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| 5th Annual PEAR Conference The Whole Child, The Whole Day Featured Speakers and Panelists Featured Speakers
Panelists and Moderators
Derrick N. Ashong is a musician, producer and entrepreneur and is currently Director of Business Development at Weapons of Mass Entertainment (WME), a new mupltiplatform media venture founded by pop legend and creative entrepreneur Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics - and SMT Films, a production company dedicated to creating compelling and socially responsive content for global youth audiences. Born in Accra, Ghana, DNA moved to Brooklyn, New York as a child. He spent his formative years in the Middle Eastern states of Saudi Arabia and Qatar returning to the US at age 16. A former PhD candidate in Afro-American Studies and Ethnomusicology at Harvard, and a recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, he graduated from Harvard College with High Honors in Afro-American Studies. During college DNA took time off to play a supporting role in Steven Spielberg's "Amistad," before returning to write and compose an award-winning musical entitled "Songs We Can't Sing. He has since worked with such established artists as Debbie Allen, Janet Jackson, & Bobby McFerrin among others. His compositions have earned his band "Soulfège" www.soulfege.com nominations for a Boston Music Award, an Independent Music Award, a Boston Urban Music Award and a finalist slot in the 2005 John Lennon Songwriting contest. In July of 2003 Ashong and Soulfège held a 2-week recording retreat with a top producer in Accra, Ghana. A year later they returned with a team of 20 artists, activists, educators & filmmakers and kicked off a youth-media movement called the "Sweet Mother Tour" or SMT. The resulting works fusing elements of African, Caribbean and Hip Hop cultures have aired globally via major media outlets including MTV Africa, NPR, MNet Africa and BBC Worldservice, reaching 146 million listeners worldwide. The SMT has been prominently featured in the Boston Herald and on ABC Chronicle and recently launched a partnership with the Interra Project - a social enterprise focused on consumer finance, launched by Visa Int'l founder Dee Hock and Odwalla Juices founder Greg Steltenpohl - with a vision to connecting immigrants more closely to their homelands. DNA has lectured on the impact of popular culture on youth identity at over 100 institutions in the US, Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. His most recent record for Soulfège - "Heavy Structured (Plus) - was recorded on 3 continents and features Grammy-winning Dancehall star Bounty Killer. He is a board member of Africa Action, the nation's oldest organization lobbying the US Government on African Issueas, and the Interra Project. In 2007, the SMT in partnership with WME is launching the "Sweet Mother Tour 2007: Voice of the Streets," a first-of-its kind interactive television show exploring Pan-African youth culture through the prism of Global Hip Hop. The show will allow viewers a chance to participate in turning an artist from the developing world, into an international sensation.
James Carrington has been with the Transportation Office of the Providence School Dept. in Providence, Rhode Island for the past fifteen years. He is responsible for the routing of over six hundred daily school bus runs and he oversees the daily transport of fourteen thousand Public, Parochial/Private, and Special Education students in a (a) safe, (b) timely, and (c) cost effective manner. He has been trained by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) at the Nobel Training Center located at the Fort McClellan Military Base in Anniston, Alabama with the intent of assisting the Providence Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) and overseeing the evacuation of Providence, Rhode Island in the event of a natural or man made disaster.
Patrick Duhon, Director of Planning and Implementation at the Providence After School Alliance(PASA). In this role, Patrick Duhon manages the work related to the AfterZone and Recreation strategies. Prior to joining PASA, Patrick directed the launch of the local City Year AmeriCorps national service program in Seattle. Patrick has a strong background in citywide systems gained through his work with Seattle Department of Transportation. While there he managed community relations and public involvement in politically charged transit and regional planning projects. Patrick has directed higher education service-learning programs, taught at the high school and college levels, and led and collaborated on several community, social justice, and faith-based initiatives in New York and Cleveland. He holds a B.A. in International Studies from The Ohio Statue University and an M.S. in Urban Studies from the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University. A native of Akron, Ohio, Patrick currently lives with his wife and two children in Cranston.
