Jody Williams

Jody Williams

 Jody Williams shared the $1 million 1997 Nobel Peace Prize with her six-year-old coalition, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which has helped persuade nearly 100 governments to support a treaty to end the production, sale and stockpiling of land mines and to clean up existing minefields around the world. The explosive devices, which can cost as little as $3 apiece and are strewn in places like Angola, Cambodia and Bosnia, are responsible for killing or brutally maiming some 26,000 people a year.

Williams is the daughter of a Vermont county judge and a mother who oversees housing projects. After earning a degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, she began her career as an activist, protesting U.S. policy in Central America in the early 1980s. Eventually she became the associate director of the Los Angeles-based humanitarian relief organization Medical Aid to El Salvador.

Williams was hired by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation in 1991 to form an anti-land mine coalition. "When we began, we were just three people sitting in a room," she said. "It was Utopia." The numbers grew quickly. The fruits of her labor resulted in the ICBL, an alliance of more than 1,000 anti-land mine groups. Early on, a participant predicted that it would take at least 30 years for a land-mine ban to be enacted.

Previously, she taught English as a Second Language (ESL) in Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Washington, D.C. She lives in Vermont, where she was born in 1950.

For More Information