Elizabeth Allen, Ph.D.
Dr. Allen, a founding board member of the Frances Perkins Center, is a geologist with nearly 40 years of experience in industry and academia. After beginning her career at Shell Oil Company, she established her own company, Methane Resources Group, in 1981 engaging in both domestic and international petroleum project development. Starting in 2000, she redirected her interests towards education, teaching academic courses at her (and Frances Perkin’s) alma mater, Mount Holyoke College, as a visiting professor and at the University of Maine in Orono as an adjunct professor of earth sciences and a policy fellow at the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. During this time she lectured to organizations and community groups in both geology and global energy with the expressed goal of helping to advance better understanding of global energy issues, environmental concerns and economic growth in a world of diverse cultures, emerging markets and economic disparity. She was founder of the Sudanese Visual History Program now located in New Zealand and has served on a variety of profit and non-profit boards including Mount Holyoke College and The Boppy Company. Betty is a Trustee Fellow of Mount Holyoke College, a member of the Camden Conference Advisory Council of Maine where she organized energy symposia for nearly ten years, and is enjoying retirement in Newcastle, Maine.

Peter C. Benton
Peter Benton is a principal with Heritage Strategies, LLC, a preservation planning firm based in Birchrunville, Pennsylvania. A registered architect and planner, Peter has been responsible for a wide range of architecture and planning projects involving the restoration, rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of historic buildings and landscapes. Before co-founding Heritage Strategies, Peter worked for twenty-five years with John Milner Associates, Inc., nationally recognized leaders in historic preservation. At JMA, Peter was responsible for the firm’s planning projects, specializing in work with national heritage areas. Peter is a graduate of the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania. He has been active on a variety of non-profit boards, including Preservation Pennsylvania, The Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, Preservation Action, The Kimberton Waldorf School, and the Chester County Conference and Visitors Bureau. He spends a portion of each year on his family farm in Jefferson, Maine.

Charles Bickford, Ph.D.
Charles Bickford is a senior-level nonprofit executive with proven fundraising, change management, strategic planning, fiscal management and advocacy experience at highly visible organizations. Charles is also a collaborator capable of building strong board, staff and community relationships. Charles served as the Executive Director of the New Hampshire Humanities council for 18 years.  Prior to his time with the council Charles was a tenured professor at College of Our Lady of the Elms. Charles continues to teach abroad at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia as well as serving on a number of boards in New England.

Brooksley Born, Esq.
Recipient of our 2010 Intelligence and Courage Award. As the former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born recognized the dangers of unregulated derivatives trading and warned about the potential collapse of the financial system. Her attempt to save the country from economic disaster is the subject of a PBS Frontline documentary, “The Warning.” Born was honored by the JFK Library in 2009 with a “Profile in Courage Award.”

Ellen Bravo
Recipient of our 2011 Intelligence and Courage Award, Ellen Bravo is the executive director of Family Values @ Work. Ellen tirelessly leads a national campaign promoting family-friendly workplace policies including paid sick days and family leave insurance. Her organization recently hosted a National Tele-Townhall Event to discuss fair pay, paid leave, and access to child care, featuring Nancy Pelosi, Lilly Ledbetter, as well as working women and Congresswomen from across America championing these critical issues. The former director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, her most recent book is Taking on the Big Boys, or Why Feminism is Good for Families, Business and the Nation.

Tracy A. Cooley
Tracy Cooley has been working on the behalf of at risk families for over 30 years. She has worked in the early care and education and domestic violence fields as an administrator, practitioner, trainer, and consultant. Cooley was the Director of the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence from 1990-2001. From 2001- 2006 she was a Policy Associate at the Muskie School of Public Service, Institute for Child and Family Policy at the University of Southern Maine where she co-authored the Safe Families Safe Homes curriculum.

Since 1990, she has maintained a private consulting practice, T. Cooley and Associates, offering the implementation of the Safe Families Safe Homes Project across the country. She provides technical assistance to practitioners, state domestic violence coalitions, state and federal agencies, and national organizations. Cooley recently joined the staff at Maine Kids-Kin, a statewide program that supports grandparents who are raising their grandchildren.

Cooley has been an activist for social justice since her youth. During her college years she started the first women’s center at Nasson College. She served for ten years on the board of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. Her recent board tenure is with Maine Initiatives, a foundation for social change.

Carla Dickstein, Ph.D.
Carla Dickstein is Senior Vice-President at Coastal Enterprises, Inc. (CEI), a Community Development Finance Institution (CDFI) based in Wiscasset, Maine. For the past 15 years she has overseen CEI’s work on research and policy development, including green industries and employment opportunities, rural development and entrepreneurship and predatory mortgage lending and foreclosures. In 2006 Carla coauthored a study of subprime mortgages and predatory lending, which led to Maine passing a strong antipredatory lending law in 2007. Prior to coming to CEI she was on the faculty at West Virginia University’s Regional Research Institute and the West Virginia University Extension Service. Carla sits on a number of nonprofit and government boards and committees including Maine’s Citizen Trade Commission, the Engage Maine steering committee, and the Research Advisory Board to the Community Affairs Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She holds a B.A. from Smith College, a Masters in Planning from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.

