ONE Massachusetts leadership and staff

LEADERSHIP TEAM

Our Leadership Team members represent a broad range of interests, geographic areas and sectors in Massachusetts. Its members are committed to working to expand the public perception about what we can achieve working together through our government to improve our communities.

Jo Blum has been Director of Government Relations for the Mass. Teachers Association since 1998. MTA represents over 106,000 educators and staff who work in the Commonwealth’s public schools and public higher education system. Prior to moving to Boston, Jo lobbied in Washington, D.C. on women’s reproductive health issues for 20 years.

Steven Bradley is Vice President of Government and Community Relations at Baystate Health, managing the day-to-day contact with local, state and federal legislators, regulators, lobbyists and City officials. Prior to serving at Baystate, he was the Chief of Staff/Director of Redistricting for the Senate Assistant Majority Leader’s Office and the Chief of Staff for the Massachusetts Senate Committee on Ways and Means. His affiliations include Associated Industries of Massachusetts, Healthcare Management Association of Massachusetts, Affiliated Chambers of Commerce of Greater Springfield, and the Massachusetts Hospital Association.

Colleen Corona was elected to the Easton Board of Selectmen in December 2003. She is currently in her second term and has served as board chair for the last four years. Colleen serves on the Board of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, the Local Goverment Advisory Council, and is Second Vice President of the Massachusetts Selectmen Association. Colleen is an instructor at Massasoit Community College, where she teaches l ocal goverment classes. In 2006, Colleen helped lead a successful campaign for a $3.4 million Proposition 2 ½ override to supplement the Easton operating budget.

Alma Couverthié is Director of Network Organizing at Lawrence Community Works. Alma received her Bachelor’s degree in Labor Relations from the Puerto Rico and was a founding member of the Association of Students of Labor Relations there. She has four years of professional experience in the field of labor organizing and first contract negotiations with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and seven years of experience in the field of community and multi-ethnic organizing through CommunityWorks.

Craig J. Dutra is President of the Community Foundation of Southeastern Massachusetts, an organization that he was actively involved in creating. He has held leadership positions in the field of community development and human services for the past 28 years, primarily in organizations serving Southeastern Massachusetts. Craig previously served as Vice President of Marketing and Development and Southeastern Massachusetts Regional Administrator for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Boston.

Laura E. Everett is the Associate Director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, the state ecumenical body of 17 Orthodox and Protestant member denominations, totaling more than 1700 local congregations and parishes across the Commonwealth. A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Divinity School, Laura’s portfolio includes working with the Council’s member denominations on areas of common concern and facilitating a unified Christian witness on issues such as opposition to the death penalty, opposition to gambling expansion, concern for the poor, encouraging proper church-state relations, just and healthy environmental policies and care for the common good.

Michael Forbes Wilcox is the founder and CEO of Alford Associates, a research and consultancy firm specializing in foreign exchange analysis. Michael has been in the investment business for more than 25 years. He serves as Town Moderator in Alford Mass, and is on the Executive Committee of Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts. Michael also serves on the Berkshire Brigades Steering Committee, the MassDems Field Services Committee and was Berkshire County Coordinator for the Deval Patrick Committee.

Lee Ketelsen is the New England Director of Clean Water Fund. Lee has over 28 years of community and state campaign organizing experience, including leading successful campaigns that produced model state policies. Her coalition organizing in Massachusetts won key victories such as the Massachusetts state moratorium on incineration and landfilling, and model policies on dioxin and mercury reduction. Lee founded the Massachusetts Precautionary Principle Project and now coordinates policy advocacy and organizing activities for the Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow, a broad and diverse environmental health coalition seeking fundamental reform of toxic chemical policies.

Jorge Martinez is Executive Director and Community Organizer of Project R.I.G.H.T., a violence prevention/intervention, grassroots organizing and economic development coalition. He coordinates the efforts of over 40 organizations to focus more efficiently around the issues of violence and quality of life in the Greater Grove Hall – Roxbury/Dorchester neighborhood. Jorge supervises staff on projects that have included youth projects, grassroots organizing efforts, economic development projects, and organizers and volunteers in coordinated efforts.

Denise M. Moorehead is the director of communications at Third Sector New England, a nonprofit organization that provides support, training and management resources to build the capacity of individual nonprofits and the sector to work for social change. Denise has served on numerous boards of trustees and advisory committees and is currently a member of the Greeley Foundation and Jericho Road boards. She founded the Saratoga County Chapter of the NAACP, was elected to the city’s Board of Education and co-founded Saratogians for Equality and Acceptance of Diversity.

Gloribell Mota is director of education and training for the Democratic Party of Massachusetts. She graduated from Emerson College with a Visual and Media Arts degree. For two years she worked as an Education Coordinator for United for a Fair Economy conducting and developing workshops for the Tax Education Program. She serves on the Board of the East Boston Community Health Center, Neighborhood of Affordable Housing and ABCD Board. She is involved in several coalitions and initiatives in the Greater Boston area such as the New Majority, Whose Boston and The Salvadoran Initiative of Education and Culture (ISEDUC).

Frank Robinson oversees a broad public-private partnership which operates under the umbrella of Partners for a Healthier Community, Inc., a broad-based multi-sector initiative aimed at improving school health services, immunization status for pre-school-age children, health insurance enrollment for children, and capacity and services of youth development organizations. Frank is a public health professional with 20-plus years of Community Health Education experiences in a variety of public and private agencies.

