PRA Board of Directors:

Chair:

Supriya Pillai (chair) is executive director of the Funders' Collaborative on Youth Organizing, a network of grantmakers and youth organizers dedicated to advancing social justice through youth development and organizing. She previously served as program officer for Asia at the International Women’s Health Coalition, where she worked with local partners in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Turkey to offer funds and technical assistance to advance sexual and reproductive health and rights. While working 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. She also worked on microfinance in Guinea.

Board:

Richard A. Gross (treasurer) is currently the manager of BW Realty Advisors, LLC in Washington, DC. 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.

Emelia Rallapalli (secretary) 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 hard-to-reach audiences through marketing and communications. She has served as coproducer and host of Essencia, a public radio program focused on women’s issues. In addition to PRA's board, she currently serves on the board of directors for her family’s charitable foundation.

Pardis Mahdavi, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of anthropology at Pomona College [www.pomona.edu]. Her research interests include sexuality, human rights, transnational feminism, and public health in the context of changing global and political structures. She is currently an editor for Rahavard Quarterly, a journal devoted to contemporary social issues in Iran and amongst the Iranian diaspora. Her book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution was published in 2008 by Stanford University Press. Her current reseach on migrant labor, sex trafficking, and the state in Dubai is supported with a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

René Redwood is CEO of Redwood Enterprise, LLC and is considered one of the nation’s foremost experts and advocates on diversity. Her consulting practice uses a cooperative business model to provide strategies and structures to enable the client’s mission. For more than two decades, Redwood has informed the debate on access, inclusion and equal opportunity while directing initiatives for public, nonprofit, and private sector organizations. Often described as smart, strategic and energetic, she has been featured in numerous publications, including TIME, Black Enterprise, American Editor, Elle, and Essence. A chemist by training, Redwood served on a court appointed task force overseeing a Fortune 500 corporation’s compliance with a historic discrimination settlement agreement. She has been executive or director of a prominent polling and consulting firm; the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission [PDF] (Civil Rights Act of 1991, Title II); a coalition of leading legal defense organizations; congressional district offices; and political operations for a national party.

pRA Staff:

Tarso Luís Ramos (executive director) assumed the role of executive director in June 2009 after serving as PRA’s research director for three years. As research director, he focused on anti-immigrant groups and the rise of “colorblind” ideology. He also launched three new research projects: on civil liberties, right-wing attacks on mainline churches, and Islamophobia and antisemitism on college campuses, and oversaw the transfer of Right Web, a site tracking those promoting a militarist foreign policy, from a nonprofit that was closing its doors. Before joining PRA, he tracked the Right’s anti-union and anti-environmental campaigns as director of the Wise Use Public Exposure Project (particularly  anti-union and anti-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.

Alen Abdula (web and 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. He is a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts. An emerging entrepreneur, Alen is also a remarkable wedding photojournalist serving the New England area.

Chip Berlet (senior analyst) 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 Boston Globe, the New York Times, The Progressive, The Nation, The Humanist, and the St. Louis Journalism Review. 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). [Bio] [Articles]

Catherine Brady (bookkeeper) has been crunching numbers since it was done with pencil and ledger paper. She took an eight-year break from numbers to engage in grassroots organizing and fundraising in the 1980s and early 90s with INFACT, beginning when the Nestle boycott was at its peak. One of her first experiences challenging the power was at a protest in Denver during a presentation by the anti-gay Anita Bryant in 1978. Catherine has held positions ranging from part-time bookkeeper to Director of Finance and Administration at almost every small progressive non-profit in the Boston area. She and her life partner have a fifteen-year-old daughter at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School.

Pam Chamberlain (senior researcher) 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, lead researcher on the Campus Activism Project, and regular contributor to Public Eye. She has been involved with feminist, peace, and human rights activism since her days as a high school teacher, and maintains a commitment to making research from various academic fields accessible to activists.

Thomas Cincotta (project director) heads PRA's nationwide investigation of regional counterintelligence strategies. A criminal defense lawyer, he led the Denver chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) in support of peace groups and others during the 2008 Democratic National Convention, and connected progressive lawyers with other community efforts around sentencing reform, immigrant rights, and police misconduct. He also represented migrant farm workers and served on the board of El Centro Humanitario, Denver’s first day laborer center. He currently serves on the NLG's national board and international committee. Before becoming a lawyer, Cincotta worked as a labor representative for UNITE HERE Local 217 in Providence, Rhode Island.

Michael Flynn, (consulting project manager, PRA's Right Web) is a writer based in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a former associate editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a past fellow of the International Reporting Project (formerly the Pew International Journalism Program), and the recipient of multiple grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. His articles have been published by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, the Inter Press Service, Asia Times, and Mexico's Reforma, among other media outlets. He holds a bachelor’s in philosophy from DePaul University, and a master’s in international relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.