Hilary Doe
Recipient of our 2011 Open Door Award, Hilary Doe is the former National Director of the Roosevelt Institute’s Campus Network. Founded in 2004, the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network was formed to strengthen the progressive movement by meaningfully engaging young people in politics, empowering them as leaders and promoting their ideas for change. Since Hilary Doe assumed leadership of the organization, the Campus Network’s budget and membership have more than doubled in size and it has been recognized by the Washington Post, the Nation and other major publications. Hilary Doe represents the perspective of young people on the pressing issues affecting their communities and the nation.

Susan Feiner, Ph.D. 
Susan F. Feiner holds a joint position at the University of Southern Maine in the departments of Women and Gender Studies and Economics. She was a founding member of the International Association of Feminist Economics and a member of the original editorial board of the award-winning journal Feminist Economics. Her most recent book, Liberating Economics: Feminist perspectives on families, work, and globalization was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2004. It was named an “Outstanding Academic Title” by the American Library Association.

Joelle Gamble
Joelle is a Master of Public Affairs candidate at Princeton University, focusing on economics and public policy. Prior to pursuing her graduate studies, Joelle was the Director of the Roosevelt Institute’s national network of emerging thinkers and doers. Under her leadership, Roosevelt has dramatically increased the number of student policy change efforts it supports. The network has also seen a marked increase in the racial, socioeconomic and gender diversity of its national student leadership—with chapters at both four-year institutions and community colleges.

Earlier, as a student organizer in the University of California Student Association, Joelle worked on political campaigns related to tax reform and budgetary priorities. As a political organizer, she has appeared in over 40 articles and television segments, including the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, the San Francisco Gate, NBC, ABC and CBS. Joelle graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UCLA in 2012 with a B.A. in International Development Studies. She is also a StartingBloc Social Innovation Fellow and a Democratic National Committee Hope Fellow. Joelle also writes on topics of race and economics. Her work can be found in places such at The Nation, Salon, The Huffington Post, the Hill and NextCity.

Judith Goldstein
Judith Goldstein founded Humanity in Action in 1997 and has served as its Executive Director ever since. Under Judith’s leadership, Humanity in Action has organized educational programs on international affairs, diversity and human rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Denmark, France, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and the United States. She received her Ph.D in history from Columbia University and was a Woodrow Wilson Scholar for her MA studies. Judith has written several books and articles about European and American history, art and landscape architecture. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and several boards and advisory groups.

June Hopkins, Ph.D.
Historian June Hopkins received her Ph. D. from Georgetown in 1997. Her biographical study of her grandfather’s social work career from 1912 through the Great Depression, Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Reformer, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1999 and Jewish first wife, divorced: The Selected Letters and Papers of Ethel Gross and Harry Hopkins, co-edited with Allison Giffen was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2003. Hopkins has been a professor of American history at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, since 1998 and has been head of the history department for the past four years. She is now working on a history of World War II and the relationship between Winston Churchill and Harry Hopkins.

Kate McCormick
Kate McCormick has worked for more than 30 years in print media, beginning with a reporting stint at The Indianapolis Star, from which she moved to a job as a reporter for the Patriot Ledger in Needham and Wellesley, Massachusetts. In 1977, she joined the copy desk of Newsday on Long Island, but almost immediately became an editor for the newspaper’s fledgling Queens edition, later called New York Newsday. From 1988 to 1995, she was an op-ed editor for New York Newsday. She later worked for Forbes special interest publications and served two years as associate editor of the Episcopal News Service, based in New York. She is now happily retired in Maine, to which she moved with her partner in 2010. A year later she began volunteering for the Frances Perkins Center. Kate is a journalism graduate of Indiana University and also holds a master of divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Donn Mitchell
Donn Mitchell is the editor and publisher of the Anglican Examiner. Since 2005, Donn has resided in Princeton, New Jersey, where he has served as adjunct faculty at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is currently a Professor of Religion and Ethics at Berkeley College in New York and edits academic and trade books on a freelance basis. 

