Massachusetts Peace Action board members

Jamie 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. He values the communities of peace activists in the Western part of Massachusetts.

Steven Brion-Meisels is chair of MAPA’s Board of Directors and of its Membership Committee. He has been MAPA’s representative to the national Board of Peace Action since 1980 and served several terms as Board co-chair.  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, he 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.

Carol Coakley is chair of Metrowest Peace Action and represents the Norfolk, Bristol and Middlesex state senate district on the Democratic State Committee. She has a B.A. in Politics from Framingham State College, where she also worked as an administrative assistant and was steward for AFSCME Local 1067. She was Field Coordinator of the Instant Runoff Voting initiative petition drive with Citizens for Voter Choice in 2009. Carol works part time in the Mass. Peace Action office.

Matt Connolly is Assistant Attorney General with the Consumer Protection Division of Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General.

MAPA’s Program Director, Shelagh Foreman, 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 print maker. She represents MAPA on the Political Committee of Mass Alliance and is a core group member of 20/20 Action. She and her husband Ed have 5 children and 7 grandchildren, live in Cambridge and also spend time in Falmouth.

Angela Kelly joined the board in 2010 after being on staff with Peace Action for five years, first at the national office in DC, and more recently with the Massachusetts affiliate. She represented Peace Action and the Student Peace Action Network to the leadership bodies of local and national coalitions and on a peace delegation to China and Japan. She previously worked and volunteered with organizations on a range of social and economic justice issues, and is currently employed with a community development organization in Dudley Square, focusing on civic engagement, resident leadership development, youth opportunities, and violence prevention. Kelly graduated from Providence College with a degree in Public & Community Service Studies, and from UMass Boston’s graduate program for Women in Politics & Public Policy, where she conducted research on the policy priorities of families affected by war trauma.   She was raised in Brockton.

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 (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.

Guntram Mueller has been a member of the Board of Massachusetts Peace Action since 2008.  He is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. While there, he also designed and taught a philosophy course called The Cognitive Roots of Conflict, which received higher student acclaim than any of his mathematics courses. When his daughter was born in the 1970′s, and he saw his time of responsibility stretched out, Mueller designed a vertical axis windmill, with helical blades, and formed a company, Urban Turbine, to address the energy issue. Since 1989, he has been a member of 2020 Vision, a citizen action group concerned with nuclear weapons and environmental issues, and is now a member of the national core group of its successor, 2020 Action.  Born in Germany, Mueller grew up in Toronto and is now a resident of Newton.  He chairs the Nuclear Abolition Task Force of United for Justice with Peace.

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 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 two programs on Israel/Palestine for Peace Action and the Nation Institute. She is also active with Occupy Berkshires.

Nancy Wrenn is a member of Newton Dialogues for Peace and War, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom – Boston Branch, and the Eastern Massachusetts campaign to Fund Our Communities / Cut Military Spending 25%. She was co-chair of the Coalition for a Strong United Nations. Wrenn is retired from the Mass. Dept. of Environmental Protection (Bureau of Waste Management). She studied conflict transformation at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, VT and participated in UNESCO Intergenerational Human Rights Conferences at the University of Connecticut and Kigali, Rwanda. In 2009 she was co-coordinator of the national conference of the U.S. Nonviolent Peaceforce Association.