Wall Street Reform, Consumer ProtectionsOn July 21, U.S. PIRG staff Ed Mierzwinski and Gary Kalman were present as Presi-dent Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The signing ended a nearly two year battle to reform Wall Street, after taxpayers were forced to bail out the nation’s biggest banks and fi-nancial firms in the fall of 2008.

Undoubtedly, the bill’s cen-terpiece is the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which Mierzwinski calls “the greatest consumer reform since deposit insurance.” Previously, bank regulators have had the dual and conflicting responsibilities of promoting banks while also enforcing consumer laws. Now, consumers will finally have an agency with only one job, protecting them from the tricks and traps of un-fair credit cards, unsustainable mortgages and other financial products, no matter where they buy them, at an insured bank or a payday lender.

It was a fierce fight, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers As-sociation both publicly vow-ing to kill the new bureau and running major campaigns against it. Fortunately, the right side prevailed.

PIRG staff in D.C. and across the country were heavily involved in the campaign to win the law. Mierzwinski and Kalman were instrumental in establishing and then helping to lead Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), an unprecedented 250-group coali-tion of leading consumer, civil rights, senior, and labor groups.

Mierzwinski often acted as co-alition spokesperson, holding events with Prof. Elizabeth War-ren, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, and Americans for Financial Reform Execu-tive Director—and long-time organizer—Heather Booth. He also testified multiple times before Congress on the legisla-tion. Mierzwinski and NYPIRG alumnus Travis Plunkett, legis-lative director of the Consumer Federation of America, each received The Hill newspaper’s annual “Top Lobbyists Award” for their efforts on passing the CFPB.

State PIRG staff also played a critical role. Canvassers knocked on over 17,000 doors in eight states for Wall Street reform. MASSPIRG staff at-torney Lizzi Weyant led Mas-sachusetts’ statewide efforts to successfully win new Senator Scott Brown’s critical vote.

In This Issue . . . Program Highlights . . . pg 2Updates from campaign work around the country.

Alumni News … pgs 3-6Check to see which alumni have made career moves or started families.

Job Opportunities . . . pg 6Check out these job listings for yourself or a friend.

Energy Service Corps Goes National . . . pg 7The program launches in Wisconsin, Colorado, and California.

Save the Date … pg 8Check to see if there’s an alumni event coming up near you!

Fall 2010State PIRG Alumni Newsletter

SECURING CRUCIAL VOTES—MASSPIRG presents U.S. Senator Scott Brown with a BMW, or “a Wall Street ride.” The mock gift was designed to help him decide how to vote on Wall Street reform.

—Continued on page 7

Times; gained celebrity support; and organized members and other activists to send more than 20,000 e-mails and make hundreds of phone calls, prompting one sena-tor to tell Dan Jacobson to “call off the dogs.”

Yet the chemical company lobby showered key senators with campaign donations and ran a spurious ad campaign designed to discredit the bill.

Despite this special interest vic-tory, the fight is not over: more than 40 local governments in California have already adopted similar plastic bag bans, and Environment California will now keep pushing every city and town in the state to take action at the local level.

MASSPIRG Counts Victories As Session AdjournsAs Massachusetts lawmakers adjourned last summer, Janet Domenitz and the MASSPIRG team succeeded in preserving a state ban on gifts by pharmaceu-tical companies to doctors and other health professionals; keep-ing the big warehouse-style stores covered by the state’s item pricing law; forcing the state to make its budget and some tax credits more transparent to the public; and signing Massachusetts to a compact promoting a national popular vote for president.

Lawmakers failed to update the popular Bottle Bill, though the bill did move further in the pro-cess than ever before.

Campaign Highlights

U.S. PIRG’s Food Safety Campaign Pushes ReformWhether it’s being dished out in the school lunch line, or at the breakfast table at home, food safety standards in this country have increasingly come under fire. Last summer’s nationwide recall of half a billion eggs was just one of more than 85 national recalls involving 153 food com-panies since July 2009.

