Steering and Advisory Committee Members
Steering Committee
Ruth Caplan, Co-chair
Ruth comes to Boston from Washington DC where she co-chaired the campaign for a public bank. She has campaigned for economic and environmental justice for more than four decades from local fights opposing nuclear plants in upstate New York, to lobbying for safe energy in Congress, to creating the Economics Working Group with economists and social policy experts to imagine a just, sustainable economy grounded in local communities. As director of Environmental Action, a national grassroots organization, she appeared on the Today Show as well as national news networks and authored Our Earth, Ourselves, published by Bantam. She was elected the first co-chair of the Alliance for Democracy in 1996 and continues to serve on their national council.
Barbara Clancy, Co-chair
Barbara is national coordinator for the Alliance for Democracy. Her interest in public banking is rooted in her longtime concern with community development, affordable housing, and food insecurity in small city and exurban settings, especially in communities outside the Boston area. She lives in Stow.
Christine Desan
Christine is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the author of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014), a book arguing that a radical transformation in the way societies produce money ushered in capitalism as a public project. She is the founding editor of Justmoney.org, a website that approaches monetary and financial design as matters of governance, and co-founder of Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism. Other work includes Beckert and Desan, eds., American Capitalism: New Histories (Columbia University Press, 2018), and Desan, ed., A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury Pub. Co., 2019).
Richard Krushnic, Treasurer
Richard is a community economic development professional, doing financial management and housing and business projects financial restructuring at Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development. He has a good deal of experience in Latin America, and works with several Latin American support groups. He brings his expertise in public housing and business financing to the public banking issue.
Chuck Grigsby
Chuck began as an international banker at Bank of Boston and then moved into community development and small business finance as manager of a new state loan fund. He later started and managed a minority enterprise venture capital fund. Subsequently, he served for fifteen years on the Board of Boston Private Bank, including six years as Chair of the Loan Committee. He also invested five years as the Director of the City of Boston Department of Neighborhood Development. As Fund Manager, Chuck started up a $100,000,000 community investment fund capitalized by Massachusetts life insurance companies. His last position was President of Mass Growth Capital Corp., a state fund structuring loan packages for un-bankable businesses. In addition to working with Massachusetts Public Banking he is on the advisory board for the Public Banking Institute.
Timothy F. Havel
Tim is a scientist and cleantech entrepreneur, who became interested in banking and finance following the crash of 2008. He learned about “system dynamics” modeling while studying the management of technology at MIT, and has begun to apply it to the emerging vision of a new economy and its implementation via monetary reforms such as public banking.
Nancy Ryan, Outreach Coordinator
Nancy holds a PhD in literature but left the academic life for community activism promoting racial and gender justice. She is the retired Executive Director of the City of Cambridge Commission on the Status of Women, a post she held for 25 years. During that time she helped create a number of ground-breaking institutions including a full service Teen Health Center in the city’s high school, a free-standing Birth Center staffed with midwives, Cambridge Cares about AIDS and an internationally recognized domestic violence education and intervention program. She has been an active member of the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of MA for three decades and past president for three terms. Nancy is a founder of the Area 4/Port Neighborhood Coalition and the Cambridge Residents Alliance, dedicated to policies that promote housing rights and an affordable, livable and diverse city. She lives in Central Square, Cambridge.
Steve Snyder
Steve joined the movement for public banking in 2010, after interviewing homeowners facing foreclosure in Roxbury and Dorchester. Steve’s thesis in Community Economic Development found that mortgage companies, banks and some owner-investors committed fraud but not owner occupants. A member of City Life/Vida Urbana, Steve is also an avid community gardener, writer and poet.
Richard Tillberg
Richard began his career as an urban planner, migrating to private real estate development, and finally landing as vice president of a consulting firm representing over fifty municipalities in their redevelopment, planning, project financing, and housing activities. Along the way he was president of a non-profit affordable housing development company and executive director of a redevelopment agency. In a second career he became a certified mediator working in small claims courts as well as business mediation. In a third career he helps his wife tend the family acre in Western Massachusetts.
Advisory Committee
Barry Bluestone
Barry Bluestone is a labor and political economist. He is the founder of Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University and the founding dean of its School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs.