It's easy to grow up in a place that's safe, familiar, and comfortable, without giving much thought to things that seem dangerous or foreign, even if your conscience tells you something could be done to change it. Susan Eaton, an award-winning journalist specializing in education, is the former assistant director of the project on school desegregation at Harvard University, where she received a doctorate in education policy. Her work has appeared in the Nation, the Hartford Courant, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. Susan grew up in an affluent suburb of Boston, and says "by third grade, I was walking safely down the worn path to mainstream American opportunity. I vaguely knew that kids who were poor and living in poor neighborhoods hadn't even been shown the entrance." Over 40 years have passed since forced desegregation, and court battles are still being waged to end the inequality that plagues schools in cities across the nation. Susan spent four years documenting a classroom in one such school in an impoverished suburb of Hartford, Connecticut. Simpson-Waverly Elementary is one of the best all-minority schools in the country, and it has been declared a Blue Ribbon school by the Bush Administration. Yet Susan's research found that it is racially isolated, overburdened, and cut off from mainstream society. In the style of a documentary film-maker, Susan follows the stories of the students in room E4, and the stories of dedicated civil rights lawyers across town, fighting court battles to end the educational divide. Meet Jeremy, a bright nine-year-old Puerto Rican boy, who Susan says "made his way to the center of the story and my heart." Susan says, "He studied maps and Googled far-off exotic lands. And curiously, I found, he also longed to explore the less exotic but equally unfamiliar suburb of West Hartford, right next door....To nearly all the kids I met in Hartford, the suburbs were indeed foreign worlds." "In writing this book, I hoped to reveal the tragic tangle of laws, history, politics, and habit that forces kids like these far off the track that leads to opportunity. I wanted to show them exactly as they were—as amazing, admirable, funny, intelligent young people eager to contribute to our 'one nation, indivisible."
Jane Feinberg is the Deputy Director of Field Building for FrameWorks Institute. Prior to her current position, Jane was a consultant who worked with a variety of non-profit and governmental organizations, developing communications strategies and tools to help change public attitudes and behaviors around social issues, particularly those related to children and their families. Jane spent twenty-five years as a writer, producer and developer of public and commercial television programs and series. She served as Senior Producer and Project Manager of "Keeping Kids on Track," a two-year media campaign sponsored by the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, KeySpan, and Boston's ABC affiliate, WCVB-TV Channel Five. The campaign, which won the coveted National Association of Broadcasters Service to America Award, focused on the vital importance of after-school programs to children, families and communities. For almost a decade, Jane was a producer for New England's nightly television newsmagazine show, "Chronicle," where she often covered issues related to education, children, and families. She also produced several historical retrospectives for the program. For PBS, Jane developed college telecourses in the arts and humanities, as well as children's programming, including "Long Ago & Far Away," the children's literature series hosted by James Earl Jones. Jane produced a national special about Tip O'Neill, Jr. on the occasion of his retirement, segments for "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," and other award-winning public affairs programs for PBS, including a business special that was nominated for a National Emmy. She was also Senior Researcher for PBS' "The American Experience." As an independent documentary producer, Jane co-produced an hour-long documentary for PBS about famed aviator Amelia Earhart. She has also produced video documentaries for a variety of non-profit and governmental organizations, including the Centers for Women at Wellesley College, the Illinois Department on Aging, the Kellogg Foundation, Citizen Schools, and Massachusetts 2020. Outside of television, Jane has served as Director of Communications for the Boston Public Schools. In that capacity, she was the superintendent's Press Secretary, created the school system's first professional media guidelines, served on the superintendent's cabinet, and guided principals and other school administrators on media relations. At the non-profit organization, Facing History and Ourselves, Jane initiated and led the effort to overhaul the organization's website. Throughout her career, Jane has written articles for newspapers, magazines and newsletters. Her work has focused largely on translating scholarly and complex topics into accessible material for public audiences. Jane graduated Summa Cum Laude/Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Minnesota, with a double major in Journalism and Near Eastern Studies. She studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and holds a Masters degree in Journalism from Boston University. Jane has served on the boards of several local and national organizations, including the American Jewish Committee; PEAR (the Harvard University-McLean Hospital sponsored Program in Education, Afterschool and Resiliency); and BOSTnet (Building the Out-of-School Time Network). She was also a founding board member of an after-school program in Cambridge. Jane lives in Belmont, Massachusetts with her husband and daughter.
