Resist Board and StaffBoard of Directors
Nikhil Aziz Board of Advisors (F Denotes founding member)Frank Brodhead Staff Members
Robin Carton BiographiesNikhil Aziz is Executive Director of Grassroots International (GRI) in Boston. Grassroots International is a human rights and international development organization that promotes global justice through partnerships with social change organizations through grantmaking, education and advocacy. Before joining GRI, Nikhil was Associate Director at Political Research Associates (PRA), where he led a team that studied the conservative movement and the political right in the United States. Nikhil previously taught human rights and international development at colleges in Colorado and Illinois. For his dissertation, he worked with India’s National Alliance of People’s Movements, an alliance of progressive movements for human rights and social and economic justice.As a gay, progressive, immigrant person of color, Nikhil has built collaborations with progressive activist and advocacy organizations nationwide and continues to speak, teach, and write on human rights, international development, and social change. In addition to sitting on the board of Resist, he is a board member of the Massachusetts Asians and Pacific Islanders for Health and the Denver-based Africa Today Associates. Almost thirty years later she is still raising money and, as a consultant, feels privileged to work with so many excellent groups and organizations doing social change work. In the late eighties, Cynthia, along with other members of the Reunion affinity group, helped make Somerville a Sanctuary City. She continues to be involved as a Board member of The Welcome Project at the Mystic Housing Development, founded during that period to organize with and advocate for immigrants and refugees in Somerville. A writer who seems to be making a shift from short stories to poetry, Cynthia is always trying to find more time to write. Robin Carton is both a staff and a Board member of Resist. She comes to Resist with a background in both grassroots political organizing and law. For 10 years she worked in the fields of child care and education, focusing on working conditions for staff and economic justice issues. Robin was also a litigator involved in civil rights and employment law struggles. In 1995, Robin joined the staff of Resist as the Grant and Fiscal Manager. She has been a Commissioner on the Somerville Human Rights Commission, a Board member of the Boston Women's Fund, and the Open Center for Children. In addition to her work with Resist, Robin teaches graduate seminars for Wheelock College on financial and legal management issues in child care. Pam Chamberlain has worked with feminist, anti-nuclear, AIDS prevention and lesbian and gay organizations over the past 35 years. An educator by trade, she has been a teacher, state bureaucrat and master trainer. She brings experience with public schools, community-based organizations and grassroots groups in Massachusetts and the Northeast. In recent years Pam has been involved in supporting the growing movement of lgbt young people and has helped publish material for activists concerning the increasing influence of the political right in the United States in areas such as public education, reproductive rights and immigration. Pam is committed to Resist funding small projects that are unable to attract funding from conventional sources. She hopes the grants will further the building of large scale progressive movements by supporting these small grassroots organizations. Noam Chomsky was one of the original members of Resist when it was the first national organization founded to support resistance to the Vietnam War and soon after to support a wide range of other forms of activism. He had been involved in many other anti-war activities in the years immediately preceding the founding of Resist. Since then his work has evolved around writing and speaking. Noam Chomsky is Professor of Linguistics, Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Semantics, Philosophy of Language at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kate Cloud first heard of Resist in 1978 while working with a small group of mothers on the issue of raising children in the shadows of nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons proliferation. A small grant from Resist offered help with child care and other expenses and more importantly signaled the encouragement of experienced activists. The book, Watermelons Not War! A Support Book for Parenting in the Nuclear Age (New Society Publishers, 1984) was the result of this effort. She joined the Resist Board in 1979, and moved to the Board of Advisors in early 2002. Kate has participated in various peace and justice activities including civil rights, anti-war, women's liberation and international solidarity movements. During the '80s she worked as a community organizer and educator on children's welfare issues such as education, abuse and neglect, and juvenile justice. During the '90s, she was the director of an agency serving battered women and their children. Ty dePass joined Resist's board in 