Board of Directors

The Board of AFGJ is an activist board meeting once a year for a retreat but taking part monthly in conference calls and regularly contributes by e-mail in working with the staff and volunteers at furthering AFGJ’s mission.


 

Charlie Delaney Megeso, has worked as a master mason for thirty years. He is currently an elected citizen judge in Chittenden County, Vermont. As a member of the Abenaki tribe, he has been involved in the indigenous movement for twenty-five years. He was a legal researcher for the tribal judge and served as tribal ambassador to Washington, DC. He wrote two bills that became law, concerning state recognition of indigenous tribes in Vermont. He is also a former chair of the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs. Over the past eighteen years he has done reconstruction work with the Miskito people on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. He works with the Miskito official representative to the US, and he serves as the North American representative of the Miskito to the United Nations and the US State Department. In 2002-2003 he was a delegate to the United Nations, representing both the Abenakis and Miskito; and he served on a committee working on the International Declaration of Indigenous Rights, ratified into international law in 2007.

Katherine Hoyt was the National Co-Coordinator of Alliance for Global Justice and its Nicaragua Network program. She lived eighteen years in Latin America – two years in Chile and sixteen in Nicaragua. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University and has authored numerous academic and activist publications including The Many Faces of Sandinista Democracy from Ohio University Press. She has taught at Wayne State University, Rutgers University and Whitman College. In the mid-eighties she served as the Michigan coordinator of the Pledge of Resistance as director of the Michigan Interfaith Committee on Central American Human Rights (MICAH) in Detroit.

At Alliance for Global Justice, she has worked on campaigns to support Nicaragua’s garment workers and on campaigns against IMF mandated privatization and user fees. In the 2000s, she actively represented the Nicaragua Network in the Stop CAFTA Coalition. In 2016 Kathy retired and joined the AfGJ board.

Mark Burton is a lawyer in private practice where he specializes in criminal defense and civil rights.  He graduated from Colorado College with a degree in romance languages and graduated from the University of Denver School of Law with a juris doctor.  Mark has been involved in social justice movements which began with his work in the British Trade Union movement where he was a rank and file organizer for low paid hospital workers where he helped organize wage and conditions campaigns.  More recently, Mark has been involved in immigrant rights, social justice, and anti-war movements.  As an active member of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) International Committee Mark  has organized a joint AFGJ/NLG delegation to Colombia.  In his law practice Mark specializes in indigent defense, freeing the wrongfully convicted, and the human and civil rights of people in the face of government repression.

Banbose Shango has a long history (since 1967) of struggle in the nationalist, peace, student, socialist, solidarity and pan-Africanist movement. He was born in Jamaica, grew up in Chicago, and has a background in electrical & plumbing. A student of Shaw University (NC) and UICC, he has participated in organizing for six months in Conakry, Guinea with the PRPAG (Pan-African Revolutionary Party of Guinea); the 5th ALBA (The Bolivarian Alternative for Our America’s) conference in April 2007 held in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, and took a Venezuela Solidarity Network’ (VSN) delegation in July 2007 to Caracas and Barlovento. He is co-chair-at-large of the National Network on Cuba (NNOC). He served as a International Election Observer at the victorious Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) presidential elections in El Salvador in 2009. He was also a delegate to the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Cochabamba, Bolivia in April 2010. He participated as a member of the initial Plumbers Brigade to Cuba in August 2010, which in coordination with the CTC (Cuban Trade Union), helped to build community apartments in the Plyer municipality of Havana. He has spoken for and represented the A-APRP/A-APRP (GC) on numerous campuses, conferences, delegations, seminars, community meetings and at international manifestations. Banbose was formerly the Region Co-Coordinator of the Venezuelan Solidarity Network.

Bob Siegel is an investment manager in private practice in New York City. He received his A.B. in International Relations from Brown and his M.B.A. from Harvard. Bob serves on the Boards of three other prominent national progressive organizations: 1) North American Congress on Latin America ( NACLA ), which publishes a widely respected journal on Latin America affairs.; 2) Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting ( FAIR ), which, since its founding in 1986, has been the nation’s leading media watchdog group documenting and attempting to counter the right-wing bias and censorship of the U.S. mainstream media; 3 ) The New York State branch of Peace Action. In 2006, he received New York State Peace Action’s highest award in recognition of his work on behalf of that organization.

Vicki Cervantes (née Welch) was raised in Colorado and became active in high school in anti-racist and farmworker  support groups. She attended George Washington University and went to “school in the streets” with the massive anti Vietnam war movement in Washington DC. Returning to Colorado she joined in the movement to support national liberation, socialism and labor rights; working in factory workplace organizing, immigrant rights, and Latin American solidarity.  She graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in Political Science. She and her husband and children moved to Chicago in the 1980’s where she worked for 26 years at the public hospital there and obtained a Masters Degree in Public Service Administration from DePaul University. She is part of the community movements of activist artists, and musicians active in Latin American solidarity and community issues  in Chicago. Vicki is a founding member of the group La Voz de los de Abajo Chicago which has been accompanying the Honduran campesino and social movements in solidarity since 1998 and helped to found the Honduras Solidarity Network in North America of which she is currently co-coordinator.

Nathan ‘nash’ Sheard leads the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s grassroots, student, and community organizing efforts. As the lead coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Alliance, nash works to support the Alliance’s member organizations in educating their neighbors on digital-privacy best practices, and advocating for privacy and innovation protecting policy and legislation.

nash’s work is informed by lived experience with aggressive and militarized policing in the United States, Honduras, and Palestine, including racial profiling, the effects of biased broken windows policing tactics, and police brutality. nash has worked extensively to help mitigate the damage of harmful interactions with law enforcement online and in over-policed communities. Before joining EFF, as co-founder of Black Movement Law Project and a member of Mutant Legal, nash spent close to a decade training communities in crisis on how to document police conduct, exercise their legal rights, counteract state repression and actively participate in their own legal defense.

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