Evelyn R. Frankford, MSW, is Director of the EOHHS (Executive Office of Health and Human Services) - School Initiative with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a systems change effort led by Harry Spence, Commissioner of the Department of Social Services. Vulnerable young people in Massachusetts face many barriers to learning and too often fail to graduate, with resulting poor life outcomes. Even though such youth are known to their schools and to state human services agencies and the juvenile courts, they frequently do not receive the kind of timely help they need. The Initiative focuses on bringing schools and health-human services together around their shared goal of child development and builds on the considerable knowledge that exists about interventions to improve youth outcomes. By moving the focus of state intervention with distressed youth from the acute to the preventive end of the spectrum, based on a public health model, the Initiative expects to achieve better integration of available services to prevent problems and intervene early when they do arise. Exploratory sites include 4 Educational Collaboratives and their associated school districts and 4 large urban districts. Prior to developing this Initiative for the state, Ms. Frankford worked in capacities where she conceptualized, secured funding for, and managed initiatives to improve state and local community and school health and mental health initiatives; assessed the need for transition services for adolescents leaving New York State's mental health system and synthesized policy and program recommendations for its mental health state plan; organized statewide campaigns (New York) to redirect mental health and child welfare services. She was a policy advocate for a wide range of children's services in New York State for almost 20 years.
Ellen S. Gannett is Director of the National Institute on Out-of-School Time at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College (NIOST). NIOST is a national action/research project which for the past 30 years provides technical assistance, consultation, and specialized training to schools and other educational organizations throughout the U.S. In this capacity she directs a national team of ten Education and Training Associates who travel across the country to lead workshops for out-of-school practitioners and directors. She previously held the position of Education and Training Coordinator with the Project from 1981 through 1989 and will be celebrating her 25 th anniversary working with NIOST. As a national speaker and trainer, Ellen has conducted hundreds of seminars throughout the country. Her recent work has focused on workforce issues and professional development. In that capacity, she advises numerous groups, such as Achieve Boston, Next Generation Youth Work Coalition, National Collaboration for Youth, National Association of Elementary School Principals, Council for Professional Recognition, National Afterschool Association, and NAEYC's National Institute for Early Childhood Professional Development. Ellen co-authored NIOST's publications , Links to Learning: A Curriculum Planning Guide for Afterschool Programs; City Initiatives in School-Age Child Care, and chapters in the following books: Employer-Supported Child Care: Investing in Human Resources , by Burud et al, published by Auburn House, Boston, and Yearbook in Early Childhood Education, Vol. 5: Issues in Child Care , edited by Spondek and Saraho, published by Teachers College Press. She also co-authored the 1998 edition of ASQ: Assessing School-Age Child Care Quality as well as the Project's publication, School-Age Child Care: A Policy Report . Ellen has recently co-authored a web-based training curriculum on after-school programming for a New York City television station. She has been featured in numerous local and national television and radio news and talk shows. Ellen has served as a board member of the National Afterschool Association (NAA, formally NSACA)) and as a member of the Professional Development Division. She is currently serving as a member of the Annual NAA Conference Professional Development Systems Building Forum. She is also the former Board Chair and Founder of the parent-run after school program which was attended by her two daughters, now young adults.
Marion is the Executive Director of the Barr Foundation, a private family foundation serving the greater Boston region.
Marty Linsky, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, has been full-time faculty since 1982, except from 1992 to 1995 when he was Chief Secretary/Counselor to Massachusetts Governor William Weld. He teaches exclusively in the school's executive programs and chairs several of them. He cofounded, with Ronald A. Heifetz, Cambridge Leadership Associates (www.cambridge-leadership.com), a leadership consulting, training, and coaching practice. A graduate of Williams College and Harvard Law School, Linsky has been Assistant Minority Leader of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, writer for the Boston Globe, and editor of The Real Paper. He is coauthor with Heifetz of Leadership on the Line, coauthor with Ed Grefe of The New Corporate Activism, and author of Impact: How the Press Affects Federal Policy Making. He runs, enjoys good beer and Mexican food (rewards for running), and collects baseball cards (more than 25,000). He lives in New York with his wife Lynn Staley, Assistant Managing Editor (Design) of Newsweek Magazine.
