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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:

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.

Surina Khan is Vice President of Programs for the Women’s Foundation of California, a statewide public foundation that is known for working across issues to bridge disparate social justice movements. Surina’s programs support social justice organizations that are innovative, policy advocacy leaders, and building broad-based social justice movements. She previously worked as the executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and, from 1995-2000, as a research analyst with Political Research Associates. Surina is also a journalist and a member of The Public Eye magazine editorial board. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the Funders Network for Population, Reproductive Health, and Rights; and the Astraea Foundation.

Marcy Westerling is a nationally recognized leader in organizing Pacific Northwest rural communities to respond to violence, bigotry, and injustice. In 1992, she founded the Rural Organizing Project, which helps local grassroots groups overcome their isolation, pool resources, and acquire skills to achieve lasting social change. The ROP is noted for linking issues through transformational organizing and an appreciation for the long-term nature of justice work. As a 2010 Open Society Fellow, Marcy is mapping progressive infrastructure in rural localities in four states as a means of identifying potential allies for social change organizing. She credits PRA with developing an analysis of the Right that was formative to the ROP’s approach to political education. She lives in the woods outside of Scappoose, Oregon.

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.

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 served as founding director of 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. As director of the Wise Use Public Exposure Project in the mid-’90s, he tracked the Right’s anti-union and anti-environmental campaigns.

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, leader of the Nestle boycott. One of her first activist experiences was protesting a Denver presentation by the anti-gay Anita Bryant in 1978. Catherine has held positions ranging from part-time bookkeeper to Director of Finance and Administration with many small progressive non-profits in the Boston area.

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.

Amy Parker (Development Director) began working with PRA in September 2009. She has over twenty years of fundraising and communications experience in nonprofit settings. She has an expertise in foundation and corporate fundraising but has worked in every area of development from launching capital campaigns to organizing development offices for small and start-up non-profits. Before joining PRA, she was the COO and Development Director at Women of Means, a healthcare organization providing free medical care to homeless women and children in the Boston metro area. Her past affiliations include the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, the New England Aquarium and several human service agencies. She has a background in visual arts, in dance, holds a Master’s degree in history and has a particular interest in programming that support issues of concern to women.

Kapya 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.

Cindy Savage-King (operations manager) is responsible for the day-to-day administrative functions that keep PRA running smoothly. A native of Raleigh, N.C., Ms. King is an ordained Southern Baptist minister. She has worked as an associate pastor, as a chaplain in the U.S. Army Reserves, and as a police chaplain with the Raleigh Police Department. In the past, Cindy has been the president of Voices Rising, a Boston-based women’s chorus, and chair of the Pride Interfaith Coalition of Boston.

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 (communications and development assistant) 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.

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.

Researching the Right for Progressive Changemakers

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