2000. He is no stranger to community activism. An Afro-Cuban American born and raised in the Bronx, he was aware from an early age of discrimination and was involved in tenants organizations, low-income housing and the improvement of educational standards. Currently Ty is still concerned with educational reform-- particularly the impact of testing on Afro and Latino Americans--and is building a coalition across ethnic and language borders to resist the further erosion of special education and bilingual education. Ty is keen on the idea that Resist should focus on funding the organizing component of movements as the most effective means of increasing social change, and that where a service project is funded it should be as part of the strategic development of establishing a movement. He would like to see Resist assist projects that use the media to challenge the power structure more effectively than is done at present. Ty feels that the battle of ideas is being won by those able to utilize research and then access the media to spread their ideas--currently a battle that the Right is winning. Ty was Assistant Editor of the Non Profit Quarterly, which examines and analyzes public policy and provides information and education to the non profit sector. Ty is now attending the graduate school at Boston University. Leila Farsakh is a Palestinian political economist, and presently a research affiliate at the Center for International Studies at MIT, Cambridge and a research fellow at the Trans-Arab Research Institute. She holds a PhD from the University of London, and a M-phil from the University of Cambridge in the UK. She has worked with a number of organizations, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris (1993-1996) and the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute in Ramallah (1998-1999). She has published various articles and studies on issues related to the Palestinian economy and the Oslo Process, international migration and regional integration. She has also been active in a number of grassroots organizations, including the Boston Committee for Palestinian Rights, which she helped to found in 2000 and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's Massachusetts chapter. In 2001 she won the Peace and Justice Award from the Cambridge, MA Peace Commission. Norm Fruchter During the 1970s, Norm helped organize and direct an alternative high school for dropouts in Newark; a bachelor's degree program for public sector workers at Saint Peter's College in Jersey City, NJ; and a program to train parents to work for school improvement in a dozen New Jersey cities. During the 1980s, Norm conducted school change studies for Advocates for Children of New York (AFC), and evaluations of national school improvement programs for the Academy for Educational Development (AED). With several colleagues, Norm wrote Choosing Equality: The Case for Democratic Schooling (Temple University Press, 1987), which won the American Library Association's Oboler Prize for Intellectual Freedom. From 1987 to 1996, Norm was Program Advisor for Education at the Aaron Diamond Foundation, and helped develop the New Visions Project that produced almost 20 new, small New York City public secondary schools. With several AED colleauges, he wrote New Directions in Parent Involvement (AED, 1993). From 1983 to 1993, Norm served as elected member of Brooklyn district school board, the last four years as president. In 1966, he helped found the Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University; currently he serves as director. With Institute colleagues, Norm wrote Hard lessons: Public Schools and Privatization (The Twentieth Century Fund, 1996). Omar Henriquez served until recently as the Immigration Campaign Coordinator for the Service Employees International Union, SEIU Eastern Region. His efforts as coordinator were concentrated in a nation-wide campaign to achieve immigration benefits that will culminate in the legalization of all hard working, tax paying, undocumented workers. Before joining SEIU, Omar was the Youth and Immigrant Project coordinator for the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH). While there, he was instrumental in bringing to light the plight of undocumented immigrant workers cleaning up the area around the World Trade Center, and helping increase both their wages (which had been very low) and safety training (which had been non-existent). Omar has provided testimony on behalf of immigrant workers in both the Senate and the House. He supported the Ag-Jobs bill, which would have legalized about 600,000 immigrant workers in the agricultural field (a number which represents .6% of the approximately 10 million undocumented immigrants in the US), and organized a five-day fast to support the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would give green cards to illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children, allowing them to attend college in the U.S. In 2002 he organized the Reward Work Campaign, during which supporters sent more than one million postcards to President Bush asking for just that. Omar traces his involvement in immigrant labor issues to the Workplace Project, an immigrant workers' organization in Hempstead, Long Island, NY, where he worked as the project's first organizer. Omar was born in Central America and proudly states that he remained undocumented for two decades. Becca Howes-Mischel worked on staff at Resist from 2001-2003. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology at NYU where she examines the social, political, and religious impacts of prenatal technologies in the United States and Mexico. Her political consciousness was shaped from an early age by her parents' involvement in progressive politics through the 1970s- she spent her childhood at various demonstrations protesting US involvement in Central America. As a high school student in Los Angeles she became involved in multiracial student oppositions to California's racist propositions 187 and 209. In recent years her primary activism has been in the realm of reproductive rights, including sexual health education, sexual assault counseling, and abortion access organizing. When not making trouble, Becca has been a competitive swimmer and professional beach lifeguard. She dreams of dropping out of graduate school and becoming a caterer. Kendra Hoyt is a budding activist who was raised by a liberal mom from the 60s generation who worked for social justice and taught her daughter to speak out against unjust actions in the world around her. Kendra has challenged that injustice in a variety of ways throughout her life, including petitions against Apartheid in junior high school, leading an 800-student walkout in high school in support of teacher's rights in the city of Boston, and working for Mass Choice to secure a women's right to choose. Her most recent participation and organizing have been in the realm of anti-war efforts. She attended the rally in New York City on February 15th in protest of the War in Iraq; her account of this historic event, alongside her mother's, appeared in the February 19th Living section of the Boston Globe. She then assisted in the coordination and implementation of the citywide Anti-War Activism Conference for Youth at Harvard University on April 12th and marched with the Peace Pagoda Buddhists from Cambridge to the State House in protest of the war. Kendra recently accepted a position as Program Director at Freedom House in Roxbury, where she will be working alongside the leadership to empower individuals and groups to engage in social justice and change. Kendra earned a Bachelor Degree in Art Therapy from Emmanuel College and a Master of Science Degree in Criminal Justice from Northeastern University. Professionally, she began work as a pre-school teacher and later worked as an advocate, counselor and educator with Boston youth through the Department of Social Services, Boston Public Schools and a number of community-based youth programs. She also served as a consultant to the Boston Evening Academy and as a key member of the Program Department at Citizen Schools. Kendra enjoys traveling outside of the country and has learned much about social and cultural class structures from her time in Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Canada, and France. Frank Joyce has been the Director of Public Relations and Publications of the International Union, UAW since August 1990. Previously he served as assistant director for four-and-one-half years. His responsibilities include news media relations, the development of communications support for numerous UAW collective bargaining, organizing and legislative activities, and oversight of numerous UAW publications, website and electronic media productions. Prior to joining the UAW staff, Frank was news director at the Detroit NPR affiliate, WDET. He has extensive experience in print journaliam and as an independent radio and television news and documantary reporter, writer and producer, with credits from PBS, CBS, INN and CNN. Hans Koning was one of the founding members of Resist in 1967. Although it was the Vietnam War that initiated Resist, Hans was and is concerned with all politically radical issues. His many novels contain a strong social element, and on his successful radio program on WPKN he discusses the current state of books and the problems of publishing with other progressive and radical people. He is particularly pleased to have been asked to advise and comment on the current civil disobediance campaigns that have been growing post-Seattle. Hans values the diverse causes that Resist funds but is also concerned that Resist should continue to fund the most politically radical ideas and beware of funding issues that are now closer to the general liberal stream, even if all the problems surrounding them have not yet been overcome. Paul Lauter was one of the organizers of Resist in 1967 and later became its national director for a time. Before that momentous event, he had worked for the American Friends Service Committee as director of Peace Studies and as Peace Education Secretary in the Chicago region. During that period he was also active in SDS, for which he wrote a Guide to CO. He was active in the Civil Rights movement in Chester and in Mississippi