PDF files on this site require the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. RealMedia files on this site require the free RealPlayer.

UFE Board of Directors

(Affiliations listed for identification purposes only.)

Rose M. Brewer teaches at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and is the interim chair of the department of Afro-American & African Studies. Rose is a scholar-activist who is also the co-founder and core member of the Freire Center, a center for popular education and democratic social change located in Minneapolis, MN. Her writing and research are in the areas of critical theory, race, class and gender and social transformation.

Polly Cleveland is the Research Director for Partnership for Responsible Drug Information (PRDI). Besides fundraising, writing and designing educational materials and a web site, she is editing PRDI’s Drug Policy Resource Directory for the Media. Most recently, Polly organized a two-day multidisciplinary conference presented by the New York Academy of Medicine, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. She is on the board of New Yorkers for Drug Policy Reform.

Over the years, Polly has held a variety of positions. She has served in the Foreign Service in Rumania, France, Australia, Thailand, and Yugoslavia. She was a Visiting Scholar, U.C. Berkeley, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and an Assistant Professor, Department of Accounting, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She was a manager and general contractor renovating apartment buildings. She was the director of publicity for Clear Creek, a national environmental magazine. Her dissertation was on the Consequences and Causes of Unequal Distribution of Wealth. She has been a member of Responsible Wealth since 1997.

Sam Grant is the Associate Director of Community Development at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, MN as well as serving on the Community Faculty in the Ethnic Studies and Social Science Departments at Metropolitan State University. He is an Adjunct Faculty member at the School of Community Economic Development at Southern New Hampshire University where he is a doctoral candidate. Since 1995, Sam has been CEO of Ujima Creations Consulting which works with grassroots community organizations to help them with strategic planning, leadership development, organizing and development objectives. Sam is co-founder of Full Circle Community Institute, a consulting group that offers reflective leadership retreats for multicultural collaboratives and organizations across the state of Minnesota. In the past 7 years he has served on local boards of organizations he co-founded. These include Wendell Phillips Community Development Federal Credit Union; Green Institute (Environmental Business Incubator); and the Organizing Apprenticeship Project.

Peter Hardie is a long-time labor, youth and community activist, formerly of Boston, Massachusetts, now living in New Jersey. He has worked in staff and rank and file union positions in the International Union of Electrical Workers and the Service Employees International Union. He has helped negotiate several successive public employee contracts in Boston, and advocated for the rights of workers of color with employers and unions. He has worked with youth for over a decade, including a stint teaching in a Boston public high school, work with a national youth development organization, and heading up a community organization working with court-involved youth.

Peter has engaged in progressive electoral work through the campaign of Jesse Jackson, Mel King's run for mayor of Boston, and as President of the Black Political Task Force in Boston. In 1988, he managed the successful campaign of Nelson Merced, the first Latino elected to the Massachusetts state legislature.

Throughout his career, Peter has been involved in community efforts for land, justice, peace, public education, an end to violence against women, and for sane and humane social policy. He currently consults to youth and community organizations and foundations, fixes old cars, and sails small boats when the rhythms of work and family permit.

Alanna Hartzok, Organizer, Pennsylvania Fair Tax Coalition, Scotland, PA

Lisa Hoyos is presently Northern California organizer the Citizens Trade Campaign. Prior to this, she led a popular education program on globalization within the South African trade union movement. Lisa also served as the Political and Organizing Director of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council in Silicon Valley, which involved extensive campaign work, both electoral and union organizing. She worked for two years in the California State Legislature for Senator Tom Hayden, focusing on labor and environmental issues. Other labor movement experience includes working as a bilingual organizer with Justice for Janitors. Lisa also has worked on environmental justice issues with Greenpeace, and has served on the Board of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and Crossroads magazine.

Jerry Koch-Gonzalez (President) has been organizing, educating and consulting for social justice for more than 20 years. Jerry leads workshops on classism and economic inequality, multicultural organizational development, and the spirit and practice of consensus. Jerry serves on the boards of the Center for Peaceable Schools, the Youth Peace & Justice Corps of the Cambridge Peace Commission, the Pioneer Valley Cohousing Community and United for a Fair Economy. Currently Jerry is working with Spirit in Action, a new organization dedicated to help build a more powerful and visionary progressive movement.

Maria Elena Letona, Executive Director, Centro Presente, Cambridge, MA

Mike Miller is the director of the Project on Inequality and Poverty at the Commonwealth Institute and a research professor of sociology at Boston College. He is on the board of directors of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council; the Scientific Board of the Comparative Research Program on Poverty of UNESCO; and the Advisory Board of the Fourth World Movement. He also served on the Executive Committee of the Field Foundation and has been a Guggenheim Fellow. Mr. Miller was an advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr. and George Wiley and to the national poverty programs of Ireland and the United Kingdom. He is the co-author of forthcoming book on Race, Gender and Class Respect; and author, co-author, editor of more than a dozen books and 300 articles.

Jacqui Patterson is Program Manager for Interchurch Medical Assistance, New Windsor, Maryland, an organization that works to improve the quality and availability of health care for the poor in developing countries.

Sam Pizzigati recently retired from the executive staff of the 2.7 million-member National Education Association, America's largest union, after twenty years directing NEA's publishing operations. Over the course of his career in the labor movement, he has edited publications for four different national unions and co-edited the primary text on trade union journalism, The New Labor Press (Cornell University ILR Press). Pizzigati has written widely on economic inequality issues, with op-eds appearing in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and a host of other newspapers and periodicals. His latest book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives (Apex Press) helps explain why increasing concentrations of wealth in the U.S., and the outrageous inequality this wealth generates, need to be feared and fought.

Susan Williams is currently the Education Team Coordinator at Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. She is a community organizer and popular educator who previously worked with Save Our Cumberland Mountains and the Tennessee Industrial Renewal Network. She serves on the steering committee for the Economic Literacy Action Network (ELAN) and has extensive experience on trade and globalization issues in the past ten years.