Christina A. Clamp
Christina A. Clamp is a professor of sociology and Director of Cooperatives and Community Economic Development at Southern New Hampshire University where she has been on the faculty for over 30 years. Dr. Clamp serves on the board of the ICA group in Boston and the Food Cooperative Initiative. She has published extensive research on the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, a model for collectively owned and managed industry.
Doug Cliggott
Doug Cliggott teaches economics at UMass/Amherst. Before joining the faculty in 2012, he worked in banking and finance for 25 years in the United States and in Scandinavia. Doug is also actively involved on volunteer boards in the Town of Provincetown.
Gerardo Espinoza
Gerardo Espinoza is Executive Director of LEAF, Local Enterprise Assistance Fund, which develops financing programs and technical assistance for small businesses in Massachusetts. He serves as an advisory member of the Federal Reserve’s Financial Innovations Roundtable and is a member of the Boston Federal Reserve’s Working Group on Wealth Inequality. He serves on the boards of the Food Coop Initiative, the Boston Industrial Development Financing Authority, and Third Sector New England.
Nia Evans
Nia Evans is Director of the Boston Ujima Project which pursues innovative strategies for economic transformation that bring people together across a range of social and economic justice issues.
Lew Finfer
Lew Finfer is founder and current Co-Director of Massachusetts Communities Action Network, a federation of faith-based community organizations with affiliates in Brockton, Boston, Springfield, Holyoke, Fall River, New Bedford, Worcester, and greater Salem. He has been a tenant and community organizer in Massachusetts since the 1970s, and lives in Dorchester.
Segun Idowu
Segun Idowu is Executive Director of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA) which works to advance the economic well-being of Black businesses and of organizations serving the Black community and Black residents.
Marjorie Kelly
Marjorie Kelly is a Senior Fellow and Director of Special Projects at The Democracy Collaborative. Through her books, articles and active participation in community education, she is a longstanding advocate for alternatives to a corporate dominated, profit driven economy. In her latest book, Our Ownership Future, she sees a “generative” economy emerging in five different patterns of social ownership of economic enterprise including public banks.
Julie Matthaei
Julie Matthaei is a Professor Emerita of Economics at Wellesley College and a board member the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network. She is the author of Feminism and Revolution and The Time for a New Economics is at Hand.
Lev Menand
Lev Menand is an academic fellow and lecturer at Columbia Law School. He is a former senior adviser to the deputy secretary of the Treasury and was previously on staff of the Federal Reserve.
Nadav Orian Peer
Nadav Orian Peer is an associate professor at Colorado Law, where he teaches Financial Institutions, Bankruptcy, and a seminar titled Funding Climate Action. His current research studies the theory and the practice of supporting important social goals like racial equality and environmental protection through affordable financing. A former Massachusettsian, Nadav is thrilled to join the effort for a public bank in the state.
Tom Sgouros
Tom Sgouros is a public policy researcher and writer. He consults with states and city/county officials about banking, economics, budgeting and better ways for governments to manage citizens’ monies. He is the author of Checking the Banks: The Nuts and Bolts of Banking for People Who Want To Fix It. He sees public banks as a kind of public utility that can help build productive economic activity in contrast to a “financialized” economy driven by speculation and profit taking.
Paul Shannon
Paul Shannon works with the American Friends Service Committee in Boston, focusing on peace, prison reform, human rights and social/economic justice. He helped initiate and organize the statewide Budget For All Referendum campaign. As part of the Majority Agenda Project, he fosters collaboration among social movements and community organizations addressing current economic, environmental and foreign policy crises.
Joseph Sommer
Joseph Sommer is a retired central bank lawyer specializing in payment systems and bank insolvency.
Michael Swack
Michael Swack is director of the Center for Impact Finance and the Master’s Program in Community Development at the University of New Hampshire, focusing on innovations in community finance including CDFIs.
Greg Watson
Greg Watson is Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. His work focuses on community food systems and the dynamics between local and geo-economic systems. Previously Greg served as the Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture under Governors Dukakis, Weld, and Patrick from 1990 to 1993 and from 2012 to 2014.