Advisory Board

Ed Begley, Jr. is a well-known actor in film, television, and stage. He is best known for his portrayal of Dr. Victor Ehrlich on the television series St. Elsewhere, for which he received an Emmy nomination during each viewing season. He began his acting career in adolescence, on the long-running television series My Three Sons. He also spent several years working as a standup comedian and as a cameraman in television studios and commercial production houses. Mr. Begley is a committed environmentalist who puts his principles into practice with a fully energy self-sufficient home and an electric car. He uses his website not only as a professional communication channel, but also to educate the public about environmental issues. His website includes extensive links to environmental resources on the Internet.

Joan Blades is the co-founder of MoveOn.org, a political action web site dedicated to promoting broad public participation in political discourse. Starting in 1998 with an anti-impeachment campaign, MoveOn.org has become a leading Web-based political action organization, with many thousands of online supporters and active volunteers. Through MoveOn.org, citizens contributed more than $2 million to year 2000 congressional candidates. Following the election, MoveOn.org has helped members be heard on the issues of campaign finance reform, environmental protection and tax reform. Ms. Blades is a software industry veteran, having co-founded a leading entertainment software company, Berkeley Systems. Prior to her work in consumer software, Ms. Blades taught mediation at Golden Gate Law School and practiced mediation. She received her undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley, and her JD from Golden Gate Law School.

Peter Coyote is an accomplished actor, writer, and Emmy award-winning narrator. His 1998 memoir, "Sleeping Where I Fall", incorporates "Carla's Story" which was awarded the 1993-1994 Pushcart Prize, a national prize for excellence in writing, published by a non-commercial literary magazine. From 1975 to1983, Peter was a member of the California State Arts Council, the State agency which determines art policy. He was its Chairman for three consecutive years, during which time the annual budget rose from 1 to 20 million dollars annually and its costs diminished from 50% to 15%, the lowest of any agency in the State. Since the early '80s, Mr. Coyote has been acting and doing voice-overs for documentaries. He has made over 125 movies for film and television , and over seventy documentaries. His mellow voice, often compared to Henry Fonda's, won him an Emmy in 1992 for his narration of the "The Meiji Revolution" episode, part of the PBS American Experience ten-part series called "The Pacific Century." He narrates commercials and documentaries, and donates his voice to films that support issues close to his heart. Early in his career as an actor, he was a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which performs political street theater on timely topics. In 1967 a play that Mr. Coyote co-wrote, directed, and performed in won the Troupe a special OBIE from New York's Village Voice newspaper. Mr. Coyote's current political interests include environmental pollution, the integrity of the election process, and the hazards of election fraud. He is a board member of Baykeepers, an organization which tracks pollution and polluters in the San Francisco Bay. He was a delegate to the 1996 Democratic National Convention, which he also covered for Mother Jones magazine. Mr. Coyote received a BA in English Literature from Grinnell College and left the Creative Writing of San Francisco State University a few units shy of his MA to "do the Sixties."

Lori Dorfman, DrPH who is Director of the Berkeley Media Studies Group, a project of the Public Health Institute, is an expert in strategies for working with the news media to advance public policy goals. The Berkeley Media Studies Group operates out of the belief that the mass media, especially the news, have a significant influence on people's beliefs and actions regarding public health and social issues and that the news media can be a powerful force for advancing healthy public policy. Dr. Dorfman directs BMSG's work with community groups, journalists and public health professionals. She edited Reporting on Violence, A Handbook for Journalists which illustrates how to include a public health perspective in violence reporting, published by BMSG. Dr. Dorfman teaches a course for masters students on mass communication and public health at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley; has published articles on public health and mass communication issues; and co-authored Public Health and Media Advocacy: Power for Prevention (Sage Publications, 1993) and News for a Change: An Advocates' Guide to Working with the Media (Sage Publications, 1999). She consults for government agencies and community programs across the U.S. and internationally on a variety of public health issues including violence prevention and injury prevention, alcohol, tobacco, children's health, child care, childhood lead poisoning, affirmative action, nutrition and exercise, and women and HIV/AIDS. Dr. Dorfman holds MPH and DrPH degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

Efrain Fuentes, EdD, a psychologist, is Director of Patient & Family Services at Children's Hospital Los Angeles and a Voluntary Faculty Member at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine.  He has broad experience in management, training, writing, and teaching, with a strong emphasis and focus on demographic shifts and the impact of multiculturalism and cross-cultural marketing.  As a Professor at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, Dr. Fuentes taught courses in cross-cultural psychology and critical thinking. He has done extensive consulting specializing in development, training and qualitative research on multicultural populations. He also has worked closely with law enforcement officials and has provided individual psychotherapy to inmates in isolation section of a maximum security prison. Dr. Fuentes has been a freelance write for La Opinion, a Spanish language daily newspaper in Los Angeles, California, since 1983.  He received his M.Ed. and Ed.D. degrees in Counseling Psychology from Boston University.

