Gbowee is the founder and president of 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. In addition, Gbowee is the former executive director of the
Women Peace and Security Network Africa, based in
Accra,
Ghana, which builds relationships across the West African sub-region in support of women's capacity to prevent, avert, and end conflicts. She is a founding member and former coordinator of the Women in Peacebuilding Program/West African Network for Peacebuilding (WIPNET/WANEP). From 2012 to 2014, Gbowee served on the High-Level Task Force for the
International Conference on Population and Development, co-chaired by
Joaquim Chissano and
Tarja Halonen. In 2013, she became an Oxfam Global Ambassador. Gbowee speaks internationally to advance women's rights, and peace and security. In 2016, 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. Gbowee is also an outspoken supporter of fellow Liberian
Ebenezer Norman's
non-profit organization
A New Dimension of Hope, a foundation which builds schools in Liberia. In May 2015, she wrote personal letters to the contributors of NDhope's
crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo and has spoken at their events. As of April 2017, Gbowee is also Executive Director of the Women of Peace and Security Program at AC4,
Earth Institute,
Columbia University. Gbowee is also a contributor at
The Daily Beast.
Involvement in trauma healing In the spring of 1999, after Gbowee had been at the Trauma Healing project for a year, Doe was the executive director of Africa's first regional peace organization, the
West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), which he had co-founded in 1998 in Ghana. Encouraged by the Lutheran reverend she calls "BB", Gbowee began reading widely in the field of peacebuilding, notably reading
The Politics of Jesus by
Mennonite theologian
John Howard Yoder, and works by "
Martin Luther King Jr. and
Gandhi and the Kenyan author and conflict and reconciliation expert
Hizkias Assefa."
Leading a mass women's movement In the spring of 2002, Gbowee was spending her days employed in trauma-healing work and her evenings as the unpaid leader of WIPNET in Liberia. Her children, now including an adopted daughter named Lucia "Malou" (bringing the number of children to five), were living in Ghana under her sister's care. Following a WIPNET training session in Liberia, Women would also oppose the war by fasting and going to government buildings to picket. and another newer rebel group, MODEL. At first the women sat in a daily demonstration outside the posh hotels where the negotiators met, pressuring for progress in the talks. "But what we [women] did marked the beginning of the end."
Consolidating the peace Recognizable in their white WIPNET T-shirts, Gbowee and the other Liberian women activists were treated as national heroines by Liberians in the streets for weeks following the signing of the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Amid the destruction and unending needs, Gbowee was appalled by the arrogance, ignorance and overall cultural insensitivity of the United Nations agencies dispatched to help disarm the country, keep the peace, establish procedures for democratic governance, and initiate rebuilding efforts. "People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, ''but they're not stupid'' (Gbowee's emphasis). They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked." who did not agree that the three women owned the WIPNET branch of WANEP and thus would not let it spin off. Abigail Disney stepped up to help Gbowee raise funds for launching WIPSEN among philanthropists in New York, enabling her to secure $50,000 in seed money.
Personal life and struggles By the time Gbowee finished her coursework at EMU on 30 April 2007, and returned to her children in Liberia in May 2007 – where her parents had been caring for them – she realized that her nine months away "nearly broke all of us." In Virginia, she had lived with "a cold that never went away" and she "felt panic, sadness, and cold, swirling blackness" as she faced "being sued by former friends at WANEP over our desire to move in a new direction." Her impending graduate degree (conferred at the end of 2007), growing fame, and other changes in her life strained the relationship she had with a Liberian man named Tunde, an employee of international agencies who had functioned as a father figure for her children for a decade, from the early period of the Liberian women's peace movement through Gbowee's graduate studies at EMU (for which he had paid the tuition). They broke up and by early 2008 Gbowee was in a relationship with a Liberian information technology expert whom she identifies as James. He is the father of her sixth child, a daughter named Jaydyn Thelma Abigail, born in New York City on 2 June 2009. In April 2008, when Gbowee's family and friends gathered to celebrate the 14th birthday of her eldest daughter, Amber, it was clear that Gbowee had developed a serious alcohol problem. In her memoir, Gbowee explains that she had turned to alcohol for about a decade to cope with the loneliness of constant separations from her family, the strain of poverty and war-engendered trauma she suffered from, and the stress of never-ending demands on her time. During Amber's birthday party, Gbowee's children noted that she drank 14 glasses of wine. The next day, she passed out. When again conscious, suffering from an ulcer, she begged James to take her to the doctor: "Then I saw the kids gathered around us, their terrified, helpless faces. After all their losses, this would be the final one. No. Not possible. It might sound too easy, but that was the end for me. I still don't sleep easily and I still wake up too early, but I don't drink anymore." ==Religious views==