Massachusetts Peace Action board nominees

James 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. A resident of South Hadley with his wife Senani, 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 a national Board member of Peace Action since 1980, including 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.

MAPA’s Program Director, Shelagh 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 and spend time in Falmouth as well as Cambridge.

Eva 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.

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.

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.

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.