Robert Macy, Ph.D. is the Founder and Executive Director of the Boston Center for Trauma Psychology, the Co-Director of a Category III National Center for Child Traumatic Stress Network site at the Trauma Center/JRI in Boston, and the Founder and Executive Director of The Children’s Trauma Recovery Foundation, also in Boston. Macy is a pioneer in the field of Traumatic Incident Stress Interventions and violence prevention initiatives for children, youth, their families and their communities exposed to traumatic events including large-scale disasters, terrorist events, and political, community and armed conflict violence. Macy is a Research Associate in Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Macy designs, implements and evaluates traumatic stress reduction programs, and psychosocial assessment and intervention projects in the United States, Netherlands, Norway, Palestine and Israel, Jordan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi, Eritrea and South Africa.
Thomas M. Menino is serving his fourth term as Mayor of the City of Boston. The first Italian-American Mayor of Boston, he was elected to his first term on November 2, 1993, winning 64 percent of the vote and 18 of the city’s 22 wards. Mayor Menino was re-elected to a second term without opposition in 1997 and won a third term in a landslide victory in November 2001. Most recently, Mayor Menino won a historic fourth election in November, 2005 with 68 percent of the vote. Prior to his election in 1993, he previously served four months as Acting Mayor and nine years as a District City Councilor from Boston's Hyde Park neighborhood. A lifelong resident of Hyde Park, Mayor Menino is a graduate of St. Thomas Aquinas High School. In 1963, Mayor Menino earned an associate's degree in business management and advertising and sales from Chamberlayne Junior College. In 1988, he earned a degree in community planning from the University of Massachusetts. Mayor Menino and his wife, the former Angela Faletra, have two children, Susan and Thomas, Jr., and six grandchildren. During his tenure as Mayor of Boston, Mayor Menino has worked hard to improve the quality of life for all of Boston’s 589,000 residents. As President of the United States Conference of Mayors from 2002-2003, Mayor Menino championed homeland security and housing availability. He has been an advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation since 1989. In the summer of 2004, Mayor Menino brought the Democratic National Convention to Boston. The convention put a national spotlight on Boston, showcasing all that Boston has to offer. Estimates put the economic contribution of the convention at more than $150 million dollars and its positive effects will be felt for years. Mayor Menino’s reputation for getting the job done has earned him a high approval rating among Boston residents. Among his main priorities, are: providing every child with a quality education; creating affordable housing; lowering the crime rate; revitalizing Boston's neighborhoods; and promoting a healthy lifestyle for all city residents.
Since August 2000, Dishon Mills has been serving as the After School Programs Coordinator for the Boston Public Schools (BPS). In this capacity, Dishon launched and presently heads up the Department of Extended Learning Time, Afterschool and Services (DELTAS). This newly formed department promotes the expansion and improvement of programs at the 145 District schools, supports community agencies seeking to partner with schools, and seeks to strengthen the link between what happens in the classroom and what happens during out-of-school time. The After School Programs Coordinator position is the first of its kind in Boston, and has grown into a vital piece of the city's infrastructure connecting schools, families, and community organizations. In addition to other initiatives and projects, Dishon manages the Boston Community Learning Center (BCLC) initiative, which if funded by the 21 st Century Community Learning Center grant. He is also an experienced trainer and has presented many national, statewide, and local workshops. Prior to joining the BPS, Dishon served as a Project Associate for BOSTnet (formerly Parents United for Child Care), a grassroots non-profit organization of low and moderate income parents dedicated to increasing the supply of quality, affordable child care in Massachusetts. While at BOSTnet, Dishon became skilled in program start-up and quality technical assistance. He was certified by the National Institute on Out-of-School Time as a quality advisor and used his expertise to guide the Black Ministerial Alliance's Victory Generation initiative and the Boston Community Learning Centers. Dishon has almost 10 years experience as a child care and youth worker. While completing his B.A. from Harvard University in Sociology and African-American Studies, Dishon worked for four years with the South Boston Boys and Girls Club - the first African-American to serve on the adult staff of that clubhouse. While there, he helped to create a multicultural education club entitled M.C. Action to help expose young people to the diversity of the human experience. After graduating from Harvard, Dishon went to work for the Computer Clubhouse - an after-school learning environment where young people explore their interests and become confident learners through the use of technology. At the Clubhouse, Dishon created and operated the Clubhouse to College/Clubhouse to Career program. The purpose of the program was to give young people the information, resources, and support to help them ensure their own future success. Dishon continues to work directly with youth through his church's youth ministry. He is happily married to his wife Afrika, and they live in Randolph, Massachusetts with their daughter and son.