As the government ordered a recall of millions of eggs and salmonella cases spiked across the country, U.S. PIRG’s Fed-eral Public Health Advocate Liz Hitchcock urged senators to forge ahead with legislation to pass the Food Safety Moderniza-tion Act.

The law would grant the Food and Drug Administration ex-panded authority to inspect food processing facilities to keep unsafe food off grocery store

shelves in the first place, and mandatory recall authority to expedite action when problems occur—the FDA currently only has the authority to request vol-untary recalls of contaminated food. It would also institute stronger traceback provisions, to help identify the source of con-taminated food that might find its way to store shelves.

The House of Representatives passed its food safety bill on a bipartisan vote more than a year ago. The Senate’s bipartisan bill has been waiting for a floor vote since November 2009.

On Sept. 9, state PIRG staff, including many new fellows, drummed up support on the issue and released a report detailing the 85 recent voluntary food recalls. Georgia PIRG’s Stephanie Jack-son Ali had already convinced the state Parent Teachers Associ-ation to sign onto the campaign to pass the law, and then went on to

generate media including state-wide NPR coverage and a clip on Fox News.

Hitchcock explains, “There’s something rotten when consum-ers get sick from unsafe food and food companies are in charge of their own voluntary recalls…The U.S. Senate has the opportunity to bring the nation’s food safety system into the 21st century by finishing the job of reforming the FDA’s food safety authority.”

Environment California: Bag Ban Falls ShortOne thousand miles off the Cali-fornia coast, in an area known as the central North Pacific gyre, is a floating island of plastic that spans nearly 5 million square miles, roughly the size of the United States and India com-bined. To help address this and other ocean pollution problems, Environment California orga-nized and advocated hard all year to pass a bill that would ban single-use plastic bags in California grocery stores. Un-fortunately, the bill fell short in the Senate by seven votes at the end of August, the victim of fu-rious lobbying by the American Chemistry Council.

Environment California had gone all-out in the weeks and days before the vote. Advocates held news events with a broad range of coalition partners and local elected officials featuring a 30-foot-long giant turtle; earned strong editorial support in the media, including the Los Angeles

Page 2

Dan Jacobson calls for California to ban plastic bags as alumnus Bill Magavern of the Sierra Club, Assemblymember Bill Monning, Environment California activists, a giant inflatable sea turtle, and Justin Malan of CLCV look on.

Alumni Profiles

Parker Blackman is the Chief Operating Officer for Fenton, one of the nation’s leading pro-gressive communications firms, based in San Francisco. He has been at Fenton for over nine years and thrives on designing communications campaigns for progressive clients as diverse as MoveOn.org, Human Rights Watch, the Hewlett Foundation, the YMCA, and our own Public Interest Network organizations. Parker enjoys the opportunity to work on such a wide variety of is-sues alongside fellow alumni Eric Antebi and Jenn Lindenauer.

Prior to his work at Fenton, Parker launched his career with several different positions with Public Interest Network organi-

Parker Blackman: Communications Expertzations. A member of the inau-gural Green Corps class in 1992, Parker recalls that initial experi-ence with particular fondness.

He remembers how the late Sarah Forslund was clearly one of the best organizers in the class, yet still revealed to him after training that she was nervous—Parker knew if she was nervous, he need not worry.

Parker’s second campaign place-ment was to create a volunteer corps with Sierra Club and generate postcards to support national forests—their efforts resulted in 10,000 postcards and they were convinced: organizing really works! It all clicked: the rule of halves, train the volun-

teers to do it, you can’t do it all yourself. Trained up by staff like Gina Collins Cummings, Leslie Samuelrich, Steff Cloth-ier, and Heather Collins, those early experiences had Parker hooked on organizing for the long-term.

After the year with Green Corps, Parker started an intermountain west office for U.S. PIRG before becoming Program Director and then Executive Director at WashPIRG. Partway through his time with WashPIRG, Parker also became the first director of the Fellowship Program, where he worked closely with Margie Alt.

