1. Leymah Roberta Gbowee was born on 1 February 1972 and is a Liberian peace activist responsible for leading a women's non-violent peace movement, Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace that helped bring an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003.
Leymah Gbowee was born in central Liberia on 1 February 1972.
Leymah Gbowee did a three-month training, which led her to be aware of her own abuse at the hands of the father of her two young children, son Joshua "Nuku" and daughter Amber.
Leymah Gbowee fled with her three children, riding a bus on credit for over a week "because I didn't have a cent," back to the chaos of Liberia, where her parents and other family members still lived.
In 1998, in an effort to gain admission to an associate of arts degree program in social work at Mother Patern College of Health Sciences, Leymah Gbowee became a volunteer within a program of the Lutheran Church in Liberia operating out of St Peter's Lutheran Church in Monrovia, where her mother was a women's leader and Leymah Gbowee had passed her teenage years.
Leymah Gbowee studied and worked her way toward her associate of art degree, conferred in 2001, while applying her training in trauma healing and reconciliation to try to rehabilitate some of the ex-child soldiers of Charles Taylor's army.
Leymah Gbowee obtained an Associate of Arts degree in social work from Mother Patern College of Health Sciences in Monrovia, Liberia, and subsequently graduated with a Master of Arts in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Leymah Gbowee received a certificate in Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding Training from the United Nations Institute for Training, the Healing Victims of War Trauma Center in Cameroon, and Non-Violent Peace Education in Liberia.
Leymah Gbowee is the founder and president of Leymah Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, founded in 2012 and based in Monrovia, which provides educational and leadership opportunities to girls, women and the youth in Liberia.
Leymah Gbowee served as the commissioner-designate for the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
From 2012 to 2014, Leymah Gbowee served on the High-Level Task Force for the International Conference on Population and Development, co-chaired by Joaquim Chissano and Tarja Halonen.
Leymah Gbowee speaks internationally to advance women's rights, and peace and security.
In 2016, Leymah Gbowee spoke at a protest march organized by Women Wage Peace, a political grassroots group working to advance a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine.
Leymah Gbowee is an outspoken supporter of fellow Liberian Ebenezer Norman's non-profit organization A New Dimension of Hope, a foundation which builds schools in Liberia.
Leymah Gbowee was the one who announced the launch of WIPNET in Liberia and named Gbowee as coordinator of Liberian Women's Initiative.
Leymah Gbowee positioned her face to be seen by Taylor but directed her words to Grace Minor, the president of the senate and the only female government official present:.
In June 2003, Leymah Gbowee led a delegation of Liberian women to Ghana to put pressure on the warring factions during the peace-talk process.
Yet Leymah Gbowee wrote of their unceasing nervousness about the fragility of the peace they had helped birth:.
Leymah Gbowee expressed particular concern for the "psychic damage" borne by Liberians:.
Thelma Ekiyor encouraged Leymah Gbowee to overcome her lack of self-esteem among "highly intelligent people who held master's degrees and represented powerful institutions" by reading and studying further to understand the theories circulating in the world of peacebuilding.
Leymah Gbowee read The Peace Book by Louise Diamond, known for advocating multi-track diplomacy, and The Journey Toward Reconciliation and The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, both written by John Paul Lederach, the founding director of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University.
Leymah Gbowee went to a USAID conference in New York, her first trip out of Africa, to a conference in South Africa, and to Switzerland where she dealt with the Nigerian in charge of UN programs in Liberia.
Leymah Gbowee studied with Hizkias Assefa, whose writings she had read five years earlier when she first began working for St Peter's Lutheran Church on trauma healing.
Leymah Gbowee studied with Howard Zehr, "who taught me the concept of restorative justice," whereby healing occurred through the joint efforts of victims and offenders to repair the harms done.
In September 2006, just as Leymah Gbowee was embarking on her first full semester of graduate school, she went to New York City to address the UN on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the passage of Resolution 1325, which dealt with protecting women from gender-based violence and involving them in UN-linked peace efforts.
Leymah Gbowee is the father of her sixth child, a daughter named Jaydyn Thelma Abigail, born in New York City on 2 June 2009.
Leymah Gbowee expressed her usage of religious songs, traditional songs, and other songs that was sung by her women counterparts, Muslim women.
Leymah Gbowee used religion and spirituality as strategies to rally women for ending Liberia's two civil wars.
Leymah Gbowee perceive Christianity to be very self-serving and crucial to the social and cultural realities of the Liberian people.
Leymah Gbowee believes that for adequate results to be seen in conflict situations, especially the ones in which she was involved in, prayer had to occupy center stage.
Leymah Gbowee has used religion to achieve many of her activist roles throughout her traveling career and teaching in healing spaces.
One aspect of Leymah Gbowee using religion and faith as a form of mothering is by using it as a resource to help whoever she is helping feel connected.
Leymah Gbowee used her faith and beliefs, especially the bible to help them understand their shared experiences and trauma.
Religion and the bible enabled Leymah Gbowee to convey her vision to Liberian women with different creeds.
However, for Leymah Gbowee, building a stronger community amongst women that will put them at the forefront of such a major movement for the end of wars and not limiting her beliefs to just Christianity, is a tactic she encouraged.
Leymah Gbowee came from a mixed religious and spiritual community where her parents were Christians, but their close friends and neighbors were Muslims.
Leymah Gbowee had worked in multiple healing spaces, for example, the Trauma Healing Office, where she traveled around Liberia to different communities, trying to educate people on how to deal with their traumas.
Leymah Gbowee felt as if this is her calling from God.
Leymah Gbowee is not able to mother her children the way she wanted, and to her, apart from her children, not losing faith is most important for her.
Religion and spirituality for Leymah Gbowee are considered essential in the peace coalition and the healing of everyone and everywhere.
Leymah Gbowee believes that to overcome injustices that take over people's livelihood and the way they live their day to day lives, it calls for true believers.
In terms of her contributions to the conceptions of violence, Leymah Gbowee used her faith to emphasize the importance of non-violence approaches.
Leymah Gbowee used women who are strong in faith and who have struggles with close contact with acts of violence although all were in a larger sense.
Leymah Gbowee told the EMU students that she went from being an angry, broke, virtually homeless, 25-year-old mother of four children with no idea of what her future might be, to listening to the voice of God in 1997.
Leymah Gbowee said God spoke to her through a five-year-old boy, a son whom she had nicknamed Nuku.
Leymah Gbowee said she began taking one tiny step at a time, asking for God's help with each step.
Leymah Gbowee is the narrator and central character in the 2008 documentary film Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which consists of scores of film and audio clips from the war period.
In July 2011, EMU announced that Leymah Gbowee had been named its "Alumna of the Year".
In 2022, Leymah Gbowee was a Bartels World Affairs Fellows at Cornell University, giving the annual Bartels World Affairs Lecture.