[row][half]
Massachusetts Peace Action board of directors members serve for a 2-year term. The following candidates have been nominated by the Executive Committee for election in February, 2014. Members, please cast your ballot by downloading the attached MAPA Board Election Ballot 2014 and returning it to the office by February 8, 2014. You may also email your ballot to info@masspeaceaction.org or return it at the annual meeting at Boston College on February 8.
New Candidate
John Ratliff, Cambridge, Economic Justice Coordinator
John Ratliff was political director of an SEIU local union in Miami, Florida, and relocated to Cambridge after his retirement in 2012. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School. A Vietnam veteran and member of Veterans for Peace, he is a member of the coordinating committee of Massachusetts Senior Action’s Cambridge branch, and chair of Massachusetts Jobs with Justice’s Global Justice Task Force. As Mass. Peace Action’s economic justice coordinator he leads our coalition work with Raise Up Massachusetts for an increased minimum wage and sick time benefits, and against the Trans Pacific Partnership. He is the father of high school senior Daniel Bausher-Belton, who was an intern at Mass. Peace Action in summer 2013.
Candidates for Re-Election
Steven Brion-Meisels, Cambridge, Board of Directors Chair
Steven Brion-Meisels is chair of MAPA’s Board of Directors. He stepped down in 2013 after over 30 years of service as MAPA’s representative to the national Board of Peace Action, including several terms as its co-chair, and continues to serve on several committees of the national Board. He is an educator whose work has focused on social justice, social development and social change in school, university and community settings. In partnership with his wife, Linda, Steven has been involved in peace education locally, nationally and in both Colombia and the West Bank area of Israel/Palestine. They have two daughters and one grand daughter — all of whom help sustain their commitment to peace with justice.
Jaime Babson, South Hadley
Jaime Babson serves on the boards of the Veterans Education Project and of two family foundations, and is a friend of the New England Peace Pagoda community. He values the communities of peace activists in Western Massachusetts.
Shelagh Foreman, Cambridge, Program Director
Shelagh Foreman is the program director of Massachusetts Peace Action. She was a founding member of Mass Freeze, the statewide nuclear freeze organization, which merged with SANE to form Massachusetts Peace Action. She has worked consistently on nuclear disarmament and focused on bringing Peace Action’s message to our elected officials. She studied art at The Cooper Union and Columbia University, taught art and art history, and is a painter and printmaker. She represents MAPA on the Political Committee of Mass Alliance and is a core group member of 20/20 Action. She is chair of MAPA’s Iran Task Force. She and her husband Ed have 5 children and 7 grandchildren, live in Cambridge and also spend time in Falmouth.
[/half][half]
John Maher, Cambridge
John Maher was an organizer for SDS in the 1960’s. He worked in a factory, taught in Cambridge and Somerville public schools, was director of education and outreach for Oxfam, and was executive director of Neighbor to Neighbor, which works for progressive working class power in Massachusetts politics. He is on the steering committee of the Eastern Massachusetts campaign to Fund Our Communities / Cut Military Spending 25%. He recently published Learning from the Sixties: Memoir of an Organizer.
Eva Moseley, Cambridge, Music Committee Chair
Eva Steiner Moseley was born in Vienna; she and her family arrived in New York as refugees in 1939. Educated at Bronx H.S. of Science, Mount Holyoke College (B.A. in philosophy) and Radcliffe College (A.M. in Sanskrit and Indian Studies), after a peripatetic marriage she was curator of manuscripts at Radcliffe’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America for 28 years, during which she was president of New England Archivists and on the Council of the Society of American Archivists. She cut her political teeth in Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign (1948), worked for a nuclear test ban with Women Strike for Peace in the early 1960s, joined the nuclear freeze movement in 1982, and has worked for peace ever since. In 2007 she visited Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron with the Cambridge-Bethlehem People-to-People Committee. She has two children and three granddaughters. Eva chairs MAPA’s Music Committee.
Prasannan Parthasarathi, Newton
Prasannan Parthasarathi is Associate Professor of History at Boston College and has a Ph.D. from Harvard University. A specialist in the history of South Asia, the British Empire, and labor and economic history, he recently published Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850. Parthasarathi was a member of the Sustainable Defense Task Force and is a member of the steering committee of the Eastern Massachusetts campaign to Fund Our Communities / Cut Military Spending 25%.
Patricia Salomon, Monterey
Patricia Salomon is a retired pediatrician and a long time activist for peace, justice, civil rights, worker rights and universal health care. She went to Mississippi in 1964 with the Medical Committee for Human Rights and organized an anti-Vietnam war community group in Warwick, NY. She has been arrested with the NYC Granny Peace Brigade, Peace Action Montgomery (MD), and the single payer health supporters called the “Baucus 8?. She successfully promoted the first state legislation to deny military recruiters routine access to the results of student aptitude tests (ASVAB). Dr. Salomon recently relocated to the Berkshires where she has helped to organize three programs on Israel/Palestine for Peace Action and the Nation Institute. She is also active with Occupy Berkshires. Salomon is one of two representatives from Massachusetts Peace Action on Peace Action’s national board of directors.
[/half]
[/row]
Governance
Members serve for a 2-year term. The most recent election was held on February 16, 2013, and the next one will be held in February 2014.