Looking back, Parker knows that if he hadn’t been part of Green

Parker Blackman

Pam Gilbert

Corps and PIRG, he never would have ended up being part of the progressive movement where he is today—and he never takes that for granted.

Parker lives in San Fran-cisco and can be reached at pblackman@fenton.com.

Perhaps because she was already involved politically, Pam Gil-bert was slightly disappointed to find that activism on the Tufts

Pam Gilbert: Public Interest AttorneyPam soon landed in D.C. with a job at National Citizens Com-mittee for Broadcasting, where alumnus Sam Simon was her first boss. Seeking further train-ing to turn this work into a career, Pam accepted a Root-Tilden Public Interest Law scholar-ship to attend NYU. One ben-efit of the program was paid summer fellowships, and for Pam’s first summer at law school, she worked with CALPIRG in Berkeley on consumer issues; her second summer was spent with the ACLU; and then Pam came on full-time staff with U.S. PIRG upon graduation from NYU.

U.S. PIRG itself was brand new when Pam started on staff in 1984 as the consumer advocate, and the only other staff included Rick Hind, Gene Karpinski, and Lauren Pooler.

Pam went on to become con-sumer program director. A high-light from her work in those years was authoring and then ushering through Congress the Art and Craft Materials Labeling Act in 1988—the bill dealt with toxics in school art supplies and was a classic PIRG example of building on success in the states

campus in the late ‘70s wasn’t as flourishing as she had hoped. Still, she didn’t waste any time launching into several different causes, including the South Af-rica divestment efforts and the anti-nuclear movement.

She and other active students, including current Fund Planning Director Kirk Weinert, coordi-nated their efforts through the Tufts Political Action Coalition. Upon graduation, Pam asked a professor how she could do this work for a living and he told her, “Ralph Nader hires young people.” —Continued on page 6

Page 4

Weddings and Babies:Fund alumna Margy Belchak and Fund Assistant Planning Director Bobby Goldstein announced the birth of their second child, Rosemary Grace Golds te in , on Feb. 23 in Evanston, Ill. Margy and Bobby report that big brother Frankie is proud as punch and that Rosie’s his “best friend.”

Green Corps alumni Kirsten Collings and Mark Hays were married on June 19 in Bel Air, Md., with dozens of alumni and staff in attendance, including the bride’s sister, alumna Kelly Collings Hawkins.

Alumna Liz Guertin married Steve Dubois on June 12 in Sperryville, Va., at Belle Meade Farm, Inn, and School with alumni Kate Abend, Kat Barr, Richard Caplan, and Tracey King in attendance. The couple spent their honeymoon in Glacier National Park celebrating the park’s 100 year anniversary.

U.S. PIRG Higher Education P rog ram Di r ec to r Chr i s

Page 4

Lindstrom and Student PIRG Assistant National Organizing Director Andy MacDonald celebrated the birth of Marit Lindstrom MacDonald on July 28 in Boston. Owen Timothy Masur was born to alumna Annie Leary and PennEnvironment State Director David Masur on June 24 in Philadelphia.

Alumna Megan Owens and husband, Jason, welcomed Katerina Lydia Marker-Owens to the world on March 21 in Royal Oak, Mich. Megan is already back to work fighting the good fight to get real transit in Greater Detroit as Executive Director of Transportation Riders United.

MASSPIRG alumnus Rusty Painter and his wife, Carrie, celebrated the birth of Benjamin Edward Painter on July 12 in Durham, N.C. Benjamin joins big brother William, who is three.

Walter Francis Leschuk was born to Pubs alumna Jenna Perry

Leschuk and her husband, Steve, on Aug. 9 in Boston. Wally joins older brother, Aidan, who turns two in December. Alumni Network Coordinator Kirsten Schatz married Stephen Simon on Aug. 7 in Estes Park, Colo., with dozens of alumni and staff in attendance. Alumni Kim Nelson and Roland Kuehn provided wonderful professional photography for the celebration.

NJPIRG alumna Traci Sheehan Van Thull and her husband, Chris, adopted their second child, Paul Charles Sheehan Van Thull, in Dec. 2009. Paul joins big brother, Mateo, age four.

