Papers of Jennifer Claire Rader, 1984-2005 (inclusive), 1992-1993 (bulk)

Jennifer Claire Rader was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1964, to Wilma Kaufman Rader and Stephen Rader. Her mother was a labor arbitrator and her father was a physician. She had a twin sister, Allison, and an older brother, Andrew. In 1967 the family relocated to the Travis Air Force Base in California, where Stephen Rader served as a flight surgeon and psychiatrist; they settled in Berkeley, California, in 1970. Rader attended Berkeley High School and then Harvard University (BA, 1987). After her sophomore year at Harvard, she spent a year traveling in India and Nepal and working at a nature field school at Ein Gedi in Israel. Upon her return to Harvard, she enrolled in a program at the Harvard School of Education, receiving a teaching certificate in 1987 along with her undergraduate degree.

Rader lived and worked in Mexico and Guatemala from 1991 to 1993. In 1992, she began working with Guatemalan Mayan refugees in Southern Mexico, as part of a Witness for Peace project. Witness for Peace, a faith-based politically independent grassroots organization dedicated to changing United States policy towards Central American countries, was founded in 1983 in response to the Reagan administration's policies towards Nicaragua. The organization gradually expanded its work beyond Nicaragua to other Latin American and Caribbean countries, responding to calls from local partners to assist people affected by United States policies and corporate practices. In her application to the Witness for Peace program, Rader wrote, "I feel a compelling interest to work with Guatemalan refugees in their Mexican context. I am excited by the tremendous strength and vibrancy of their political and social organizations, their primary and secondary schools and especially the attention paid to process in these organizations and institutions as they attempt to make difficult choices amidst the harsh conditions and stresses of life in the camps." She and the rest of the Witness for Peace team assisted the refugees, who lived in United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) refugee camps, as they organized for a return to Guatemala.

After her return from Central America in 1993, Rader received an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She taught history and social sciences in a public high school in the San Francisco Bay Area and then initiated a health project at her public high school that she directed over twenty years. Over this time she returned to school and got an MSW (Humboldt State University), becoming a licensed clinical social worker in 2016. She remained involved with organizations working in Central American countries and in late 1996/early 1997, she coordinated a cultural exchange visit to Guatemala organized by the San Francisco Jewish Sanctuary Coalition. Rader and her wife Barb (her girlfriend at the time of her work with Witness for Peace) have two sons.