Mona Shaw
Mona Shaw became a member of the Des Moines Catholic Worker Community in August, 2007. A 40-year human rights activist, Shaw is a fourth-generation Iowan, was born and raised 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, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender equality, and economic justice issues.
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 similar 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 embraced a lifestyle of voluntary poverty to more fully practice those principles.
She is the mother of two grown sons and a grandmother.
Some of Shaw’s Writings
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 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.
Cordaro and Shaw on Sabbatical
Mona Shaw and Frank Cordaro are on sabbatical until October 1, 2010. All inquiries about the Des Moines Catholic Worker should be sent to dmcatholicworker@gmail.com.