Movers and Shakers:Alumnus Joel Ario resigned from his post as Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner in August to accept a position with the Obama Administration as director of the federal Office of Insurance Exchanges. In the new role, Joel directs the unit that will develop and oversee the nation’s new system of state-based health insurance exchanges.

Owen Timothy Masur Katerina Lydia Marker-Owens

Alumni Updates

William & Benjamin Painter

Alumna Ellynne Bannon re-cently became Communications Director at Colorado Workers for Innovation and New Solutions (WINS).

NYPIRG alumnus Ron Brown-stein, political director of Atlantic Media, was also named editorial director for the National Journal Group last summer.

Green Corps alumna Liz Butler was promoted to Campaign Di-rector of 1Sky in August.

In September, MASSPIRG alumna Anne Collins began a new job as Associate Administra-tor for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Trans-portation.

Media Center alumna Michelle Ehlen is hard at work producing, directing, and acting in her second feature film, POP-U-larity! Mi-chelle describes the film as “Ameri-can Idol meets Best In Show in this quirky comedy about finding your fifteen minutes of fame.”

Fund alumna Michelle (Denney) Erenberg reports that she’s in

Paul Charles Sheehan Van Thull

New Orleans working as the campaign organizer for Gulf Future, the Gulf Restoration Network’s campaign for the BP oil drilling disaster. She works alongside fellow alumni Dan Favre and Aaron Viles at the Gulf Restoration Network.

Fund alumna Aimee Gaines reports that she wrapped up a year of teaching English and studying yoga in South Korea and then spent some time study-ing permaculture in Thailand before returning to her home base in Hawaii.

Green Corps alumna Nathalie Graham recently joined the team at Corporate Accountabil-ity International as a Regional Campaign Organizer, where she organizes action committees on the Think Outside the Bottle and Value [the] Meal campaigns.

Alumni Tim Greeff and Tra-vis Plunkett, along with U.S. PIRG’s Ed Mierzwinski, were named to The Hill’s list of top lobbyists for 2010.

VPIRG alumnus Kevin John-son recently published a book entitled The Power of Legacy and Planned Gifts: How Non-profits and Donors Work Togeth-er to Change the World. Kevin

is based in Portland, Ore. and is principal of Retriever Develop-ment Counsel, where he coaches nonprofit leaders on how to be more effective in strategy, chart-ing new directions, and building sustainable funding models.

Fund alumnus—and nephew to Public Interest Network staffer Mo Kirk—Jeremy Kirk is now a doctoral candidate in Christian Social Ethics at Union Theo-logical Seminary in New York. Jeremy has been an activist with Witness Against Torture and is a co-founder of Union Theologi-cal Seminary Students for Peace and Justice. Earlier this year he traveled to Bermuda to interview a group of Uighur men who had been released from Guantanamo.

Alumna Suzanne Leta Liou wrapped up her position at Renew-able Northwest Project last summer to take a new position as Develop-ment Manager with RES Americas.

After nearly five years as Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Deputy District Director, alumna Melanie Nutter accepted an appointment in August with the City and County of San Francisco as the Director of the Department of the Environment.

MASSPIRG alumna Linda Orel became Executive Director of

Massachusetts Association of Conservation Commissions in September.

Former canvasser and campus organizer William (Bill) Powers recently had another book pub-lished, Twelve by Twelve: A One Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream. More information at http://www.williampowersbooks.com/.

OSPIRG alumnus Tim Raphael reports that after a wonderful year in Chile, he and his family are back in Portland, Ore., where he’s begun a new job as Western Representative for the American Wind Energy Association.

Walter Francis Leschuk with Mom and brother Rosemary Grace Goldstein and family Marit Lindstrom MacDonald and parents

Green Corps alumna Leila Sala-zar-Lopez took a new position as Program Director at Amazon Watch in August.

MASSPIRG alumna Iris Vicen-cio-Rasku was elected to the Greenfield, Mass. Town Council last summer.

