Arvada-Based Peace Charity Feels Roseanne Barr Fallout

ARVADA, CO – Peacejam Foundation, a 20-year-old Arvada-based international charity, helped the City of Arvada log hundreds of volunteer hours in April with technical help from Google. The charity partners Nobel Peace Prize winners with young people around the world, and provides an online site to log charitable acts. Peacejam, through its "Billion Acts" campaign, is gearing up for its biggest event of the year, the International Day of Peace, Sept. 21.

But a celebrity controversy tangentially touching the organization has been anything but peaceful.

Brandi Brown, 47, non-profit publicist and director of the Billion Acts campaign, is a Denver-area native, and long-time resident.

Brown is also the biological first child of controversial ABC sitcom star Roseanne Barr, a child Barr gave up for adoption when she was 18. The outspoken Barr, now living in Hawaii, started her career as a Denver standup comedian and still comes to town from time to time.

Barr's complex career as sitcom star, business woman, and now Twitter cautionary tale has spilled over onto the causes she has supported, including Peacejam.

Angela Babala, a California-based television producer and co-owner of Angel's Garage have donated a 1968 refurbished Chevrolet Corvette, hologram-blue and violet, to Peacejam for the Vehicle for Peace car raffle. Ten-dollar chances are sold online, and a winner will be chosen in September. Babala's husband and she donate a restored classic car to a charity every year. Some car raffles earn more than $100,000 for the charity involved, she said.

She was, and still is, a huge Roseanne fan.

"[Roseanne] was the show for me in 1989 when I was a teenager," Babala said. She loved how "raw" Roseanne's comedy was in the 1990s. She even attended a live taping of the most recent Rosanne sitcom.

Angel's Garage donated the Corvette after Babala found out about Brandi Brown's charity through a Roseanne Twitter post on Brown's birthday. But that was May 16, two weeks before her mother posted an insulting tweet mocking former Obama administration member Valerie Jarett.

"Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj," Barr, an unabashed supporter of President Donald Trump, wrote in a now-deleted tweet. Although Barr apologized over Twitter, the tweet led to ABC's cancellation of the second revival season of the comedy actress' sitcom.

The grand prize drawing for the Corvette will take place Sept. 21 in front of the United Nations building in New York City.

Formerly, a celebrity of some sort would be involved with the drawing, but Babala said Barr is out of the picture. "We'll have to find someone else," she said. Angel's Garage had to refund money to a vendor who had given a discount on paint for the Corvette, after they wanted to pull out of the project citing Barr's involvement, she said.

Brown offered to decline the car donation, Babala said, but Angel's Garage wouldn't hear of it.

"I in no way condone what [Barr] said on Twitter," said Babala. "I voted for Obama. But I just wish people weren't so divisive. I come from a different generation where you made a slip and you got a second chance. It's a different time now," she said.

As for Brown, who has headed Peacejam for three years, she says her organization finds ways to find common ground among ordinary people to work on social problems.

"In our culture that we’re so divided and really change comes when we find out what unites us," she said.

Brown is very close to her birth-mother, she said, and was shocked at the reaction to Roseanne's Twitter fiasco and the fallout.

"I can’t really speak for her, " Brown said. "What it felt like to me having a front row seat, watching other people attack somebody you love. It’s painful and gives me perspective and makes me what to do this work even more.

"It’s bad that 12 words can erase 30 years of someone being an activist," she added. "I think that’s a shame."

Although Barr has advocated for, and help spread the word about, Peacejam, Brown said she is not connected to the organization in any way, other than as a cheerleader.

"[Barr] has no connection to us. Chips will fall where they will," Brown said. Peacejam is about ordinary people working together to solve complicated problems, she said.

"We have over a million social media followers, most of those who wake up every day and try to change the world in a postive way," she said. The organization has logged "over 50 million acts of peace in 151 different countries," she added. "If you focus on solutions and solving problems it’s a game changer."