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Board & Staff
Board of DirectorsNikhil AzizCynthia Bargar Melissa Cariño Robin Carton Miabi Chatterji Diana Digges Leila Farsakh Carol Gomez Kay Mathew Malika McCray Yafreisy Mejia Marc S. Miller Jim O'Brien Christy Pardew Carmen Rau Carol Schachet Camilo Viveiros Jen Willsea StaffRobin Carton, Director of Grantmaking and FinancesReach Robin at robinc (at) resistinc.org. Malika McCray, Director of Development Reach Malika at malika (at) resistinc.org. Yafreisy Mejia, Administrative Director Reach Yafreisy at yafreisy (at) resistinc.org. Christy Pardew, Communications Director Reach Christy at christy (at) resistinc.org. Nikhil Aziz is Executive Director of Grassroots International, a human rights and international development organization and progressive public foundation that promotes global justice through partnerships with social change organizations through grantmaking, education and advocacy. Before joining GRI, Nikhil was Associate Director at Political Research Associates, where he led a team that studied the conservative movement and the political right in the United States. Nikhil previously taught human rights and international development at colleges in Colorado and Illinois. As a gay, immigrant, person of color, Nikhil has built collaborations with progressive activist and advocacy organizations nationwide and continues to speak, teach, and write on human rights, international development, and social change. In addition to serving on the board of RESIST, he is a board member of the Denver-based Africa Today Associates. Cynthia Bargar is a fundraising consultant for social change nonprofits. In the 1960s, Cynthia became interested in media radicalism. In the early 70s at Urban Planning Aid, while fighting to ensure public access in the then-new cable TV industry, she produced videos with tenant groups, health and safety organizers, women’s organizations, prisoners’ rights groups, and daycare activists. At the Somerville Media Action Project, Cynthia volunteered to write a few grants. Over 30 years later, she is still raising money, and is grateful to have been involved with so many excellent groups organizing around issues like homelessness, poverty, occupational health, domestic violence, and progressive culture. As a RESIST board member, she enjoys working the other side of the fence and being a grantmaker. In the late 1980s, along with other members of the Reunion affinity group, Cynthia helped make Somerville, MA a Sanctuary City. She is a long-time friend of the Welcome Project at the Mystic Housing Development, founded during that period to organize with and advocate for immigrants and refugees in Somerville. She enjoys practicing yoga, writing poems, and playing on the beach with her dog, Betsy. Melissa Cariño is a Filipina-American who was born in San Francisco and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. As part of a working-class family and a child of immigrant parents, she knows what it is like to struggle in America and understands the importance of critical education, equality, and giving to the greater community. Her passions are in youth work, social justice, grassroots organizing, social change philanthropy, and community development. She is thrilled that her work with the Boston Women's Fund, especially with the Young Sisters For Justice in Philanthropy (YSFJP), can fuse all these passions together. She is also thrilled to join the RESIST family! Melissa continuously wants to learn about different cultures and peoples' experiences. She loves to travel (when she can afford to), be outdoors, swim and hike, dance, eat good food, explore new places, challenge herself and others, and experience new things. She live with her partner, Trip, and dog, Sam I Am. Robin Carton, both a staff and board member of RESIST, has a background in both grassroots political organizing and law. For 10 years she worked in the fields of child care and education, focusing on working conditions for staff and economic justice issues. Robin was also a litigator involved in civil rights and employment law struggles. In 1995, Robin joined the staff of RESIST as the Grant and Fiscal Manager. She has been a Commissioner on the Somerville Human Rights Commission, a Board member of the Boston Women's Fund, and the Open Center for Children. In addition to her work with RESIST, Robin teaches graduate seminars for Wheelock College on financial and legal management issues in child care. Miabi Chatterji is an activist, full-time graduate student, and sometime teacher in New York City. She studies low-wage immigrant labor and corporate-led globalization in the American Studies PhD program at New York University. She has worked in the workplace justice movement in a few different capacities, including a living wage campaign, as a volunteer with a restaurant-workers’ center, and as a former member and leader of the graduate assistants’ union at New York University, which struck in the 2005-2006 academic year. Miabi is also committed to radical educational initiatives; she was an Organizing Collective member of Youth Solidarity Summer (a former RESIST grant recipient), a summer political education and movement-building program for young South Asian American / desi activists for three years. She has also provided ally, technical, and fundraising support for an anti-domestic-violence organization and a multi-issue legal advocacy organization for trans and gender non-conforming people. Diana Digges is a high school history teacher in Boston, a former journalist and a longtime RESIST. She joins the Board after many years teaching Americans and