Barbara Lubin is the founder and Executive Director of the Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA), an organization which since 1988, has delivered millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to children's clinics, hospitals, schools and women's organizations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Iraq. For her efforts on behalf of these children, the Union of Palestinian Women's Associations in North America honored her with a special award in 1990.
Lubin has also worked with Voices in the Wilderness, to deliver tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical supplies to Iraq, in open defiance of U.S. sanctions, and has traveled back to Iraq several times on humanitarian missions. Lubin has also traveled throughout the Occupied West Bank and Gaza and Palestinian towns in Israel, witnessing what is being called the "New Intifada." (In Arabic, intifada means "changing things from the roots.")
Lubin regularly leads fact-finding delegations to the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel, bringing hundreds of people from the United States to the Middle East to learn first-hand about the realities there. With slides and stories, she brings her eyewitness account of the Israeli occupation and the situation in the Middle East to U.S. audiences, mobilizing people to fight for peace with justice. She works tirelessly to educate the U.S. people about both the impact of Washington's military and political policies on the Iraqi and Palestinian people, including the silent weapons like sanctions which in Iraq killed over 500,000 children, some 5,600 children each month.
On September 30, 2000, the American Muslims of America presented Lubin with the Service to Humanity Award at their 51st annual conference. The award cited her as a "unique individual with an inextinguishable love for fellow beings, children in particular, and for capacity to transcend religious boundaries."
Lubin, a mother of four children including a son with Down's Syndrome, has also been at the forefront of the struggle for equal access to education for disabled children. As a children's advocate in the early 1970s, she filed lawsuits against school districts to provide free appropriate education for disabled children. Later she served on the city of Berkeley School Board. She also founded and directed Project PLAE, a summer program that brought together both disabled and able-bodied children in barrier-free environments where they could learn to play and work together.