Fund alumnus Rick Werwaiss became the Executive Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Eastern N.Y. Chapter in August.

Fund alumnus Pete Witzler re-cently began work as the Senior Community Political Organizer

—Continued on page 6

Liz Guertin and Steve Dubois celebrate their wedding with alumni friends.

Maryland PIRG alumnus Jim Wyerman became Chief Pro-gram Officer at Carbonfund.org last summer.

Page 6

Current Career OpportunitiesFor more opportunities and information, please visit www.uspirg.org/jobs or www.environmentamerica.org/jobs, or call Surf del Mar at 303-573-5885 x325.

• Development Director, U.S. PIRG—Chicago, IL; other locations considered Lead U.S. PIRG’s work to increase fundraising from citizen members, major individual donors, foundations, and other non-corporate institutions. Work with various citizen outreach divi-sions to double membership assets over the next five years.

• Issue Advocate, WISPIRG—Madison, WIStand up to powerful special interests on issues to modernize our transportation system with high-speed rail and public transit; reform Wall Street and enact bank reforms; advo-cate for consumers; fight political corruption; and provide safe and affordable health care.

Alumni Updates (continued)

Mark Hays and Kirsten Collings

—Continued from page 5

Public Interest Network alumni and staff celebrate Kirsten Schatz and Stephen Simon’s wedding.

with the SEIU. He and his wife, alumna Lisa (Chuda) Witzler, are now living in the D.C. area and look forward to catching up with alumni and staff friends in the area.

Alumna Julie Wolk is now officially Co-Founder and Co-Director of Wilderness Torah (www.wildernesstorah.org), an Oakland, Calif.-based organization dedicated to re-connecting people to the earth through Judaism.

Pam Gilbert (continued from page 3)

for eventual action at the fed-eral level.

After leaving U.S. PIRG in 1989, Pam worked for five years at Public Citizen before getting hired by alumnus Don-ald Ross to join M+R Strategic Services, where fellow alum-nus Bill Wasserman had also just joined the staff. Before too long, Pam was asked to become the Executive Direc-tor of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the highest non-presidential appointment job and one she held for more than five years.

After returning to M+R for a time, Pam was recruited in 2002 to serve as legislative advocate at the D.C. law firm where she’s now a partner, Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca. Pam loves the variety: she’s still lobbying on consumer issues, but also utilizing her legal training. Pam often comes

across PIRG alumni and staff, and frequently works alongside U.S. PIRG’s Liz Hitchcock, Gary Kalman, and Ed Mi-erzwinski. Pam notes that, wherever she goes, she and her colleagues notice that the most effective, hardest-working ad-vocates in D.C. are those who have worked with the PIRGs.

Additional accolades include being chosen as Consumer Advocate of the Year by the Trial Lawyers’ Association of Metropolitan Washington in 1995 and serving on President Obama’s transition team for the CPSC. Pam sits on several boards, including The Public Interest Network’s National Environmental Law Center.

Pam is married to Charles Lew-is, has a grown step-daughter, Cassandra, and a son, Gabriel Lewis, and lives in Alexandria, Va. Pam can be reached at pamelag@cuneolaw.com.

• Americorps National Energy Service Corps Director, Student PIRGs—Washington, DC, Chicago, IL, or Boston, MAMake significant immediate impacts on energy efficiency through community service projects organized at 36 college campuses as well as instilling long-term attitude shifts through community education.

• Environmental Advocate, Environment Illinois—Chicago, ILLead campaigns for a cleaner, greener, healthier environment in Illinois, with a primary focus on protecting clean water and restoring Lake Michigan.

• Transportation Advocate, Environment America—Washington, DCWork to advance federal policies to promote clean, efficient transportation choices.

Alumni Updates (continued) Student PIRGs Update

Energy Service Corps Launched In New StatesAfter successful work in New Jer-sey, the Student PIRGs’ Energy Service Corps program received enough new funding last sum-mer to launch in three new states this year: Wisconsin, Colorado, and California.

