The new Coordination Team’s names and bios are below the voting form. Please vote once.
Coordination Team Members
Sam Anderson
Maritza Arrastia
Marilyn Frankenstein
Sally Jane Gellert
Alfredo Lopez
Dorotea Manuela
Kevin Norton
Angel Román
Makani Themba
Cleo Silvers
Lois Helmbold
Marie Kennedy
Ellen Barfield
Betty Davis
Hector Rivera
Team Member Bios
Sam Anderson is a retired Mathematics and Black History professor who has taught math, science and Black History at various New York City metropolitan colleges and universities for more than forty years. He is also an author of books on science, technology and the history of slavery like The Black Holocaust for Beginners. He has also been active in the Civil Rights/Black Liberation Movement since 1964… and has combined his activism with his scholastic work via numerous community based organizations and Black Studies Departments.
Maritza Arrastia has worked since 1984 as a Freirean popular educator in community based programs, and currently at a community college in NY. She first practiced Freirean education when she was a militant of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party involved in political education. She covered sterilization abuse in Puerto Rico when she was a reporter for the PSP’s Claridad newspaper in the 70s, and this led to being one of the founders of the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA), a group that helped wage a successful campaign to pass City guidelines and later a NYC law, to curb sterilization abuse in NY. More recently, she was active in Occupy Sunset Park. She served on the board of May First Movement Technology (MFMT) for many years. She was one of the initiators of the Radical Elders political project and firmly believe we elders have key roles to play to create the world where everyone lives well and not just the few live better.
Marilyn Frankenstein is a retired professor, College of Public and Community Service (UMass/Boston), whose work focused on teaching quantitative reasoning as vital to understanding and acting to create a more just world. She is currently compiling a summary archive of her work as an activist academic; and, is active in BDS Boston; July26.org Cuba solidarity coalition; and, HEART (Wholistic Emergency Alternative Response Team), an alternative to policing created by The Black Response/Cambridge.
Sally Jane Gellert, a resident of Bergen County, N.J. (on occupied Lenape land) is active in civic education and advocacy. She is a member of InterOccupy, and helped organize the Occupy Wall Street gatherings in 2013 (Kalamazoo) and 2014 (Sacramento). Currently she maintains Occupy Bergen County’s social-media presence, was a founding member of the Bergen Unitarian Universalist Relief Group (BUURG) and through Occupy Sandy New Jersey headed up the Bergen County Long-term Recovery Group’s advocacy committee. Sally is deputy team lead of Messaging for Voter Choice New Jersey (working on ranked-choice voting) and s chairperson of the Lackawanna Coalition, a rail-passengers’ advocacy group, and is part of the web-maintenance teams for Northern NJ Jewish Voice for Peace, National Radioactive Waste Coalition, Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community (also cochairperson and newsletter editor for that group), the Lackawanna Coalition, and Radical Elders.
Alfredo Lopez, a revolutionary organizer and activist for a half century, has been a leader of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in the U.S.; organizer of many actions, campaigns and demonstrations (including the 1974 Day of Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence in Madison Square Garden); a founder of May First Movement Technology; author of six published books and one of the founders of Radical Elders.
Kevin Norton is a musician based in New Jersey: a composer, performer and educator for over 35 years. As a composer he has written for jazz bands, chamber groups and movie soundtracks. His compositions can be heard on over 20 CDs (and he has performed on maybe 100 recordings) As a performer he has worked with Milt Hinton, Anthony Braxton, Joëlle Léandre, Fred Frith, John Zorn, Pat Irwin and Connie Crothers. As a community activist, Kevin is or has been a member of The Leonia (NJ) Peace Vigil, COFIA (Community of Friends in Action: working for immigrant workers in North New Jersey), Radical Elders, the North New Jersey chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (NNJ-DSA) (working groups: Immigrant Justice, Mutual Aid, CREW (Committee of Radical Education Workers) amongst others) and POP (People’s Organization for Progress). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Norton
Angel Román is a member of the Venceremos Brigade challenging the U.S. blockade of Cuba; Board member of Cumbe Center for African and Diaspora dance which champions the legacy of culture and resistance; Member of NYC Labor Chorus singing about worker struggles and social justice; Retired municipal worker fighting against privatized Medicare plans; Was board member of a credit union, community health center, and Center for Puerto Rican Studies.
Dorotea Manuela is an Afro Boricua Radical Elder and former RNP (Registered Nurse Practitioner); Community health and occupational medicine, is a long standing anti racist and liberation warrior for over 50 years. Her experience and activities have included: Cofounder of MassCOSH /Massachusetts Coalition on Occupational Safety and Health (conducted successful campaign “Right to Know” which led to legislation); Labor organizing and administration (NYC – Columbia University. Boston Area – Boston University and Harvard University as well as workers in local companies. Co Founded a Women of Color Reproductive Rights Coalition. Developed culturally and linguistically appropriate health programs. Have also organized events including Lolita Lebron Centennial Celebration and Welcoming of released Boricua (Puerto Rican) Freedom Fighter Political Prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera.
Makani Themba is a veteran organizer and movement communications practitioner based in Jackson, Mississippi. An author, social justice innovator, and pioneer in the fields of change communications and community-led, justice centered policy development, she has spent more than 40 years supporting organizations, coalitions and philanthropic institutions in developing high impact change initiatives. Her ideological influences are diverse, intersectional, and dynamic. Her main political “homes” over the years have remained the Black Liberation Movement, liberation theology, and “Third World” and eco feminism.