Linda Nathan is the founding headmaster of the Boston Arts Academy, the city's first and only public high school for the visual and performing arts. Under her leadership, the school has won state, national, and international recognition, including a Massachusetts Compass Award, a "Breaking Ranks" award from the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and a Mentor School award from the Coalition of Essential Schools. BAA sends well over 90 percent of its graduates--all residents of the city of Boston--to college. Linda was instrumental in starting Boston's first performing-arts middle school, and was a driving force behind the creation of Fenway High School, recognized nationally for its innovative educational strategies and school-to-work programs. She is also a co-founder and board member of the Center for Collaborative Education in Boston, a nonprofit education reform organization dedicated to creating more equitable and democratic schools. She was named 1990 Teacher of the Year by Channel 5 "Chronicle" in Boston, and from 1995 to 1998 she served on the National Academy of Science's Commission for the Science of Learning. In 2003, Linda received the Nadia Boulanger Educator's Award from the Longy School of Music for her work in arts education; in 2006 she received the first Fidelity Inspire the Future Award given to community leaders who inspire the next generation of artists and arts advocates. She was recently named a Barr Foundation Fellow, Class of 2007. Linda's articles on school reform and arts education have appeared in Phi Delta Kappan, Educational Leadership, Horace, and other publications. Fluent in Spanish, she has worked on issues of school reform in Puerto Rico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. In March 2006, she presented to the first UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education in Lisbon, Portugal. She is a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she teaches a course titled "Building Democratic Schools." She is also currently writing a book about urban education and the arts. Linda Nathan earned a bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, a master's degree in education administration at Antioch University, a master's of performing arts at Emerson College, and her doctorate in education at Harvard University.
Gil G. Noam is Executive Director of the Program in Education, Afterschool & Resiliency (PEAR) and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital. Trained as a clinical and developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst in both Europe and the United States, Dr. Noam has a strong interest in supporting resilience in youth, especially in educational settings.
Ann J. Reale is the first Commissioner of the Department of Early Education and Care, which will build a new, coordinated, comprehensive system of early education and care in Massachusetts. Commissioner Reale served as Senior Policy Advisor to Governor Romney from 2003-2005. Ms. Reale held a number of positions in the Executive Office for Administration and Finance from 1996-2003, including Undersecretary and Acting Chief Financial Officer (2002-2003) and State Budget Director and Assistant Secretary (1999-2002). Commissioner Reale holds a master's degree in public administration from Syracuse University, and a BA in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. |
CONFERENCES | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
5th Annual PEAR Conference Advisory Board Mayor Thomas Menino Honorary Chair, Boston, MA Jonathan Abbot Senator Robert Antonini Alan Bersin Louis Casagrande Commissioner Elizabeth Childs Michael Contompasis William Dandridge Matt Fishman Gary French Chris Gabrieli Cinthia Haan Reverend Ray Hammond Milton Little, Jr. Stacey Lucchino Jill Medvedow Ronay Menschel Earl Phalen Commissioner Anne Reale Eric Schwarz Ellen Semenoff John Shattuck Commissioner Harry Spence Representative Marie P. St. Fleur Marylou Sudders Meg Vaillancourt |
