Disarm Education Fund is a New York City-based international nonprofit organization founded in 1976 to build movements for peace, social justice, and human rights at home and around the world. In the 1980s, Disarm worked to end U.S. military aid to right-wing death squads in El Salvador and to the Contras in Nicaragua. We’ve partnered with grassroots organizations to promote human rights in Mexico and Guatemala. Now, together with Global Health Partners, Disarm is supporting community-based medical programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. We provide resources, training and North-South collaborations to promote sustainable public health systems throughout the region. Disarm has led efforts to end the U.S. embargo against Cuba, while delivering a remarkable $85 million worth of medicine and medical supplies to the island over the past 16 years. We provide training to Los Pipitos, Nicaragua’s innovative community-based program for children with developmental disabilities, and are launching a rural Safe Motherhood project in the country’s Matagalpa region. In 2012, Disarm and Global Health Partners will merge, and continue our joint programs under the Global Health Partners banner.

Disarm works to end the illegal, immoral U.S. embargo against Cuba with vigorous advocacy, including a focus on ending the travel ban that bars most Americans from visiting the island. We augment this broad-based advocacy with our Cuban Medical Project, a people-to-people humanitarian program that delivers desperately needed medicines and medical supplies to the Cuban people. Disarm partners with hospitals and community clinics throughout the island to provide aid ranging from basic supplies like surgical gloves and painkillers to scarce pediatric cancer drugs. We’ve arranged for more than two dozen surgical teams from across the United States to visit Cuba to help share skills with their Cuban counterparts; and we’ve taken several high-profile delegations to Cuba, including the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, and two former U.S. Surgeons General, in an effort to draw international attention to the embargo’s inhumane impact.

In Nicaragua, we partner with Los Pipitos, a community-based, parent-run national network of facilities and programs to build better lives for children with disabilities. Since 2007, Disarm/Global Health Partners has sent teams of volunteer occupational therapists, speech therapists, and graduate students from Texas Children’s Hospital, and Baylor and Columbia Universities to provide advanced training to Los Pipitos staff and parent caregivers.

Disarm Staff

Bob Schwartz
Executive Director
bschwartz@disarm.org

Howard Gressey
General Counsel
hgressey@disarm.org

Javier Bajaña
Director, Latin American Program
jbajana@disarm.org

Karen Gellen
Director of Communications
kgellen@disarm.org

Rachel Sheskier
Program Associate
rsheskier@disarm.org