Harvey Gotliffe, Ph.D., is Professor of Magazine Journalism in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University. He was previously an Associate Professor at Central Michigan University, where he started and headed the Magazine Journalism program. He has also held academic positions at several other universities in California and Michigan, teaching courses in journalism, writing for broadcast media and film, and advertising. Dr. Gotliffe's early career was in advertising and writing, in roles that included communications consultant, editor, creative services manager, and copy writer. He has been involved in several progressive political campaigns, in which he was in charge of public relations, promotion, and campaign advertising. He also did scholarly research on the effects of paid-for communications in a senatorial campaign. Dr. Gotliffe has a BS degree in Advertising/Marketing from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan; an MS in Print Journalism/Mass Communications from San Jose State University; and a PhD in Radio, Television, and Film from Wayne State University.

Van Jones is founder and national executive director of the Ella Baker Center (EBC) For Human Rights, where he is helping to lead a national fight for alternatives to the U.S. incarceration industry. Launched in 1996, the EBC now houses Bay Area Policewatch (a police misconduct legal hotline, combined with social and legal services); Books Not Bars (which campaigns for a modern juvenile justice system in California, has a network for parents of incarcerated youth, and a youth development program); Freedom Fighter Music (record label for performers resisting the punishment industry and the war in Iraq); and Reclaim the Future (a think tank and advocacy group working to create ecologically sound, clean-energy jobs in high-incarceration-rate urban environments). Prior to founding EBC, Mr. Jones was a Thurgood Marshall Fellow at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, where he worked on issues such as environmental, employment discrimination, educational equity, and homelessness. Mr. Jones is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including: the 1998 Reebok International Human Rights Award; the 1997-99 Rockefeller Foundation's Next Generation Leadership Fellowship; the Echoing Green Fellowship; and the 2001 Ashoka Fellowship. He was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 2002 and is a member of the National Steering Committee of the Apollo Alliance. Mr. Jones received his undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee at Martin and is a graduate of Yale Law School.

Jeffrey S. Karan is the Managing Partner of Woodside Capital Partners, a technology investment bank that provides merger and acquisition advice, outsourced corporate development, and financial strategy to visionary, high growth companies. He serves on the Board of the VC-Angel Roundtable in Silicon Valley. Previously, Mr. Karan was the founding CEO of OneDemocracy.com, an Internet e-commerce company that built a marketplace exchange in the political/social arena. He assembled a team of twelve political luminaries for its Advisory Board (including Ann Richards, former Governor of Texas, and Ken Khachigian, Senior Advisor to John McCain for President). OneDemocracy.com was ranked by Time Magazine as the best political web site in March 2000, and was selected by Yahoo! and MSN as site picks of the month. OneDemocracy.com was subsequently sold to Voter.com in June 2000. Mr. Karan's prior background includes twelve years of investment banking experience with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. He holds an MBA from Dartmouth's Amos Tuck Business School (Tuck Scholar, 1980), a BA in Economics from Dartmouth College, and an MA in Comparative Philosophy and Religion from the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Celinda Lake is President of Lake Snell Perry & Associates, Inc., a national political research firm that provides services to a wide range of advocacy and non-profit organizations, and foundations. She is one of the nation's foremost experts on electing women candidates and on framing issues to women voters. Ms. Lake and her firm are known for cutting edge research on issues including the economy, health care, the environment and campaign finance reform. Ms. Lake is a regular pollster for U.S. News and World Report. Celinda Lake is also a leading political strategist, serving as tactician and senior advisor to the Democratic Party's national party committees, dozens of Democratic incumbents and challengers at all levels of the electoral process, and democratic parties in several Eastern European countries and South Africa. Prior to forming Lake Snell Perry and Associates, Ms. Lake was partner and vice president at Greenberg-Lake. She has served as political director of the Women's Campaign Fund. She has also been Research Director at the Institute for Social Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Policy Analyst for the Subcommittee on Select Education. Ms. Lake holds a Masters degree in Political Science and Survey Research from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; a certificate in political science from the University of Geneva, Switzerland; and an undergraduate degree from Smith College.

George Lakoff, PhD, is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a leading expert on cognitive linguistics, the scientific study of the nature of thought and its expression in language. Since the mid-1980s he has applied cognitive linguistics to the study of politics, especially the framing of public political debate. He has served as a consultant to numerous advocacy organizations and political campaigns. Dr. Lakoff is one of the founders of the Rockridge Institute, a California think tank that studies means of reframing public understanding of policy issues. He is author of Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, a guide for progressives, and Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't, an analysis of the differences in how conservatives and liberals formulate their world views and moral perspectives, and how these differences play out in the language they use and their positions in the policy arena. He is also the author of Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and co-author of Metaphors We Live By and More than Cool Reason. Dr. Lakoff got his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University. He taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan and was at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, before coming to Berkeley.