during the summers of 1964 and 1965, and with Friends of SNCC thereafter. He also was the executive of the US Servicemen's Fund, and was one of the founders--and for 14 years the Treasurer--of The Feminist Press. Back in academe, Lauter taught for 17 years at the SUNY College at Old Westbury before coming to Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he now teaches. At Old Westbury, he was active in the SUNY Faculty/Staff union, and served for a time as the statewide vice president for academics, among other posts. Over the last two or three decades, he has tried to apply his political experience to his teaching and scholarly work, particularly in connection with changing the "canon" of American literature. That goal he has mainly tried to implement by organizing a revisionist anthology, the Heath Anthology of American Literature, now in its third edition. Lauter is a frequent speaker on issues of multiculturalism, the literary canon, politics and literature, and the like, both in this country and abroad. Among other professional posts, he was president of the American Studies Association (USA). June Lee, a recent addition to the Board of Advisors, joined the Board of Resist in 1997. At that time, she was working with a local progressive foundation, the Boston Women's Fund, which shares similar beliefs with Resist, especially around the idea that members of communities systemically left out of decision-making processes yet most affected by social and economic injustices should be supported as the leaders to address specific issues and change systems. Joining the Board of Resist gave June an opportunity to learn about a broad spectrum of issues since the funding was national and the issues extremely diverse, including national work on international issues. And given the activist backgrounds of other board members, she could also learn more about the local issues since she was relatively new to Boston. Prior to moving to Boston June worked at a university in Connecticut on issues of the retention, the survival and the success of students of color in higher education. In general June has a strong interest in communities of color and the issues that affect them, immigration issues and a growing interest in learning more about international perspectives and movements. Penn Loh served as a Board member for Resist between 1996 and 1998 before moving to the Board of Advisors. He is currently Associate Director of Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE), a non-profit law and education organization based in Roxbury, Massachusetts. His work at ACE continues his long-standing commitment to social justice and involvement in social change work. ACE works with residents of low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color to develop environmental leadership and build environmentally healthy and economically sustainable communities. Penn first became politically active in college at MIT in the late 1980s. He was involved in the anti-apartheid movement and in efforts to rid the university of military influence over research and education. He was also a core member of the Alternative News Collective, which still publishes the radical student paper, the Thistle. During a stint in Berkeley, Penn became involved in the environmental justice efforts in the Bay Area and worked with various groups including Nindakin: People of Color for Environmental Justice, the Political Ecology Group, and Urban Habitat Program. Penn holds a masters degree in environmental policy and science and has been previously employed by various non-profits, including Tellus Institute in Boston and the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, California. Kay Mathew works at City Life/Vida Urbana, a grassroots tenant organizing and affordable housing advocacy group in Boston. Over the past 15 years, Kay has worked for community organizing efforts in Boston, including organizing public school parents through Parents United for Child Care and Allston Brighton Healthy Boston Coalition. She has been active with other grassroots groups in Boston, including Proyecto Vida, Hawthorne Youth & Community Center and Spontaneous Celebrations, the creators of Wake Up the Earth. A former member of Students for a Democratic Society, Kay was active in the Anti-Vietnam War movement, and later became involved in prisoner rights and free school movements in the early 1970's in California. She helped to found and direct an alternative high school in the Bay Area that focused on building power for students, and education and advocacy for prisoners’ rights. She was a founding member of the Stanford University Women’s Center. A former documentary filmmaker, she has made films on issues related to women’s rights, disability rights and prisoners’ rights. In the 1970’s she was active with the Boston Women’s Bail Fund and later, in the 1980’s, Communicators for Nuclear Disarmament. Also in the 1980’s Kay organized artists as cultural workers through Artists’ Call Against Intervention in Central America, Arts for a New Nicaragua, working in solidarity with the Centros Populares de Cultura of Nicaragua, and cultural