Next week, on Wednesday, October 19, GAP is set to host the American Whistleblower Tour: Essential Voices for Accountability at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) School of Social Work. This event will be held in conjunction with the school’s First Annual Social Justice Week.
The UT-Austin Tour stop is highlighted by an open-forum interview with peanut butter/salmonella outbreak whistleblower Kenneth Kendrickand GAP Tour Director Dana Gold. This event will begin at 6 p.m. at Utopia Theatre at the School of Social Work.
Kendrick, a former assistant plant manager at Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), blew the whistle on the company’s numerous public health violations. Salmonella-tainted peanut butter originating from PCA sickened hundreds of people across the United States in 2008-09. Although the widespread contamination was traced to a single plant in Georgia, it was Kendrick’s whistleblowing on Good Morning America that belied PCA’s defense that the batch of peanut butter from the Georgia plant was an unexpected and isolated event.
This interview seeks to educate students on how whistleblowing can promote greater organizational effectiveness, accountability, and social justice.
Social Justice Week seeks to bring faculty, staff, students, and the community together for education, discussion and the advancement of social justice. The UT-Austin stop is only the second of our Tour, which is set to visit at least nine other campuses in the 2011-12 school year. The Tour kicked off three weeks ago at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which included a full day of events. The day culminated in a highly captivating panel discussion on ethics and whistleblowing that drew an audience of 2,000 people.
For more info on the UT-Austin Tour stop, click here.
Heather Hoffman is the American Whistleblower Tour Coordinator for the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.