Massachusetts Peace Action directors serve for a 2-year term. The following candidates have been nominated by the Executive Committee for election in March 2020. Elections will take place on March 28, 2020 at the MAPA annual meeting.
Any member may nominate him or herself or another member before March 21, 2020. See the procedures to follow or call the office at 617-354-2169 for information.
New members running for election
| Yoav Elinevsky, Northampton
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| Joseph Gerson, Watertown
President of the Campaign for Peace Disarmament and Common Security, Director of the American Friends Service Committee’s Peace and Economic Security Program, and Vice-President of the International Peace Bureau. He plays a leading role in building collaborations among U.S., Asian, and European peace and nuclear weapons abolition movements and is currently the lead organizer for the intersectional World Conference for nuclear disarmament, climate, peace and justice to be held in New York in April. He works closely with Asian and European peace and nuclear disarmament movements and a frequent keynote speaker at the World Conference against A- & H- Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other international and U.S. forums. He helped to launch the nuclear weapons freeze movement of the 1980s, led the successful opposition to construction of naval nuclear weapons bases in Boston, Rhode Island and New York, and was the lead organizer of international conferences and mass mobilizations on the eves of the 2010 and 2015 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference. His books include Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World; With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination and The Sun Never Sets…Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases. |
| Keith Harvey
Keith B. Harvey is the Regional Director for the Northeast Region of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a position he has held since 1992. The American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker Peace and Social Justice multi issue organization, working on Peace, Economic justice, Immigrant rights and Healing/Criminal Justice issues in the US and overseas. Keith has used popular education methodologies to facilitate many different workshops, such as non-violence trainings (Help Increase the Peace program), Criminal Justice history, and International Debt and the IMF/World Bank. Before coming to AFSC, Keith spent nine years in low and moderate-income property development and management. Keith recently sat on the Cambridge Friends School Board of Trustees, chaired the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute Board of Directors, sat on the Philadelphia Planning committee for the US Social Forum, and worked with the MA Poor Peoples Campaign coordinating committee. |
| Jackie King, Cambridge
Jackie King is editor of the Mass. Peace Action print and electronic newsletters and a member of MAPA’s Communications Committee. She holds a master’s degree in journalism and has worked as a reporter for local weekly and daily newspapers, including the Bay State Banner, Quincy Patriot Ledger, and Middlesex News. She was Press Secretary for Mel King’s 1983 mayoral campaign and Mass. Press Secretary for the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign. Jackie worked for the Department of Environmental Protection as a Deputy Director of the Bureau of Solid Waste Disposal developing and publicizing recycling programs. For years, she served as a Board member of the welfare rights organization Survivors Inc. and was periodically editor of its paper, Survival News. She worked with the Greater Boston Union of the Homeless and served on the Board of the Women’s Institute for New Growth and Support (WINGS), a temporary home for formerly homeless women in recovery. More recently, she worked for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest) as Statewide Coordinator of the campaign to oppose the imposition of the high-stakes MCAS test, then served on the Board of Citizens for Public Schools and was co-editor of its newsletter, The Backpack. She is a Board member of the Cambridge Residents Alliance. |
| Steve Powell, Somerville
Steve Powell is a graduate of MIT’s political science program, and has had a longstanding interest in people-to-people diplomacy. He is a member of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and went to El Salvador as part of an accredited election accompaniment delegation in 2019. During January-February 2020, he also has worked as an organizer for MAPA Education Fund’s Elephant in the Room Project, which calls on Presidential candidates to speak about the Pentagon budget during the Massachusetts Presidential primary. |
| Paul Shannon, Somerville
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Board Members Running for Re-election
Michael VanElzakker, Somerville
Michael is a research fellow in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he studies post-traumatic stress syndrome. He became fascinated by peace and justice through his study of neurology and science and is now a leading member of our Nuclear Disarmament working group, as well as an activist on MAPA’s work in relation to the Korea crisis. He is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Jeff Napolitano, Springfield
Jeff has long been a key peace organizer in the Pioneer Valley where he directed the Western Massachusetts office of the American Friends Service Committee until it closed in 2017. He has now led the launch of the Resistance Center for Peace and Justice, which continues the work of AFSC-WM. Jeff is passionate about peace, justice and ending war without end. He is also fascinated by racial justice. Recently, Jeff gave a presentation on the 34th annual Martin Luther King Day celebration called “Getting Military Recruiters out of our High Schools,” and how, since 2001, military recruiters have had increased access to children in high schools and are regularly given their personal information in order to solicit them. He talked about how to stop them from gaining access to students and their information
Jared Hicks, Dorchester
Jared was born in Dorchester and is a 26-year-old millennial. He was a Bernie delegate at the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently working for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign. He is a member of the Boston Democratic Ward 17 committee. He will forever feel the BERN and believes that the struggle continues. He is a founding member of Our Revolution Massachusetts (ORMA) and of Our Revolution Boston, and serves on ORMA’s Representative Council. He is also active in Dorchester People for Peace and works for the Massachusetts Nurses Association.
Jaime Babson, South Hadley
J
aime 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, Board Chair and Middle East Working Group co-chair
Shelagh Foreman is the chair of Massachusetts Peace Action’s board of directors. 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 and her husband Ed have 5 children and 7 grandchildren, live in Cambridge and also spend time in Falmouth.
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 Committe and participates in our Palestine/Israel Working Group.
Prasannan Parthasarathi, Newton, Middle East Working Group co-chair
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 of the Eastern Massachusetts campaign to Fund Our Communities / Cut Military Spending 25%.
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, chair of Massachusetts Jobs with Justice’s Global Justice Task Force, and president of the Massachusetts Alliance of Retired Americans. As our economic justice coordinator he leads our coalition work with Raise Up Massachusetts for an increased minimum wage and sick time benefits.
Jonathan King, chair, Nuclear Disarmament Working Group
Jonathan King is professor of molecular biology at MIT, the author of over 250 scientific papers, and a specialist in protein folding. He founded the Jobs with Peace campaign in the 1980s and now chairs Massachusetts Peace Action’s Nuclear Disarmament Working Group. He is also an officer of the Cambridge Residents Alliance and of Citizens for Public Schools.
Nominating Additional Candidates
Any member may nominate him or herself or another member before April 16, 2020. See the procedures to follow or call the office at 617-354-2169 for information.
Continuing Board Members
Because of staggered terms, existing members Rosalie Anders, Andrea Burns, Caitlin Forbes, Carol Coakley, Rosemary Kean, Jeff Klein, Maryellen Kurkulos, Savina Martin, Valentine Moghadam, Brenton Stoddart, and Vernon Walker will continue to serve for another year. They will be eligible for re-election in early 2021.
Thank You
Pat Salomon and Denise Simmons are ending their service on the board and will be named to our Advisory Board when it is set up soon. We thank them for their loyal service!