exchange with an artists' union in El Salvador. Kay joined the Resist Board in 1996. Now, along with tenants’ rights, Kay’s work as a community activist focuses on out-of-control development’s negative impact on the urban environment. Kay is a single mother of two teenagers. Amanda Matos-Gonzalez is a native of lower Roxbury, and has been active in community organizing and youth empowerment in the Boston area. A former member of the Young Sisters for Justice program at the Boston Women's Fund, Amanda brings experience in grants allocation and leadership development, feminism and social justice work. Amanda's ethnic background is Puerto Rican and Dominican. Amanda attends the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Her interests include dance, performing arts, good food and public speaking. Yafreisy Mejia is the Grants Associate/Office Manager at Resist. Originally from the Dominican Republic, Yafreisy comes to Resist with experience in progressive philanthropy. She worked previously at the Boston Women's Fund where her main area of responsibility was working with the Grants department and Program department, specifically in the Young Sisters for Justice program. Most of her social justice work has focused on women's leadership development as well as youth empowerment. Yafreisy loves to dance (and is good at it), loves to travel, is a true epicurean at heart, and is a proud new mom. Marc S. Miller joined the Resist Board in 1995 and has known about and supported Resist since its founding. He joined the Board because he felt that the type of funding Resist offered was crucial to grassroots activism. Part of his political efforts over the years have been through his work as a writer and editor, particularly the eight years he was at Southern Exposure magazine and its publisher, the Institute for Southern Studies, which grew out of the Civil Rights Movement. Marc now works in Boston at Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit that seeks to increase economic opportunity through innovative approaches to education and workforce development. Outside of working hours, almost all of his non-Resist waking hours are devoted to his real passion: theater. For Resist, Marc indulges that cultural side of his life with a special interest in funding organizations that incorporate theater, film, and other media into community organizing. Even more, though, he looks with favor on proposals for projects focused on young people: to engage them as organizers and to help to prepare a new generation of activists. Dick Ohmann was one of the founding members of Resist and he is concerned that Resist continues to fund the projects that promote the same ideals of peace and justice that inspired the anti-war movement. Since 1975 he has been a member of the editorial collective that publishes The Radical Teacher, a social and feminist journal on the theory and practise of teaching. His writing is concerned mainly with the accountability, freedom and the privatization of higher education. Dick is also active on the Mohawk Trail Regional School Committee, where equal access to education and testing are the current issues causing concern. He is working with other local organizations to address these issues. Wayne O'Neil signed the original Call to Resist Illegitmate Authority in 1967 and is a founding member of Resist. In addition to his many years of working with Resist--which included a period of time editing the newsletter and being what was called an "area person"--he is also a co-founder of The Radical Teacher and a member of its editorial collective. In 1985, he and several other linguists organized Linguists for Nicaragua/Linguistas por Nicaragua, a group that works in Nicaragua in aid of the bilingual education programs on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast. Wayne is Professor of Linguistics at MIT and director of its Mind Articulation Project, a theoretical linguistic and neurolinguistic research project joint with brain scientists and others in Japan. Some details of his academic life can be found on the web here. Henry Rosemont, Jr. served as a Marine Corps infantryman during the Korean War, which (inadvertently) taught him the values of both communitarianism and pacifism. He joined Resist in 1968 stuffing envelopes, answering phones and working on the Newsletter, and was elected to the Board in 1971. He has organized and spoken at numerous anti-war and civil rights marches, teach-ins and demonstrations since the early 1960s, and directed draft and CO counseling centers at Oakland University, MIT, the University of Illinois, and Brookyln College. His political articles have appeared regularly in the Resist Newsletter and other progressive journals, including In These Times, Raven, Z Magazine, and Social Anarchism. He has also written, edited and/or translated a number of books, including A Chinese Mirror, Rationality & Religious Experience, The Analects of Confucius (with Roger Ames), and the forthcoming Radical Confucianism. On the verge of retirement, he is Distinguished Visiting Professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University. Carol Schachet joined