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.