Michelle Goldberg (project investigator) is a journalist and author based in New York, whose New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (W. W. Norton, 2006), was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Her latest book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, will be published by Penguin Press in April 2009. Goldberg was a senior writer at Salon.com, where she traveled to Jordan and Egypt to track down immigrants who had been swept up in post-9/11 raids. She also covered right-wing demonization campaigns against professors of Middle Eastern studies, as well as various manifestations of antisemitism on both the Left and the Right. She has reported from Israel, Iraq, India, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Argentina, and her work has appeared in The Nation, Rolling Stone, Glamour, The Guardian (UK), and The New Republic, where she has a blog. She is a member of the advisory board of J-Street, a group that is building a liberal, pro-peace alternative to supporters of aggressive Israeli policies in the Middle East.

Kapya John Kaoma (project director) investigates right-wing efforts to destabilize mainline Protestant denominations. He is an ordained Anglican clergyman with a particular interest in social justice issues, ecological ethics, and interfaith work. From 1998-2001 he served as the dean of St. John’s Cathedral in Harare, Zimbabwe and lecturer at Africa University, where he coauthored a class text in ethics, “Unity in Diversity.” From 2001 to 2002, he was academic dean for St. John’s Anglican Seminary in Kitwe, Zambia, where he launched its women’s studies and church school training programs. An active campaigner for women’s reproductive rights, Kaoma argues theologically for the promotion of condoms in the fight against HIV/AIDS. He received the Boston Theological Institute’s Costas Consultation In Global Mission award from 2003-2005. A doctoral candidate at Boston University School of Theology, he received its merit-based African Studies Fellowship four years in a row, from 2004 to 2008.

Kathy LeMay (major donor consultant) is the founder, president and CEO of Raising Change, which helps organizations raise capital to advance social change agendas and philanthropic individuals with social action planning worldwide. She began her global activism in war-torn Yugoslavia, where she worked with women survivors of the siege and rape-genocide camps, and she has been a social change fundraiser for fifteen years, raising millions of dollars in the fields of women’s human rights, hunger and poverty relief, HIV/AIDS, and movement-building. She has provided social-change fundraising and philanthropy training to hundreds of organizations throughout the world and is a prolific public speaker on strategies that advance the movement for justice and empower women to come into their own voices. She is the author and architect of several trademarked programs, including “Guide to Creating Your Generosity Plan,” “Anger Into Action,” and “Time, Treasure, Talent and Taking a Stand: How to Make a Difference in the World for Good.”

Jan Nunley (director of communication and development) is an Episcopal priest who served most recently on the staff of the Episcopal Church Center in New York as deputy for communication and executive editor of Episcopal Life Media. She spent 20 years as a television and radio news anchor and reporter in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, anchored "Weekend Edition" for Boston's WBUR-FM, and worked as newscaster and development director for National Public Radio's environmental news program, Living on Earth. She was the media liaison for women bishops and a member of the official news team at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, a decennial gathering of the world’s Anglican bishops. She has reported for Episcopal News Service at six of the Episcopal Church's General Conventions, and anchored video reports at the 2006 convention. She is the author of the North American edition of How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take To Change a Christian?

Charles Ocitti (finance director) brought a strong background in accounting and financial management services for nonprofit organizations when he joined PRA in June 2009. Before coming to PRA, he was a senior project manager and team leader at Boston Medical Center. He also spent two years as a consultant for Accounting Management Solutions, specializing in nonprofit organizations. He has worked for Jumpstart for Young Children and Year Up, Inc.

Maria Planansky (Right Web project editor) is a recent graduate from Beloit College in Wisconsin, where she studied political science and philosophy. Before joining PRA as a staff member, she served as an editorial intern, assisting with The Public Eye. In addition to her work in Somerville, she runs with her dogs each morning and studies the piano.

Abby Scher (PRA Editorial Director; Editor, Public Eye), edits and produces 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 presses, 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 Ph.D. sociologist, her writing on civil liberties, labor organizing and other topics appears in a range of progressive publications.

Pamela K. Taylor (project investigator) is a cofounder of Muslims for Progressive Values and former director of the Islamic Writers Alliance . She is a member of the national board of advisors to the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and served as cochair of the Progressive Muslim Union for two years. Taylor has been active in interfaith dialogue for 20 years, both in local initiatives and speaking at numerous conferences, universities, and places of worship. She received a masters in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, and writes regularly on spiritual matters and the Islamic faith. Her essays have appeared in Nurturing Child and Adolescent Spirituality: Perspectives from the World's Religious Traditions (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) and The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (University of California Press, 2008). As a freelance writer, she has been published extensively in newspapers, magazines, and journals, and is an award winning poet.

Becca Wilson (consulting editor, Right Web) has worked as an editor and writer for over a quarter of a century in the alternative and union press.  Her work with Right Web, a program of PRA, involves the study of organizations and individuals that promote militarist U.S. foreign and defense policies. She has written and edited articles, reports, and proposals for numerous nonprofit organizations, including a U.N.agency, environmental organizations, and nonprofits serving low-income people.

PRA's Founder and President Emerita

Political Research Associates was founded by Jean V. Hardisty, a political scientist with a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and seven years' teaching experience. She 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 has served 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 remains involved in the work of PRA.