One of Doreen Stabinsky's pet peeves is the "jumping up and down and waving your hands model of activism.” In other words, change is not accomplished by protest alone. Instead, she says that activists must think carefully about the changes they want to make and plan strategically to accomplish them.

Doreen helps students do just that in her Practical Activism course at COA. In this class, students learn nuts and bolts strategies for creating change - from interacting with the media, to crafting a message through stories and pictures, to the step-by-step planning of an activist campaign. Doreen endeavors to help students recognize how much more change can accomplished through strategic planning•and she should know. In addition to teaching at COA, Doreen is a genetic engineering campaigner for Greenpeace International.

At Greenpeace, Doreen is part of an international coordination team implementing the genetic engineering and sustainable agriculture campaign. She and her colleagues develop resources and provide strategic and logistical support to Greenpeace offices throughout the world. Doreen provides direct support to offices in Mexico and Chile, using both her scientific background in genetics and her activist experience to help Greenpeace staff plan and implement campaigns in these countries.

Doreen became involved in the issues of genetic engineering and sustainable agriculture while pursuing her Ph.D. in genetics in the 1980s. Of these parallel concerns, she says, "When critiquing a new technology, you can't just say no to everything. You have to put forth a positive alternative vision. Sustainable agriculture is that vision. It's about producing environmentally safe and socially just ways of feeding people.”

Doreen has traveled to five continents advocating for responsible genetics and sustainable agriculture before the United Nations, the Pontifical Council on Peace and Justice, and other government entities. As an NGO observer and advocate, she participated in the development of the UN Convention on Biodiversity's Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. When meetings on the Cartagena Protocol resumed in Curitiba, Brazil in the spring of 2006, Doreen's students accompanied her to the negotiations where they had a chance to see her in action and gained valuable experience of their own.