National Priorities Project
Board of Directors
September 2009

Dennis Bidwell is the principal of Bidwell Advisors, providing real estate consulting services to non-profit organizations and private real estate owners and specializing in charitable gifts of real estate. With over twenty-five years of real estate and non-profit management experience, Dennis has extensive experience with conservation and preservation organizations, colleges and universities, families and their professional advisors, government agencies, financial institutions, private foundations, and community based housing, educational and human services organizations. He also has engaged in volunteerism and civic activity, serving on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations and devoting countless hours to organizing community projects and political campaigns. Dennis holds an MBA in nonprofit management from Boston University.

Eve Brown-Waite is a minister, author, and community activist who has lived and worked in several developing countries. Eve received her MPH in Community Education from Hunter College in New York City and also attended Meadville Lombard Divinity School in Chicago. Eve has worked in the fields of HIV/AIDS Prevention, both in the US and in Africa, and has worked with street children in Ecuador. In this country, she has worked on domestic violence intervention for the New England Learning Center for Women in Transition, and she was Health and Nutrition Manager for Head Start in two counties of western Massachusetts. Eve is presently a full-time writer.

Peter Greenwald is a Managing Director in the Quantitative Management Department at Babson Capital, a wholly owned subsidiary of MassMutual, where he has worked in asset liability management for 22 years. He has a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Amherst College and an MBA from the University of Massachusetts. He is a Chartered Financial analyst and member of the CFA Institute, an organization of investment professionals.

Jen Kern currently serves as Field Campaign Manager at American Rights at Work, an organization working to inform the public about the struggle to win workplace democracy for nurses, cooks, computer programmers, retail cashiers, and a variety of workers who we all depend on every day. Previously, she worked in the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) national office, providing research support for local ACORN organizers nationwide on issues from insurance and banking discrimination to jobs, education and minimum wage.

Bakari Kitwana is a journalist, activist and political analyst whose commentary on politics and youth culture have been seen on the CNN, FOX News (the O'Reilly Factor), C-Span, PBS (The Tavis Smiley Show) and heard on NPR. His 2002 book, The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture, which focuses on young Blacks born after the Civil Rights Movement, has been adopted as a course book in classrooms at over 100 colleges and universities.

Michael T. Klare is the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies, based at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Before assuming his present post, he served as Director of the Program on Militarism and Disarmament at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. (1977-84). Professor Klare has written widely on U.S. defense policy, the arms trade, and world security affairs. He is the defense correspondent for The Nation, a Contributing Editor of Current History, and recently authored the book: Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (Metropolitan Books, 2004). Professor Klare serves on the board of directors of the Arms Control Association, and the advisory board of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch; he is also a member of the Committee on International Security Studies of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Stephanie Luce is an Assistant Professor at the Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She received her PhD in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with an emphasis in political and economic sociology. She researches low-wage labor markets, with a major emphasis on the living wage movement, and is co-author with Robert Pollin of The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy. Stephanie is also a staff economist at the Center for Popular Economics and on the editorial board of Against the Current. She is a member of Jobs with Justice, and a long-time activist in the labor movement and third party politics.

Miriam Pemberton is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, writing and speaking on demilitarization issues for its Foreign Policy In Focus project. She leads a group that produces the annual “Unified Security Budget for the United States.” Other recent publications include "The Budgets Compared: Military vs. Climate Security." Formerly she was editor, researcher and finally director of the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Vijay Prashad teaches International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He is the author of eight books, two of which were chosen by the Village Voice as books of the year: Karma of Brown Folk, and Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. His most recent books are Darker Nations: The Rise and Fall of the Third World, and Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare. He is on the board of the Center for Third World Organizing, the co-founder of the Forum of Indian Leftists and writes every month for Frontline (Chennai, India), ZNET and Little India, as well as occasionally for Counterpunch.

William Strickland is on the faculty of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is also on the board of the Rainbow Coalition. Bill's long involvement in the Civil Rights movement has included the Presidency of the Northern Student Movement and northern coordinator of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Congressional Challenge. He acted as consultant on the award-winning PBS civil rights documentary series “Eyes on the Prize,” as well as for the PBS film “W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in 4 Voices.” He is also author of Malcolm X: Make It Plain, the companion volume to the film.

Sue Thrasher is the Coordinator of the Five College Public School Partnership in Amherst, Massachusetts. She holds a doctorate in Educational Policy and Research from the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is an adjunct faculty member for the School of Human Services at Springfield College. She is a former member of the staff and Board of Directors of the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. She is a co-founder of the Institute for Southern Studies and served as its first Director. She has worked with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC and was a recipient of a research fellowship from the Center for the Study of Civil Rights and Race Relations at Duke University. She is an author of the collaborative volume, Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, and has contributed to several volumes on oral history, including Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grassroots Activism in America 1921-1964.

Leah Wise is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network based in Durham, North Carolina. A native of California, Leah went South in the 1960's to work with SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement. She balanced motherhood with being an organizer, trainer, oral historian, cultural worker, and (disabled) steelfitter. She received an MA in History from Duke University. She was a founding editor of Southern Exposure, an award-winning journal of Southern politics and culture, and has co-authored several publications on Southern labor struggles. While directing Southerners for Economic Justice, she helped establish several organizations and networks addressing racist violence and plant closings, including the Center for Democratic Renewal, North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence, and the Federation for Industrial Retention and Renewal.

Lawrence Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. He is a former president of the Conference on Peace Research in History (now the Peace History Society) and a former chair of the Peace History Commission of the International Peace Research Association. His extensive writings on the history of peace movements, nuclear arms control and disarmament measures, and U.S. foreign policy include eleven books. Among them are an award-winning trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb, and, most recently, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, both published by Stanford University Press. In addition, he is active as a labor leader, a musical performer, and a member of the board of directors of Peace Action.

Cate Woolner worked at Franklin Community Action Corporation for nearly 15 years as the Director of the Mediation and Training Collaborative, the Director of Staff Training and Development, and, most recently, the Director of Human Resources. Cate has a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Brandeis and a Master's of Counseling Psychology from Antioch Graduate School of Education. She has many years of community activism and has especially focused on addressing racism and multi-culturalism in presentations, workshops and writings. Cate is an experienced mediator and facilitator as well as organizational consultant.