Board of Directors

The Coalition for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ)

Barbara Arms - Community Organizer and Treasurer

"I grew up in Licking, MO and Cahokia, IL and graduated from Southern Illinois University. I lived and worked in East St. Louis, IL and then moved to San Francisco. In 2002 I moved back "home" to Belleville, IL.
I've been a dish washer, a taxi driver, a security guard, an educator, a nonprofit administrator, and always a grass roots organizer. I embrace democracy, freedom, and fairness.
My favorite quotes are:

"Never doubt that a small group of educated citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead

"America never was America to me. And yet I swear this oath - America will be!" Langston Hughes

Betty Traynor - President

I grew up in the San Franciso Bay Area and after college graduation went on to do biological science research, ran a small academic research business, and worked in the non-profit world. I was politically involved since my 20's, a founder of the Green Party of California and San Francisco, and am a community and social activist. I am currently an active member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and volunteer with many local organizations in San Francisco from parks to schools to delivering food to the needy. I joined the Campaign to Abolish Poverty in the 80's and have been active in its work ever since.

Anne G. Politeo - Secretary

Aileen Clarke Hernandez

Since 1967. AILEEN C. HERNANDEZ has been President of Aileen C. Hemandez Associates, an urban consulting firm based in San Francisco which works with major American companies, governmental agencies and grassroots organizations on a wide variety of issues facing cities - housing, education, economic development, transportation, etc. She appears frequently on television, radio and the lecture circuit discussing race and gender relations, human rights, and civic activism.

Campaign to Abolish Poverty (CAP Advisors)

SHEILA D. COLLINS

Sheila D. Collins is Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University in New Jersey She and her co-author Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg are co-founders of the National Jobs for All Coalition. In Washington's New Poor Law : Welfare "reform" and the roads not taken, 1935 to the present, the authors make the case that welfare reform legislation offers neither work opportunity nor real reform. In failing to create an entitlement to work while imposing strict, time-limited work requirements, Washington has, in effect, written a new Poor Law. Like earlier poor laws, it condemns the poor to continued or further impoverishment and public stigma. The book also suggests that the so-called reform will likely have the effect of depressing wages, increasing hardship and exacerbating social conflict. Professor Collins' first book (co- authored with Professor Goldberg and Helen Lachs Ginsburg) was Jobs for All: A Plan for the Revitalization of America. As Congress prepares to consider re-authorization of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families law (TANF), Washington's New Poor Law provides valuable analysis of failed efforts to end poverty in the United States and creative suggestions for real reform.

Rev. Carl Robert Forsberg

Presbyterian minister, spent 40 years living with family in Black and Hispanic slum and public housing in New Haven CT, as part of the still unfinished Human Rights and Economic Justice movement.
Moved near our kids in San Francisco 18 years ago. Still working with a church in a gang war part of Oakland, getting to know more about Asian and all world religions, and ending anti-Semitism for our 4 Jewish grandchildren and Islamophobia for all my new friends who are Muslims. Praying and working for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and ending our military invasions of other nations like Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran next.
Editor of www.Sequoianewsmag.com
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Ying Lee, Washington D.C., Aide to Congress woman Barbara Lee

Ying Lee served as staff person in Washington D.C. for Congressman Ronald V. Dellums and current Congresswoman Barbara Lee from Oakland, CA. Prior to working in D.C. Ying was a Berkeley City Council Woman.

Ben Leet

I worked as an elementary school teacher in east Oakland and Richmond for about 16 years. In that setting some 80 percent of the children born in the neighborhood were from "non-marital" births, according to the US Census report noted in a newspaper article. Poverty correlates with high non-marital birthrates. Therefore the role of the teacher changes dramatically. I have spent some years now out of teaching, and I have read quite a number of books on economics. We need a popular movement to capture the legitimate profits from work that the minority of owners of corporations have illegitimately sequestered. See my blog at http://benL8.blogspot.com. I hope CAP is part of a large solution that abolishes outrageous conditions such as having 16.4% of the workforce working full-time at a below-poverty wage rate, another 11.8% who are unemployed, underemployed or discouraged from looking for work. (See ww.njfac.org/by the numbers) That totals to close to 30% of all workers, or close to 45 million U.S. adults. This is a biography not an essay. But it has become part of my life.

Evelyn and Val (Deceased) Schaaf

VAL AND EVELYN SCHAAF - have been partners in the continuing struggle for human rights, peace, abolition of the death penalty, opposition to the expanding prison industry and an end to poverty ever since they-met years ago as Board members of the Technical Engineers and Draftsmen's Union Local. Fighting back against the Newt Gingrich Contract On America, they joined CAP and were successful in getting Marin County to pass a Living Wage Ordinance. They are now working to persuade 11 Marin cities and towns to adopt local ordinances. -

Carl Wiener

Carl Wiener, 58, is a substitute paraprofessional in special education, and works in the San Francisco Unified school district. He is currently focused on the problems of health care and poverty and is also a volunteer at Saint Anthony's Dining Room. Carl enjoys walking and writing poetry.

The Founders meeting for the National Jobs for All Coalition held in June 17,1994 at Hunter College, New York

Left to Right:  Barbara Arms, Helen Ginsburg, Shelia Collins and Trudy Goldberg

Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg (Trudy) is chair and co-founder of the National Jobs for All Coalition, the only national organization with the goal of full employment at living wages as well as other components or what the International Labour Office calls "decent work."  Beginning with a master's paper on youth employment in her twenties, Goldberg has had a life-long interest in job creation and full employment. She was an author of the World of Work programs of Mobilization for Youth, the anti-delinquency program on the Lower East Side of New York that served as a model for Great Society anti-poverty programs, including the Jobs Corps. Goldberg was an activist in the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, an early opponent of nuclear bomb testing and the Viet Nam war and a proponent of multi-lateral nuclear disarmament.
Trudy Goldberg is Professor of Social Policy and chair of the Ph.D. program at the Adelphi Univesity School of Social Work. Her scholarship is in full employment, women's poverty in an international perspective and comparative welfare states. She has co-authored and edited The Feminization of Poverty: Only in America? Diminishing Welfare: A Cross-National Study of Social Provision; Jobs for All: A Plan for the Revitalization of America; and , with Sheila Collins, Washington's New Poor Law: Welfare "Reform" and the Roads Not Taken, 1935 to the Present. She has just headed a team of scholars in eight nations whose research will be published in  Poor Women in Rich Nations: Feminized Poverty across the Life Course(Oxford University Press, Fall 2009). Goldberg writes frequently for scholarly
publications and has lectured both in the United States and abroad.  She regards herself as a scholar/activist and finds that research and reform are good partners.