Cleo Silvers began her career in community and labor organizing as a VISTA Volunteer and activist in the South Bronx beginning in 1966. Her training as an organizer was based on the Saul Alinsky organizing method of going door-to-door meeting and listening to people in the community.
She was co-founder of the Trinity Avenue Block Association, the Jackson Avenue Block Association and the Kelly Street Block Association, Lincoln Detox, and the Think Lincoln Committee (TLC), a coalition of members of the community, interns and doctors, Young Lords and Black Panthers and hospital workers). Cleo as co-chairperson of HRUM (Health Revolutionary Unity Movement) and the Think Lincoln Committee collectively penned the Patient’s Bill of Rights (watered-down version now seen in every hospital across the country). She participated in the three take-over protests of Lincoln Hospital.
Today she works as a consultant at Cossitt Library in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. She is part of a mentoring program for sixth graders thru high schoolers. She will be helping youngsters design and implement a podcast on the need for protests and how to do it. Black people in Memphis were allowed to use libraries in town only after students from Rhodes and Owens Colleges lead sit-ins at the library in 1961. Cleo is also trying to complete her memoirs within the next few years.
Lois Rita Helmbold is the daughter of a Pennsylvania Dutch, evangelical, fundamentalist, rural, country preacher and a Polish coal miner’s daughter. Teaching at an impoverished HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in rural Mississippi in the late 1960s compelled her to a lifelong commitment to racial justice. She has been an activist in anti-war, feminist, LGBT, and racial justice movements. She headed women’s studies at San Jose State University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her writing appears in feminist, labor, lesbian, and historical scholarly and popular journals. Making Choices, Making Do: Survival Strategies of Black and White Working-Class Women during the Great Depression (Rutgers UP, 2023) illustrates her political and intellectual commitments. Despite three degrees in history, she was only allowed to teach US history outside the US: in Tokyo, Japan and Izmir, Turkiye as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer. Colleagues, comrades, friends, lovers, and students have propelled her along the path of working as an ally and co-conspirator. ShCleo Silverse creates and exhibits political quilts and practices tai chi. She lives in Oakland, California.
Marie Kennedy is Professor Emerita in Community Planning at the University of Massachusetts Boston and served as Visiting Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California Los Angeles for eight years. Throughout her academic career she has combined the roles of activist and scholar, working in and writing about transformative community development, planning education and participatory action research, with a particular emphasis on developing racial and cultural awareness in community planning and on participatory planning methodologies for community empowerment. Marie’s teaching focused on collaborative projects through which students earned academic credit while providing service to community and worker organizations focusing on anti-displacement, anti-racist community development and lifting the voices of marginalized communities. Over the years, she has worked extensively with community organizations and social movements in the Greater Boston area, as well as in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua and Palestine. Marie has served on the board of directors of both local and international community development organizations and serves on the editorial board of Progressive City.
Ellen Barfield currently serves on the national boards of Veterans For Peace, the War Resisters League, Military Families Speak Out, and the Center on Conscience and War, and heads VFP’s Baltimore Phil Berrigan Memorial chapter, and on climate issues works primarily with the anti-fracking/FERC restructuring group Beyond Extreme Energy. She also is involved in anti-racism, Nicaragua solidarity, and peace organizing in her home town on stolen Piscataway land now called Baltimore, MD.
She spent 4 years in the US Army, 1977-1981. She wondered why so many US troops were in those nations so very long after the hot wars there, which curiosity led her to activism challenging the absurdly huge number of US bases worldwide, nuclear weapons, and militarism in general, and its massive theft from human needs.
As she has for nearly 40 years, she supports struggles for justice challenging racism, homophobia, misogyny, and other oppressions. Ellen has participated in peace delegations to and solidarity work with Palestine, Iraq, Korea, and Nicaragua.
Betty Davis I have been a warrior in the struggle for community control of education every since the NYC school strike in 1967. I was a social worker and an educator. I was, along with Ralph Poynter and Lynne Stewart, founder of The New Abolitionist Movement because as everyone knows, “Cats don’t educate mice, they eat them.”
This organization grew out of the movement to support the Ocean Hill Brownsville Community Control struggle and the rest is history., I am dedicated to the institutions of the public school system because as Frederick Douglass observed, ‘education and slavery are incompatible. I was proud to serve as financial administrator and fundraiser.
The entire movement of the sixties was based on the belief that our children are the future and it is the duty of each generation to guarantee the future of the ones who come after them. I believe as the Cree people believe, we must make our decisions and our actions with the intention of guaranteeing a positive impact unto the 7th generation.
Hector Rivera was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico and brought to New York City at the age of two months. He has engaged in over 50 years of personal and professional activities that include serving as a not-for-profit administer, building the capacity of Latino community-based organizations and organizing for social and economic justice.
He was radicalized as a pre-teen in the early 1960s as he watched the civil rights struggles unfold throughout the country. During this time, he began reading the works of Marx and Lenin and is guided by those principles. Although he was strongly opposed to the war in Vietnam, he was drafted and forced to serve in the army. Upon his release from the military, Hector began organizing college veterans against the war and advocating for expanded benefits. While attending school in the evenings, he was employed full-time in the fur industry as a sewing machine operator. He also became affiliated with the Furriers Joint Council, where he served on the union’s organizing committee.
Hector served as the Editor of Voz del Pueblo and columnist/reporter for the Daily World, both left/progressive publications, from 1977-1983. During that period, he was a member of the Newspaper Guild of New York. He holds a Master’s Degree in biology and has taught at an alternative public high school in New York City prior to working in youth and community development. Hector is currently retired but continues to provide management and fund development advice to established and emerging Latino CBOs.