Mark A. Peterson, Ph.D.
Mark A. Peterson, with a Ph.D. in political science from The University of Michigan, is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science, and former department chair, in the Department of Public Policy at the UCLA School of Public Affairs. His previous faculty appointments were in Government at Harvard University and Public Affairs, Political Science, and Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. Peterson is a scholar of American national institutions, focusing on the interactions among the presidency, Congress, and interest groups, as well as on national health care policy making and Medicare reform. His publications include Legislating Together: The White House and Capitol Hill from Eisenhower to Reagan (Harvard). As a participant in the Annenberg Institutions of American Democracy Project, he co-chaired the Commission on the Executive Branch and co-edited the volume it produced on the politics and performance of the presidency and bureaucracy, Institutions of American Democracy: The Executive Branch (Oxford), which won the Richard E. Neustadt Award for the best reference on the presidency. He was also a co-author of the Annenberg’s project book exploring public and elite opinion on the performance of American institutions, Institutions of American Democracy: A Republic Divided (Oxford). Peterson is on the Council of the American Political Science Association, serves on four national advisory committees (chairing one) for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is past editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, and has been a guest scholar at The Brookings Institution. As an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow he served as a legislative assistant for Health Policy to Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD). He is a founding member of the core team of the Blue Sky Health Initiative, which seeks to transform the health and health care system in the United States. An elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, he served on its Study Panel on Medicare and Markets, and he is a recipient of an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Ron Phillips
Ron Phillips founded CEI in 1977. Under his leadership, CEI has grown from a three-person office focused on Maine’s fisheries to become one of Maine’s and the nation’s major finance development organizations. Ron was selected by the James A. Johnson Fannie Mae fellowship for the class of 2002. His past and present board and advisory board memberships include the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; KeyBank’s National Community Development Advisory Board; Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston; Board of Regents, Economic Development Council of Maine; Maine Small Business Advisory Council; Mainewatch Institute; Maine Center for Economic Policy; Maine Fisheries Industry Development Center; and Albanian-American Trade and Development Association. He is a member of Rural LISC Advisory Counsel and on the national board of LISC; he is a past board member of Opportunity Finance Network, a long-time board member of the National Congress for Community Economic Development, and a founding member of Association for Enterprise Opportunity.

Hon. Robert Reich
Robert B. Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of twelve books, among them the best-sellers The Work of Nations and Locked in the Cabinet, and, his most recent, Supercapitalism. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. In that capacity he shepherded the Family and Medical Act through Congress, as well as the Pension Protection Act and the School-to-Work Act, and he laid the groundwork for the Workforce Development Act. He also led a national campaign against sweatshops, secured safer workplaces, and expanded opportunities for job retraining to millions of American workers.

Christopher I. Rice
Christopher Irvine Rice is principal designer for Designs for Native Landscapes. He holds a Master of Arts degree from the Conway School of Landscape Design and a BA in Journalism from the University of Maine at Orono. Inspired by the complexity and random beauty found in environmentally sound landscapes which are native to a region, Christopher has worked developing landscapes for non-profits and residential clients while living in midcoast Maine with his partner, Tomlin Coggeshall, since 1995. Formerly a commercial interior designer and conservation commissioner in Massachusetts, he’s currently a trustee of his local historical society in Newcastle and pleased to be a founding member of the Frances Perkins Center.

Nancy Teel, Ph.D.
Nancy Teel is Professor of English and Interim Dean of Liberal Arts at Roxbury Community College in Boston. She has taught composition and literature for more than twenty years and has been a college administrator for two years. She has an undergraduate degree in English literature from Saint Mary’s College and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Cornell University. Beyond the classroom, her interests include human rights, world peace and globalization. In her spare time she enjoys spending time with family, gardening, boating and working on old houses.

Katharine Watson, Ph.D.
Dr. Watson is Director Emerita of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. A native of Raleigh, N.C., Watson earned her bachelor’s degree at Duke University before earning her master’s and doctorate degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a Fellow of the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and of the American Council of Learned Societies. From 1973 to 1977, she was a curator of art before 1800 at Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum, co-editor of the museum’s Bulletin, and a lecturer in art history at Oberlin College. Watson has published numerous scholarly articles on Renaissance and Baroque sculpture.

From 1982 to 1986, Watson served as a member of the Accreditation Commission for the American Association of Museums and from 1985 to 1987 as gubernatorial appointee to the Maine Arts Commission. In 1990, she was elected to the Smithsonian Council, a 25-member panel of eminent scholars and scientists who guide the Smithsonian Institution in developing activities for the advancement of knowledge in science, history and the arts.

Charles M. Wyzanski
A graduate, cum laude, of Harvard College and of Columbia Law School, Charles has practiced law for more than forty years, fourteen of which were as an Assistant Attorney General for Massachusetts. He has served as a full-time Clinical Instructor at Harvard Law School and an adjunct faculty member at Boston University, Brandeis and Tufts. Charles is writing a book on his father, the late Hon. Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr. Judge Wyzanski had an illustrious career as United States District Court Judge from 1941 to 1986. He served as Frances Perkins’s first Solicitor of the United States Department of Labor from 1933-35, and, later, as a member of the Solicitor General’s Office, he successfully defended the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act in the United States Supreme Court.