The program began in 2009 when NJPIRG, in partnership with AmeriCorps, launched the new model service program to tackle the problem of society’s over-reliance on dirty, dangerous, and expensive fossil fuels. Based on a campus organizing model, the goal is to reduce energy use by:

• educating kids and community members about energy efficiency and how reducing their energy use can help their financial bot-tom line as well as the environ-ment, and

• assisting communities through service projects and events that

help homeowners, small busi-nesses, and local public officials achieve greater energy efficiency.

The program’s work last year in New Jersey resulted in:

• more than 3,500 K-12 students educated about energy efficiency and conservation;

• more than 1300 community members educated about en-ergy efficiency and conservation through workshops, house par-ties, and door-to-door outreach;

• nearly 100 energy consultations performed, where staff and vol-unteers audited local homes and businesses to identify wasteful energy use; and

• basic weatherization provided in several dozen homes, includ-ing caulking windows and seal-ing drafts.

One of her events, where they presented Sen. Brown with a BMW, or as she called it, “more of a Wall Street ride than your old truck,” was even featured in the Financial Times of London.

Out in Colorado, CoPIRG’s Danny Katz led several high profile events to secure Sen. Michael Bennet’s vote, includ-ing a town hall meeting orga-nized in partnership with Jobs with Justice and AFL-CIO.

Other highlights from the field: In March and April, PIRG staff organized success-ful town halls meetings and other events around the coun-try. For example, WISPIRG was joined by AARP and WIS-DOM at an event with Sen. Herb Kohl’s staff, highlighting stories of students, seniors, and small business owners hurting from the economic collapse. In Portland, Me.,

U.S. PIRG, Maine People’s Alliance, and Maine Wom-en’s Lobby held a roundtable discussion with consumers, Maine Insurance Commis-sioner Mila Kofman, Maine Attorney General Janet Mills, and staff from Sen. Olympia Snowe’s and Sen. Susan Col-lins’ offices. In Salem, Mass., MASSPIRG hosted a panel with U.S. Rep. John Tierney and 55 college students on the important of the credit card bill to students and the need for further reform. In Chicago, Illinois PIRG, Citizen Action Illinois, AFL-CIO, the Wood-stock Institute and Jobs with Justice held a district meeting with Sen. Dick Durbin and a business roundtable with At-torney General Lisa Madigan.

The fight isn’t over: U.S. PIRG is running a major campaign to en-sure that the banks don’t weaken the CFPB agency through the regulatory process.

Wall Street Reform (continued from page 1)

The expanded program will now operate on 36 campuses. Total staffing will include a national program director, four state pro-gram directors, 19 full-time AmeriCorps members, and 235 paid interns.

As Student PIRGs Political Di-rector Sujatha Jahagirdar puts

it, “Energy Service Corps takes the mystery out of energy ef-ficiency. We give people the tools and knowledge they need to stop energy from seeping out the cracks in the windows, serve their immediate needs, and act as the catalyst in the community to greater energy efficiency.”

The State PIRG Alumni Network1536 Wynkoop Street, Suite 100Denver, CO 80202www.pirg.org/alumni

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BROCKTON, MAPERMIT NO. 430

Environment Colorado’s Pam Kiely with alumni Will Coyne, Elena Nuñez, Elizabeth-Ann Rowlison, and Rex Wilmouth at a Denver alumni gathering last spring.

Save The Date: Upcoming Alumni Events

Alumni and staff gather regularly in cities across the country to catch up with old friends and meet some new faces from the Public Interest Network family. Stay tuned to www.pirg.org/alumni/calendar.html for more details on upcoming events and for photos from past events. If you’d like to help organize an alumni get-together near you, contact Kirsten Schatz at alumni@publicinterestnetwork.org or 303-573-5885 x331.

Minneapolis, MN Contact Ed Johnson: EdJFund@aol.com

Austin, TX Contact Luke Metzger: luke@environmenttexas.org

Boston, MA Contact Colleen Spivey: cspivey@masspirg.org

Thursday, Oct. 28, 2010

Friday, Jan. 7, 2011

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Printed on recylced paper.