Resist as a staff and Board member in 1995. She pulls her hair out monthly trying to publish the Resist Newsletter on time, while also coordinating fundraising efforts. Prior to working for Resist, Carol spent her time working as a community organizer with ACORN in Boston and New York, and with Sojourners Magazine and community in Washington, DC, as well as serving as the National Grassroots Coordinator at Witness for Peace. Between her years as an organizer and working with Resist, Carol earned a Masters of Divinity, concentrating on the intersections of politics and theology. Carol plays softball, flag football and volleyball, occasionally runs marathons (very slowly), and roots for the [now World Champion!] Red Sox. Abby Scher is a journalist and director of Independent Press Association-New York, a nonprofit network of ethnic and community publications where she is editor in chief of an online newsletter translating articles from the ethnic press. Her articles in the Nation, In These Times and Dollars & Sense have analyzed such issues as civil liberties violations of anti-globalization activists, cleavages among anarchists in the U.S., the threat of credit card debt on the macro-economy, cross-border labor organizing, and New York's ethnic press in the wake of September 11th. She served as editor of Dollars & Sense, the economic justice magazine based in Boston, for four years. Abby is currently helping build cross-ethnic coalitions in New York to support South Asian and Arab Americans in detention, and to defend civil liberties. Her activism and desire for economic and racial justice took root during women's rights campaigns during the Reagan era. Amy Swerdlow is a long-time peace activist. She was a founder of Women Strike for Peace in 1961, which was a loosely organized network of grassroots women opposed to nuclear testing and the Vietnam War. Swerdlow is a former professor of history, now Emerita, at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of WOMEN STRIKE FOR PEACE: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s, as well as numerous articles and reviews on women's movements for radical transformation in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1997 she coedited a special issue of Women's Studies Quarterly on Rethinking Feminist Peace Politics. Nancy Wechsler (a.k.a "Wec") was a "red diaper" baby (the daughter of anti-Stalinist leftists) who grew up in Levittown, NY, in the 1950s and early 1960s. In high school she often got into trouble for her radical politics. While at the University of Michigan Wec became involved in the newly formed Ann Arbor Tenants Union, the early women's and gay liberation movements, anti-Vietnam War protests, and student power movement. In 1971 she became the Coordinator of the Ann Arbor Radical Independent Party. Soon after the party joined the Human Rights Party of Michigan, and she was elected to the Ann Arbor City Council for a two-year term. During those two years HRP organized demonstrations, participated in strike support work, and used City Council meetings as a public forum for radical politics and debate. For personal reasons she decided not to run for re-election. She was the first lesbian to come out publicly while in office. Kathy Kozachenko ran as an open lesbian for Wec's seat and won. Wec still believes in the need for a progressive/radical third party movement in this country. After finishing her term on City Council in 1974, Wec moved to the Boston area. She became active in the Boston Women's Union, New American Movement (which later merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to become DSA, a merger she opposed), Gay Community News, and the Boston Grand Jury Project and later the Gay and Lesbian Defense Committee and Mass Act Out (an AIDS Activist group). She joined the Resist Foundation staff in 1986 and remained active on the board after she left her staff position in 1995. Discussions of race/ethnicity, class and politics in general have been a part of her life from her earliest memories. Feminism, gay/lesbian liberation, disability rights, and AIDS activism have opened her eyes even wider. She considers herself a democratic socialist. For fun she enjoys seeing friends, reading, watching movies and videos and playing cards. Her daughter is the love of her life and brings a smile to her face from the very depth of her soul. Fran White joined the Board of Resist in 1989. She likes the way Resist fills a niche in the funding world, where small grassroots movements that do not get consideration from most foundations can find help. Fran likes to see Resist funding groups organizing around prison issues but also feels it is important for Resist to maintain a diversity of issues it will support. As a student, Fran was involved with the black student movement and with the feminist and gay movements--and these are issues that still take up her time. Currently she is a Board member of the Audre Lord Project, which supports and strengthens existing and emerging lesbian and gay groups in New York City. Fran is Dean of the Gallatin School at New York University. |
| Copyright © Resist, Inc., 1997-2005 |