the White House in Washington D.C. He has been busted six times for nonviolent civil disobedience, including once in East Jerusalem in occupied Palestine on Christmas Day, 2009. David spent three weeks in occupied Palestine as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement in December 2009 and also traveled twice to Colombia for a total of fifteen weeks in the summer and winter of 2008 to provide protective accompaniment to internally displaced Afro-Colombian subsistence farmers at risk of violence by state and paramilitary security forces. He also risked arrest at the 2008 RNC in St. Paul, Minnesota as part of a nonviolent "mobile blockade brigade" with the Campus Antiwar Network.
In addition to his duties as a member of the Des Moines Catholic Worker community, David is also a rural community organizer with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a grassroots, statewide community organization with more than 3,200 members in 97 of Iowa's 99 counties. Iowa CCI's main program issue areas are factory farming and the environment, housing and financial safety, immigrant rights and workers justice, voter-owned clean elections, and other neighborhood-based issues.
David Goodner
515-288-4326David Goodner volunteered with the International Solidarity Movement (www.palsolidarity.org) in the Occupied Territories of Palestine from December 10 to January 2. His blog about his trip may be read at: www.fromporktopalestine.blo gspot.com.
