Board of Directors

  • Laura Berry

    Laura Berry is the Executive Director of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility. She began her career as a chemical engineer prior to a 17-year career on Wall Street in socially-responsible investing that included handling accounts for religious orders. After leaving Wall Street, she served as the director of the New London Development Corporation’s Community Development Initiative. At the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven she served as Vice President for Development and, later, Senior Vice President for Philanthropic Services. Laura has a B.S. from Michigan Technology University and an M.S. from the University of Michigan. She obtained a Certified Financial Planner designation from Quinnipiac University.

  • Dennis Bidwell

    Chair

    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.

  • Bill Breitbart

    Treasurer

    Bill Breitbart is the Director of Housing for Central and Western Massachusetts for the Massachusetts Community Economic Development Assistance Corporation (CEDAC), for which he provides technical assistance and pre-developmental funding to affordable housing organizations. He has spent most of his career as an attorney specializing in affordable housing. Bill served on the NPP board as Clerk 1993-1996 and as Treasurer 1997-1999.

  • Savita Farooqui

    Savita Farooqui is the Founder and President of SymSoft Solutions (SymSoft), a Sacramento-based web development and systems integration company. SymSoft specializes in creating software solutions for government agencies and non-profit organizations. Under Savita’s direction SymSoft has delivered popular, award-winning applications that have been recognized by the White House, the US Department of Labor and the Center for Digital Government. Savita is passionate about open data and has been recognized as a “Champion of Change” by the Executive Office of the President for her work in technology and innovation. She is a member of the California DGS Small Business Advisory Council, PMI Government Forum, IEEE and ACM. She holds an MS in Computer Science from the National Institute of Technology in India.

  • Doug Hall

    Vice Chair

    Doug Hall is the Director of Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN). Previously, Doug served as Director of Operations and Research for Connecticut EARN partner, Connecticut Voices for Children. His areas of expertise include child poverty, state economic development policy, and tax incidence. Doug has written and co-authored numerous reports, including eight State of Working Connecticut reports and his work as been cited by statewide media, with op-ed articles in several newspapers including the Hartford Courant and the Kentucky Post.

  • Jim Harper

    Jim Harper is the Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He works to adapt law and policy to the unique problems of the information age, in areas such as privacy, telecommunications, intellectual property, and security. Jim is a member of the Department of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee and he recently co-edited the book Terrorizing Ourselves: How U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It. He has been cited and quoted by numerous print, Internet, and television media outlets, and his scholarly articles have appeared in the Administrative Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review, and the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. He wrote the book Identity Crisis: How Identification Is Overused and Misunderstood. Jim is the editor of Privacilla.org, a Web-based think tank devoted exclusively to privacy, and he maintains online federal spending resource WashingtonWatch.com. Jim holds a J.D. from UC Hastings College of Law.

  • Paul Kawika Martin

    Paul Kawika Martin is Peace Action’s organizing and political director and has worked with numerous Environmental, Peace, Animal Rights and Human Rights organizations including Greenpeace and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR). Paul worked with a Clinton Presidential Commission and spent a year campaigning in twenty countries on Greenpeace ships including the Rainbow Warrior. He is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

  • Jen Kern

    Clerk

    Jen Kern is the Minimum Wage Campaign Coordinator at the National Employment Law Project. Previously she worked as the 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 whom we all depend on every day.

  • Roz Lemieux

    Roz Lemieux is the founder and partner of Fission Strategy (web 2.0 and social media strategy) and Executive Director of New Organizing Institute. From 2004-2006, Roz worked for MoveOn.org Political Action. Prior to MoveOn, she consulted for progressive candidates. Roz started career in online organizing in 1999 as web team director at the feminist majority foundation

  • Miriam Pemberton

    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. Miriam holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

  • Lorna Peterson

    Lorna Peterson served as the Executive Director of the Five Colleges, Inc, a consortium comprising Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges and the Univeristy of Massachusetts Amherst. Recently retired, she led one of the nation’s most successful higher education consortia for eighteen years.

  • Vijay Prashad

    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.

  • Cate Woolner

    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.