Anne Bernstein Richan
1933 – 2000

Peacemaking was central to Ann Richan’s entire life.  As a teenager, she campaigned for a peace candidate for president, during the early stages of the Cold War.  In the 1960s, she was an active member of the Cleveland Area Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and did draft counseling there.  Soon after coming to Swarthmore with her family in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam conflict, she initiated a draft counseling service.  In 1981, Ann organized the Community Dispute Settlement Program of Delaware County (later named Center for Resolutions), which she administered for many years.  She was an active member of the Friends Conflict Resolution Program Working Group of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.  She had a leading role in the Central American Sanctuary Alliance (CASA) and the Sanctuary Committee of the Swarthmore Friends Meeting.  She worked with others to consolidate the disparate peace and social justice activities of the Meeting under the aegis of the Peace and Social Justice (Peace and Social Concerns) Committee.  For the last six years of her life, Anne devoted herself to the Alternatives to Violence Program (AVP), spending countless weekends leading workshops with the inmates at the Chester State Correctional Institution and the Gander Hill Maximum Security Prison in Wilmington.  During this time she also conducted AVP training in the community. Close to the time of death, she was still planning upcoming AVP training sessions. 

By nature a private person, Anne shunned the spotlight, preferring to do her peace work quietly, often behind the scenes.  Public speaking and lobbying did not come naturally to her, but she trained herself to do both because that was what was needed. But perhaps the thing that best characterizes Anne was her persistence in staying with a project, once she began it.  For example, she was one of a number of Swarthmore Meeting members who worked with the Meeting for almost a year to help it find unity on the issue of sanctuary for Central American refugees.  And long after other burning issues had drawn many of the initial CASA members elsewhere, she was part of a small band of activities who continued to work with and support a community of repatriated refugees in El Salvador.  As it was said of her at the time of her death, she never gave up on a task, once begun, nor on any human being.

Her loving and gentle nature permeated Anne’s whole being, as wife and companion to Will Richan throughout 45 years of married life, as mother to their four children and grandmother to her grandson, as the constant support for her parents in their late years, and as a good neighbor to those who knew and loved her.