Welcome to the conversation!


Welcome to the conversation!

Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1811-1896) best-selling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), made her the most famous American woman of the 19th century and galvanized the abolition movement before the Civil War.

The Stowe Center is a 21st-century museum and program center using Stowe's story to inspire social justice and positive change.

The Salons at Stowe programs are a forum to connect the challenging issues (race, gender and class) that impelled Stowe to write and act with the contemporary face of those same issues. The Salon format is based on a robust level of audience participation, with the explicit goal of promoting civic engagement. Recent topics included: Teaching Acceptance; Is Prison the New Slavery; Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North; Creativity and Change; Race, Gender and Politics Today; How to be an Advocate

This blog will expand the reach of these community conversations to the online audience. Add your posts and comments to keep the conversation going! Commit to action by clicking HERE to stay up to date on Salon and social justice news.

For updates on Stowe Center programs and events, sign up for our enews at http://harrietbeecherstowe.org/email.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Meet the panelists for "Inspiring Action: Real Stories of Social Change" on Thursday, June 5 at 4pm


The community and student activists are invited to join the Stowe Center for Inspiring Action: Real Stories of Social Change, a free public program at Immanuel Congregational Church preceding the Big Tent Jubilee this Thursday, June 5, 2014. The program will include an Inspiration to Action Fair with Hartford-area activists and organizations from 3:00-4:00pm, and a panel discussion from 4:00-5:30pm. The panel will feature a dialogue with Student Stowe Prize winners Madeline Sachs and Donya Nasser, as well as JoAnn H.Price of Fairview Capital and Patricia Russo of the Women’s Campaign School at Yale University. 

The conversation will be moderated by WNPR's John Dankosky.You can learn more about Madeline and Donya in last week's blog posts, and about Ms. Price, Ms. Russo and Mr. Dankosky below. RSVPs are strongly encouraged and can be made by emailing Info@StoweCenter.org or calling 860-522-9258, ext. 317. Don't miss this outstanding Stowe Center program!











JoAnn Price is the co-founder and managing partner of Fairview Capital Partners, a leading private equity investment management firm in Hartford. Her professional career has pioneered significant change in the way institutional investors approach diversity in hiring and the availability of capital to underrepresented groups. Her activism as a community leader is similarly change-making, formed in part by her education at Howard University in Washington DC, then the epicenter of black intellectual thought on social issues. As a business leader and mentor, Price leads by example, encouraging her colleagues to apply their talents to the community through board memberships and voluntarism with a wide variety of non-profit organizations.Price is admired for her leadership and well-known for her energy, her enthusiasm and her generosity.

She serves on the boards of the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, the Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford Communities That Care and the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame and is a member of the Howard University Board of Visitors and Vice Chairman of the Apollo Theater Foundation in New York City. Price is active with Goodworks, an organization that provides business attire for women making the transition back into the community from incarceration. She is also an ordained Deacon.




Patricia Russo is a nationally respected leader focused on improving the quality of life for women in Connecticut and the United States. For over twenty five years she has held numerous leadership positions in public, private and not for profit organizations centered on women’s rights and has also held leadership positions on federal, state and local political campaigns. 

Russo is the Executive Director of the Women’s Campaign School at Yale University, a nonpartisan, issue neutral political campaign training program for women interested in running for public office, and for women interested in campaign management. She is also a member of the Council of Women’s Health Research at Yale University and chairs its Philanthropy and Communications Committee. 

She is a member of the national leadership team of Political Parity, a bi partisan initiative dedicated to increasing the number of women in elected office and served twenty three years as a member of Connecticut’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW), including eight years as its Chair. She is an honorary member of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women.

Russo is the founder of the Connecticut Women’s Agenda, co-founder of the Women’s Business Development Council of Connecticut and co-founder of the Connecticut NARAL Foundation. She has received numerous awards and citations for her leadership in the area of women’s rights.




John Dankosky is News Director of WNPR and Host of Where We Live. He started working in radio at WDUQ Pittsburgh in 1988, and has spent most of his career in public media.

Since coming to Connecticut in 1994, he’s helped to build WNPR’s award-winning newsroom - cultivating one of the most talented news staffs in public radio. He has reported for NPR on politics, economic redevelopment, drug crime, assisted suicide, tribal recognition, immigration and a surprising number of stories about sports. He’s also worked as an editor at NPR in Washington, and as a fill-in host for NPR’s Science Friday in New York.

John has won national and local awards for his reporting, and Where We Live has twice been honored by PRNDI as public radio’s “Best Call-In” Show. He’s also won awards for editing nationally distributed documentaries on care for the chronically ill, the evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11, and the mental health of children. 

In 2010, John accepted an appointment as the Robert C. Vance Endowed Chair in Journalism and Mass Communication at Central Connecticut State University, having previously served as an adjunct journalism professor at Quinnipiac University. He has hosted countless political debates, along with live panel discussions for The Connecticut Forum, the Mark Twain House and Museum and The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.

John is a native of Pittsburgh who tells anyone he meets about the Steelers, the Pirates, the Penguins, The Andy Warhol Museum and Primanti Brothers sandwiches. He lives in Winsted with his wife Jennifer, and cat, Dirk.

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