Summer 1983: Chet Tchozewski, Karen Gruber, Jeri Brown, Sally Dowiatt, Rich Stafford, and LeRoy Moore resolve to create a peace center in Boulder. These six become the founders.

Original commitments of the Center: Nonviolent action as the method for social change and as a way of life; nonviolence training for direct action; consensus decision-making; non-hierarchical internal structure; work to end structural violence; multi-issue organization.

October 1983: Encirclement of Rocky Flats

October 1983: Office rented in the basement of Center for United Ministries, now the Boulder Mennonite Church, 1520 Euclid, Boulder

Center incorporated as Boulder Peace Center

Name changed to Rocky Mountain Peace Center

January 1984: Adoption of bylaws constituting the Rocky Mountain Peace Center.

Application to IRS for 501(c)(3)status

Formation of Board of Trustees.

April 15, 1984: Official opening of RMPC, with a reception held at 1520 Euclid.

1984: beginning of the project on war tax resistance, an activity of education and counseling that has continued to the present.

First project: study groups on nonviolence, on US/Soviet relations

"Peace by peace" op-ed series: For about three years, op-eds written on a wide range of topics written by associates of RMPC were sent to newspapers all across the country. Many were published. We had expected this to generate income for RMPC, but quickly learned that newspapers rarely pay for opinion pieces and that right-wing think-tanks flooded them with free articles.

Summer 1984: RMPC helps plan and co-sponsors the first national conference on nonviolence in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Fall, 1984-Fall 1985: RMPC moves from 1520 Euclid (the building was put up for sale by the Ministries in Higher Education) to a downtown location in what is now a portion of the upper level of the Boulder Bookstore.

November 1984: Principles of the RMPC adopted. Statement called "Aspects of Peace and Peacemaking" adopted. See box and November 1993.

Spring, 1985: Study group on feminism and nonviolence

May 1985: LeRoy travels to Soviet Union, meets with people from the semi-official Soviet Peace Committee as well as members of the dissident Moscow Trust Group, a small group in constant trouble with Soviet authorities.

Summer 1985: RMPC sponsors Belgian author and nonviolence trainer, Pat Patfoort, in what became the first of a series of events in which we continued to sponsor her visits and to organize training workshops in various locations throughout the state. Pat still comes to Boulder once each year as our guest.

Summer 1985 and 1986: RMPC sponsors regional retreats on nonviolence, one in Nebraska in 1985, another near Bailey, CO, in 1986.

August 1-10, 1985: Peace camp for nuclear disarmament on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, held on rented land near the west gate of Rocky Flats, with workshops, vigils, music, poetry.

Fall, 1985: RMPC returns to 1520 Euclid, which had been purchased by the Boulder Mennonite Church.

Fall 1985: First of a series of study groups on US intervention in Central America offered by RMPC over a period of three years. Many local Central America activists got their basic education on the issue in these study groups.

Fall, 1985: Gandhi/Marx study group. This group still meets.

1988: Beginning of RMPC's very active Central America program.

December 1990: RMPC Caravan to El Salvador led by Hank Brusselback and Gaia Mika.

August 9, 1987: Large Nagasaki Day civil disobedience blockade at Rocky Flats, causing Rocky Flats plant to be shut down for the day.

December 1987: LeRoy participates in the Glasnost Human Rights Conference convened in Moscow by dissidents and former political prisoners, the first such event allowed in the USSR.

1987: RMPC initiates efforts to create a Green movement in Colorado.

1987: First edition of the Citizen's Guide to Rocky Flats, written by Marcia Klotz, was published by RMPC.

1987-1988: Series of RMPC-sponsored backcountry hike-in actions at the Nevada Test Site to try to halt tests of nuclear bombs. Mother Jones published a cover-story on one of these actions.

1988: Publication of Communities of Conversation and Action, a manual on organizing for social change, written as a group project.

1988: RMPC co-sponsors and provides training for efforts to stop the CIA from recruiting on the CU campus.

1988-1989: Working with an armed grassroots Mexicano group in Tierra Amarilla, NM, to help them retain ancestral land. Our commitment was to provide a nonviolent buffer between them and the armed state troopers. This effort eventually was successful; they retained the land and built a cultural center on it.

July-August 1989: After the June 6, 1989, FBI raid on Rocky Flats to collect evidence of violation of environmental laws, a small group met with Gov. Roy Romer and urged him to act before July 4 to call for a halt to production at RF until it could be shown to be safe. When he failed to do this, on July 5 LeRoy began a water-only "fast in solidarity with the victims of Rocky Flats" at the State Capitol; he fasted 24 days, then passed the fast on to the Buddhist monk Gyoshen Sawada, who fasted the 12 additional days till Nagasaki Day, August 9. The fast got constant media attention. Many people participated for a few hours or a few days. Visitors from all over the US and many other countries stopped by to talk about Rocky Flats.