foreign students from elementary to post-graduate levels — in the U.S., Central America and the Middle East, including a decade of teaching and reporting in Egypt. Sobered by the widespread misunderstanding of the Middle East among Americans, Diana returned to school to get a Masters in Teaching to work with high school students in social studies and world history. Diana is heartened by what RESIST does, what it stands for and the unique connections it makes among diverse causes and people. Leila Farsakh is a Palestinian political economist, and presently an Associate Professor in political science at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She holds a PhD from the University of London, and a M-philosophy from the University of Cambridge in the UK. She has worked with a number of organizations, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris (1993-1996) and the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute in Ramallah (1998-1999). She has published various articles and studies on issues related to the Palestinian economy and the Oslo Process, international migration and regional integration. She has also been active in a number of grassroots organizations, including the Boston Committee for Palestinian Rights, which she helped to found in 2000 and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's Massachusetts chapter. In 2001 she won the Peace and Justice Award from the Cambridge, MA Peace Commission. Her book, Palestinian Labor Migration, was published by Routledge Press in 2005. Carol Gomez is a South Indian Malaysian living in the US. She has been involved in the violence against women movement, immigrant rights advocacy and anti-slavery/trafficking work for the past fifteen years in the US Malaysia. She is founding director of Matahari: Eye of the Day and its projects – Trafficking Victims Outreach and Services (TVOS) network and the South Asian Solidarity Network (SASN). Matahari offers advocacy, community capacity building, organizing, critical analysis and community education on the rights and empowerment of migrants and communities of color in the US. Carol sits on the Governor’s Commission on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault’s Immigrant and Refugee Subcommittee, the advisory committee of the Organizers of Color Initiative and serves on the Board of Fantezi Kreyol Afro Caribbean Dance Theatre. Kay Mathew works at City Life/Vida Urbana, a grassroots tenant organizing and affordable housing advocacy group in Boston. Over the past 15 years, Kay has worked for community organizing efforts in Boston, including organizing public school parents through Parents United for Child Care and Allston Brighton Healthy Boston Coalition. She has been active with other grassroots groups in Boston, including Proyecto Vida, Hawthorne Youth & Community Center and Spontaneous Celebrations, the creators of Wake Up the Earth. Now, along with tenants' rights, Kay's work as a community activist focuses on out-of-control development's negative impact on the urban environment. Kay is a single mother of two teenagers. Malika McCray is the Development Director at RESIST. She comes from a family of progressive activists and community organizers. Most of her social justice activism has been around health issues, domestic abuse, LGBT issues and anti-war organizing. She also has a Masters degree in social movement history, and she wrote a thesis on radical health activism and the new left. Christy Pardew works as the Communications Director at RESIST. Serving as both a staff and board member, Christy joined RESIST in January of 2008, bringing a strong background in communications work and grassroots organizing. Christy has spent many years working on grassroots campaigns for positive social change, and she spent several years working on the staff of School of the Americas Watch in Washington, DC before moving to Boston in 2007. In addition to her part-time work at RESIST, Christy teaches English to adult immigrants at The Welcome Project in Somerville. Carol Schachet is a longtime activist working for social change in international justice. She was RESIST's director of development and communications from 1995-2008. She previously was a community organizer with ACORN in Boston and New York, and with Sojourners Magazine and community in Washington, DC, as well as serving as the National Grassroots Coordinator at Witness for Peace. Carol is a Unitarian Universalist with a Masters of Divinity and is particularly interested in the intersections of politics and theology. Camilo Viveiros works in public health in the New Bedford area of Massachusetts. Born to immigrant parents, Camilo was raised in the closely-knit Portuguese community of Fall River. He has been involved in work for social justice for virtually his whole life. He has a long background in tenant organizing and gained national media exposure in 2004 when he and other activists were arrested during demonstrations at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He and the Timoney Three were acquitted of all charges. Jen Willsea grew up in Rochester, New York. In the San Francisco Bay Area and around Boston, she has worked on issues including the Iraq War, white privilege and racism, the prison-industrial complex, and queer survivors of violence. She recently completed a masters at Harvard Divinity School, where she studied intersections of race, class, and religion in the contemporary U.S. Jen now spends a lot of her time organizing around issues of extreme wealth concentration and class and race privilege. She is also a passionate cook. |
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