November Branch Program
November 19, 2025
Ann Arbor City Club
11:30 AM Lunch (Registration required)
12:30 Presentation (Free)
Topic: I can’t believe we have to do this sh*t over again…
Speaker: Jan BenDor
Sally Haines, Program Vice President, will introduce Jan BenDor, a renowned women’s rights activist, who will lead an interactive call to action on women’s issues under the Trump administration. The call will be to counter the cruel authoritarian climate we are facing on many fronts, not just the current administration in Washington.
None of us expected we would have people in power calling for women to lose the right to vote or telling states that their programs to protect the poor and disabled “must end now.”
Jan has been a social justice activist since grade 8, protesting against local segregation as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Southern Illinois. The next year, she spoke up for women’s reproductive rights at a national youth conference and almost got the votes to pass a resolution in support of legalizing abortion. While a graduate student at U-M, Jan organized women to address the widely feared threats to women’s safety in Washtenaw County during the late 1960s serial rape murders by John Norman Collins. She was a co-founder of the Women’s Crisis Center in 1971.
In 1974, Jan led the Michigan Women’s Task Force on Rape that wrote and lobbied through the legislature a comprehensive reform of state laws on sexual assault. She joined the board of Safe House in 1986
and helped pass a county millage to fund a new domestic violence prevention shelter and center in1992.
Jan was a social work practitioner and administrator for many years and an adjunct instructor in the EMU School of Social Work. She was elected to the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 1991 for her achievements in preventing violence against women.
She continues to make “good trouble” as a member of the National Council of Gray Panthers Networks, the successor to Maggie Kuhn’s Gray Panthers, which unites Age and Youth in Action.