1989-1992: sustained effort to stop resumption of production at Rocky Flats, where production had been "temporarily" suspended following the June 1989 FBI raid. Working very closely with a key group of activists from other organizations, we persuaded Senator Wirth and Rep. Skaggs to vote against special funding to renovate the plutonium recovery facilities at Rocky Flats. Words about ending production of a specific warhead in Pres. Bush's State of the Union address in January 1992 informed both peace activists and Rocky Flats workers that production at the site would end permanently. Soon after, the mission of the facility was changed from production to cleanup.

January 1991: Large-scale civil disobedience opposing the Gulf War.

1991-1992: Initiation of several "Allies" programs - with Gay, Lesbians and Bisexuals; with prisoners; with Native Americans. Within a couple of years all these programs except what came to be called the "Prisoner Rights Project" either ended or were spun off as separate entities.

Summer 1991: RMPC becomes a membership organization conceived as a cooperative in which power rests with members gathered into various collectives. The intent of these changes is to realize within the structure of RMPC the kind of organization we want for the human future. As part of this change, we change the name of our board of directors to spokescouncil.

1992: Publication of the much enlarged, completely rewritten second edition of the Citizen's Guide to Rocky Flats.

May 1992: LeRoy travels to Chelyabinsk (site of the massive Mayak nuclear bomb factory) for a conference on environmental consequences of nuclear bomb production, an event sponsored by some of our Russian counterparts.

October 1992: Very active participation in the events of October 12, 1992, 500th anniversary of the landing of Columbus in the Western Hemisphere, calling for an end to celebration of Columbus Day.

Summer 1993: RMPC hosts four anti-nuclear environmental activists from the former Soviet Union for one week.

November 1993: Principles of RMPC revised (see November 1984 and box).

1994: RMPJC creates a food co-op which functions on a strictly volunteer basis for several years, until ???

1994: LeRoy participates in a conference calling for conversion to socially useful work of nuclear weapons design laboratories, held in Nizhny Novgorod, the city closest to Arzamas 16, the Soviet counterpart to Los Alamos. One highlight was visiting the house where the dissident Soviet bomb designer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner were kept under house arrest.

1995: Creation of the Middle East Peace Action Group

1996: RMPC plays a leading role in generating public opposition to the cleanup plan adopted for Rocky Flats in October.

1996: Name changed to Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center.

1997: Beginning of the International Relations Collective.

1997: After a riot on the Hill near the end of the academic year, RMPC works closely with city and university personnel to set up a program of nonviolent peacemakers on the streets at times of stress between students and police.

1997-2000: Under pressure from RMPC and others DOE decided to fund an independent scientific review of the cleanup levels adopted in 1996, out of which in Feb. 2000 came a proposal for a much more stringent cleanup.

April 1998: RMPC sponsors events honoring the 20th anniversary of the Rocky Flats Truth Force and the "year of disobedience" on the tracks at Rocky Flats, April 1978 - April 1979.

September20, 1998: Ray and Mary Sell recognized as Peacemakers of the Year.

1998: RMPC loses effort to prevent WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, NM) from opening.

October 1998: Ward Churchill and LeRoy Moore discuss and debate violence vs. nonviolence in work for social change.

September 11, 2001, and following: RMPJC very actively opposes the Bush administration's rush to war and curtailment of civil rights.

Fall 2001: RMPJC calls on DOE to clean Rocky Flats to the very stringent level required to protect a hypothetical subsistence farmer who may some day live and farm on the Rocky Flats site.

2002-2003: RMPJC sponsors or co-sponsors several events intended to foster dialogue and mutual understanding across the divide between Israelis and Palestinians and the supporters of both. RMPJC initiates Safety Net Group to protect those who human and civil rights are threatened due to 9 / 11, the Patriot Act, and escalating racism.

2003: The RMPJC Prisoner Rights Project is spun off as a separate organization.

December 2003-January 2004: RMPJC plays leading role in opposing the plan for cleanup of Rocky Flats put forward by DOE, EPA, and the Colo. Dept. of Public Health and Environment. In June 2003 these agencies essentially adopted what they had proposed, but the public record shows that 86% of the individuals and organizations that commented on their cleanup plan rejected it.

January-March 2004: RMPJC takes lead in opposing the rush to war.