PRA Board of Directors:

Chair:

Richard A. Gross is currently the Manager of the BW Realty Advisors LLC in Washington, D. C. He is a board member of NARAL Pro-Choice America and NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation. He was a private practice attorney and has managed state-level and federal consumer protection agencies and commissions.

Vivien Labaton was the founding Director of the Third Wave Foundation, the only national organization for young women between the ages of 15 and 30, which funds young women activists around the country. She is a noted public speaker, journalist and has been featured on CNN’s Inside Politics, Oxygen’s Trackers and Pure Oxygen, and is regularly quoted on the opinion of young women and the status of feminism today. For the past five years she also worked with Gloria Steinem as a Research Associate.

June L. Lorenzo, an attorney and consultant, currently serves as a judge in two tribal courts in New Mexico. She has also been adjunct faculty at New Mexico State University in the Criminal Justice Program. Previously, Ms. Lorenzo was a staff attorney for the Indian Law Center in Washington, D.C., a U.S. Trial Attorney on the Voting Rights Act, and served as Deputy Counsel for the Congressional Subcommittee on Native American Affairs and as Staff Attorney for the Committee on Indian Affairs in the United States Senate. She is Laguna Pueblo and Navaho.

Supriya Pillai is the Program Officer for Asia at the International Women’s Health Coalition.  She has experience in gender, health, and international development, working in complex and challenging political environments with diverse partners.  Through her work at IWHC, Ms. Pillai works with local partners in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Turkey to both provide necessary funds as well as technical assistance to advance sexual and reproductive health and rights.  Prior to working with IWHC, Ms. Pillai worked with the social marketing organization Population Services International (PSI) and in Cambodia she led the introduction of several new products, including a female condom, emergency contraception, and a new male condom marketed to women in trusting relationships.  Ms. Pillai has also worked and lived in West and Central Africa, for PSI, and earlier for Opportunities Industrialization Centers International in Guinea working in microfinance. 

Emelia Rallapalli is Vice President of Brand Strategy at Greenberg, Inc., a research and brand consultancy based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She specializes in helping companies speak with and reach hard-to-reach audiences through marketing and communications. Ms. Rallapalli has always served as a strategic planner in advertising, and coproducer and host of Essencia, a public radio program focused on women’s issues. In addition to PRA's board, Emelia currently serves on the board of directors for her family’s charitable foundation.

Alea Woodlee serves as the Associate Director at the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing (FCYO), a collective of national, regional and local grantmakers and youth organizing practitioners dedicated to advancing youth organizing as a strategy for youth development and social justice. Her key focus at FCYO is leadership of FCYO’s grantmaking programs, providing oversight to the FCYO’s strategic communication work, and working in partnership with the Executive Director on the overall management of the organization. A long-time activist, Alea formerly served as the Executive Director of the Pro-Choice Public Education Project. She currently serves on the board of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, and is chair of the board of The Laundromat Project, an organization that engages the community of Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn in using the arts as a social justice vehicle.

PRA Staff:

Director of Research Tarso Luís Ramos has been a researcher and writer on right-wing groups since 1991.  As director of the Wise Use Public Exposure Project he led efforts to counteract anti-union and environmental campaigns in the western United States.  From 2000-2005 he directed Western States Center’s racial justice program, which resists racist public policy initiatives and supports the base-building work of progressive people of color-led organizations.  Ramos spent 2005 in Brazil as a freelance writer and volunteer press assistant and translator for the MST (Landless Workers Movement).  His interests include immigration and the rise of “colorblind” ideology.

Senior Analyst Chip Berlet is a veteran freelance writer and photographer who specializes in investigating right-wing social movements, apocalyptic scapegoating and conspiracism, and authoritarianism. A PRA staffer since 1982, he has written, edited and co-authored numerous articles on right-wing activity and government repression for publications as varied as the The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Progressive, The Nation, The Humanist, and The St. Louis Journalism Review. Mr. Berlet edited Eyes Right! Challenging the Right-wing Backlash, co-published by PRA and South End Press (1995), a popular primer on the right. He is also co-author with Matthew N. Lyons of Right-wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, published by Guilford Press (2000).

Researcher Pam Chamberlain studies and writes about opposition to the reproductive justice and LGBTQ rights movements. She has worked with PRA since 1999, as an editor for the Activist Resource Kits, the lead researcher on their Campus Activism Project, and regular contributor to the Public Eye.  Pam has been involved with feminist, peace, and human rights activism since her days as a high school teacher. She maintains a commitment to making research from various academic fields accessible to activists.

Abby Scher, Ph.D, is Senior Editor of Public Eye, the quarterly magazine of Political Research Associates. She was founding director of Independent Press Association-New York, a network of immigrant, African American and other community press where she launched Voices That Must Be Heard, an email/web weekly translating key articles from the ethnic press. In 2003-2005, she was honored by the Ford Foundation with a Leadership for a Changing World award. A sociologist, her writing on civil liberties, labor organizing and other topics appear in a range of progressive publications.

Helen L. Crowley, PRA's Development Director, is a long-time social justice advocate with a strong focus on reproductive rights. Her career has included development director positions at Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, and the Centre for Population and Development Activities. As Associate Director of external Relations at Population Services International, she was a leader for Development, Public Affairs, and U.S. Programs. She also represented PSI on the International Consortium for Emergency Contraception, an early and instrumental group in the introduction of emergency contraception - Plan B - in the United States.

Amy Lessler is the Executive Assistant and Office Manager of PRA. Before joining PRA, she was marketing assistant at The Theater Offensive, a Boston-based queer theater company. In 2006 she graduated from American University with a degree in communications. A supporter of using art as activism, Amy volunteers regularly at Cambridge's folk venue Club Passim.

Desiree Soares is Administrative Assistant at PRA. Before joining the PRA team, she was an Administrative Assistant with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Georgia. She is currently a student at Cambridge College pursuing a BA in Psychology with a concentration in Couples & Family Counseling.

Alen Abdula, Web & Data Manager, is responsible for PRA’s web design, development, and production. Born in Bosnia, he moved to the Boston area in 1997 with his family, earning the MIAA Academic Excellence Award and accolades from the Boston Herald for his high school soccer performance. He is a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

PRA's Founder and President Emerita

Political Research Associates was founded by Jean V. Hardisty, Ph.D., a political scientist with a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and seven years' teaching experience. Dr. Hardisty founded PRA (formerly Midwest Research) in 1981 in Chicago. She has been an activist for social justice issues for over 25 years and is a well-known speaker and widely published author, especially on women’s rights and civil rights. In 1999 her book, Mobilizing Resentment, Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers, was published by Beacon Press. She currently serves on the boards of the Sister Fund, the Highlander Center, and the Women's Community Cancer Project and is the education consultant to the Ms. Foundation Democracy Funding Circle. She continues to remain involved in assisting the work of PRA.