Caprice Taylor Mendez is the Executive Director of Emerge Massachusetts, a new organization seeking to increase the number of progressive Democrat women elected leaders at the local and state-wide levels. Caprice brings 12 years of policy advocacy, coalition building, and grassroots organizing experience around issues such as education, public health, affordable housing, economic development, and the environment. She has worked as a policy advocate at a national, statewide and local levels.

Dolores Thibault-Munoz is Executive Director of the Cleghorn Neighborhood Center in Fitchburg and was born in Chicago, IL to Mexican and Guatemalan parents. She holds a bachelor’s in Women’s and Gender Studies from DePaul University in Chicago . Before coming to CNC she was the housing organizer for Blocks Together in Chicago. She also started a small arts organization for youth in Chicago.

Chuck Turner is a Boston City Councilor representing District 7 including Roxbury, Lower Roxbury, and parts of the Fenway, South End, and Dorchester. He has worked as an activist for over 40 years. During that time, he has served as the director of a community development corporation, an organizer training center, and a placement agency for construction workers of color. He has also worked as a manager/counselor at the nation’s oldest batterers’ treatment organization and as education director at a nonprofit consulting firm, focused on establishing worker cooperatives.

ONE MASSACHUSETTS STAFF

ONE Mass Project Director: Yawu Miller is an expereinced journalist and community organizer. He also serves as a senior editor at the Boston Banner, which for 40 years has been Boston ’s African American newspaper. Yawu’s writing has chronicled the political and social justice movements in the Greater Boston area for the last 16 years, forging relationships with activists from communities in Boston and across the state. Additionally, he is an advisory board member of the Ethnic Media Project, an initiative of UMass Boston’s Center for Media and Society aimed at building greater cooperation between news outlets serving the state’s communities of color. A life-long Boston resident, Yawu graduated from Dartmouth College in 1990 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature.

ONE Mass Outreach Judy Meredith is the founder and executive director of the Public Policy Institute. A veteran lobbyist, Judy has worked for more than thirty years creating change through legislative advocacy. Judy’s lobbying experience in Massachusetts began in 1969 when she became a volunteer lobbyist for her adoptive and foster parent group. After ten years of working as an advocate inside and outside of state government, she founded Meredith and Associates a political consulting firm known for its work with nonprofits. Over the years, Judy’s lobbying work evolved into a coaching model in which she guides clients through the process of developing their own internal capacity for advocacy by mentoring staff, building leadership skills of volunteers, and helping to broker constructive and positive working partnerships with policy makers.

Strategic Communications: Harmony Blakeway serves as The Public Policy Institute's Strategic Communications Director, focused primarily on the ONE Massachusetts Project. Harmony earned an MS in Information Systems and an MBA in Public and Nonprofit Management at the Boston University Graduate School of Management, where she consulted for both local nonprofits and socially-responsible corporations, including the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Hasbro's CSR Department, and Recycline, Inc.

Prior to joining PPI, Harmony developed a business plan for the Medical Access Program at the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT). Currently in the process of gathering funding, the organization will bring non-resource-intensive, best-in-class, locally-manufactured neonatal incubators to Sub-Saharan Africa, designed to utilize existing supply chains. The project will bring educational opportunities, local jobs, and medical technology to the region, and serve as a case study of "organic resourcing," solving problems with locally-available resources.

Policy and Training: Cynthia Tschampl. Hailing from a long history of service, Cynthia Tschampl officially began her Peace and Justice advocacy career in 2000 with NETWORK, A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby where she honed both organizing and lobbying skills. While there she educated on a range of issues, including: livable wages, access to benefits, sanctions on Iraq, affordable housing, elections in Haiti and military aid to Colombia. Prior to joining the PPI team, Cynthia spent nearly five years immersed in immigrant issues and communities as the Senior Legislative Organizer for the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA) and the Youth Arts and Leadership Program Director for Centro Presente, Inc. She also serves as Boston Global Leader for RESULTS, an international grassroots organization dedicated to creating the political will to end world hunger and poverty, and as a member of the Medical Advisory Committee for the Elimination for Tuberculosis.

Organizational Development and Network Building: Joan Lancourt is a consultant working on the ONE Massachusetts campaign of the Public Policy Institute. Joan is currently an Executive Coach in the Achieving Excellence program at the Kennedy School’s Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations sponsored by Neighborworks, where she has been coaching executive directors of affordable housing organizations in how to more successfully grow and sustain their organizations. Joan has also been on the Executive Committee of Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts and has been active in a number of non-profit organizations, as a board member, volunteer, researcher and coach. Joan has had a long career, beginning with the LA County Welfare Dept. and as a faculty member at the Boston University School of Social Work’s Div. of Continuing Education where she ran workshops for community mental health workers, nursing home staff, foster care workers, and provided technical assistance to health care cost containment agencies throughout New England. Joan received her MSW in Community Organizing from UCLA, and her Ph.D. from Brandeis. She has published 2 books – Confront or Concede, an assessment of the impact of organizations developed by Saul Alinsky, and Intentional Revolutions, an investigation into why some organizations can make significant changes in how they operate while others fail. Joan has also worked extensively in the private sector as director of human resources, head of management development, and as a senior organizational consultant to leading companies and gvt. agencies around the world.