Mona Shaw

Mona Shaw became a member of the Des Moines Catholic Worker Community in August, 2007. A well-known human rights activist Shaw is a fourth-generation Iowan and was born in Burlington, Iowa, in a socially stigmatized tenement neighborhood called Flint Hills Manor. Shaw became a social justice activist in 1961, when she was ten-years-old, and she worked in a strike kitchen and walked the picket line during a labor union strike at the Champion Spark Plug factory where her mother was employed. This led to Mona's involvement in the civil rights movement while she was in high school in the 1960s. A few years later, she became active in anti-war efforts, the women's movement, and is perhaps best-known for her work for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender equality.

In the 1990s her experience s with class bigotry, especially within academic institutions, led her to develop workshops on class as a cultural construction or, as she calls it, “American Apartheid.” After becoming disillusioned with electoral politics and witnessing increasing corruption and greed within social justice and other non-profit organization, Shaw took a short sabbatical from activism and returned to the texts of teachers like Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, jr., Mary Harris Jones, Dorothy Day, and Gandhi.

In 2005, she founded the School for Moral Courage as a place that would foster these teachings as a basis for life and work, and, the following year she adopted a lifestyle of voluntary poverty to more fully practice those principles.

Shaw is also a writer and currently divides her time between living and working in the Des Moines Community as well as living and continuing her work in Iowa City. She is the mother of two grown sons and a grandmother.

Some of Shaw’s Writings

Witness from the Fence

a blog that appears on the Iowa City Press-Citizen newspaper website.

MonaShaw.com

Links to some past columns written by Mona are on this site.

Shaw with Renee Espeland (on the left) and Carla Dawson (on the right) at the occupation of Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters, Nov. 2007.

(Photo by Sean Michael Gillespie.)

Renee Espeland and Mona Shaw holding signs at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, November, 2007.

(Photo by Sean Megan.)

Mona at the occupation of Mike Huckabee’s campaign headquarters, Dec. 31, 2007.