L. Hunter Lovins is President of Natural Capitalism, Inc. Trained as a lawyer, she co-founded the California Conservation Project, and subsequently the Rocky Mountain Institute, which she led for 20 years. Ms. Lovins has lectured extensively in over 15 countries, including at the World Economic Forum at Davos, The International Symposium on Sustainable Development in Shanghai, and the Global Economic Forum in Washington D.C. She has co-authored numerous papers and nine books, including Natural Capitalism, and has consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide. Her areas of expertise include sustainable development, energy and resource policy, climate change, land management, community economic development, and globalization. Based on her belief that individuals working together within a market context are the most dynamic problem-solving force, Ms. Lovins has devoted herself to creating and implementing practical affordable solutions to the problems facing life, by working with corporations, communities and citizens. She shared a 1982 Mitchell Prize, a 1983 Right Livelihood Award (often called the "alternative Nobel Prize"), the 1993 Nissan Prize, and the 1999 Lindbergh Award. In 2000, she was named Time Magazine Hero of the Planet. In 2001, she received the Shingo Prize for Manufacturing Research and the Leadership in Business Award. Ms. Lovins holds BAs from Pitzer College (Political Studies and Sociology), a JD from Loyola University School of Law (Los Angeles), and several honorary doctorates.

Currently Mr. Malveaux is managing the Nelda Wells Spears Campaign for Travis County Tax Assessor-Collector. The campaign’s fundraising events have reflected Mr. Malveaux’s background in the arts and politics. Each of the fundraising events for the campaign has featured live music -- blues, gospel and inspirational jazz -- in non-traditional venues for Democratic political fundraisers – a high-end art gallery, a black Baptist church, and a rock n’ roll nightclub.

For the 2006 Election cycle, Mr. Malveaux served as the Coordinator of the East Austin Initiative of the Travis County (Texas) Democratic Party’s Coordinated Campaign (True Blue Travis), an outreach program that substantially increased voter participation in predominantly African American and Mexican American communities. Mr. Malveaux also produced the Digital Polemics Film Festival, which brought controversial political documentary films to the public during the 2004 Presidential Election cycle.

Mr. Malveaux's previous positions in the entertainment and communications industries were as CEO & President of Victory Grill Entertainment (VGE), a nonprofit arts organization; Director of Sales and Marketing for The Mayfield Group, an information technology services company; and Principal of Bass Beats Broadcasting, a radio broadcasting property acquisition and operations company.

Since the 1980s, Mr. Malveaux has been involved in the creative application of arts and entertainment as means of consciousness-raising, nonviolent political protest, and fundraising for advocacy. Mr. Malveaux did his undergraduate studies in Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He has done research in the field of ethnic enclave formation and entrepreneurship, and completed a post-baccalaureate program at the Entrepreneurial Institute for the Arts, conducted by the Graduate School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and The Association of American Cultures.

Will Marshall is President and a founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council. He is editor of Building the Bridge: 10 Big Ideas to Transform America (Roman & Littlefield, 1997) and co-editor of Mandate for Change (Berkley Books, 1992), a policy blueprint for President Clinton's first term. He has written on a number of political subjects, including welfare reform and urban revival, race and affirmative action, new models for governing, and defense and foreign policy. Since 1980, Mr. Marshall has worked on Capitol Hill and in electoral politics, including stints as press secretary, speechwriter, spokesman, and policy analyst for Democratic candidates and officeholders. He was the policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council from 1985 to 1989, and is chairman of the editorial board of the DLC's magazine, The New Democrat. Before becoming involved in politics and public policy, he was a journalist in Virginia. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia.

Richard H. Middleton, Jr., leading consumer advocate, is a partner in Suggs, Kelly & Middleton, a plaintiff civil litigation firm with offices in Savannah, GA, and Columbia, Myrtle Beach, and Florence, SC. As the immediate past President of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA), Mr. Middleton continues as chairman of ATLA's political action committee and serves on ATLA's executive committee. He previously was a partner in Middleton, Mathis, Adams & Tate, one of the largest plaintiffs' firms in the Georgia. He has nearly 200 publications and presentations to his credit. Mr. Middleton received his BA and JD degrees from Washington & Lee University.

Ted Nordhaus is Vice President of Evans/McDonough, Inc., an opinion research and strategic consulting firm in Oakland, California. As a specialist in environmental, transportation, and land use issues, he has been involved with a variety of projects in which his qualitative and quantitative research skills mix with public relations work and strategic consulting for public persuasion efforts. Mr. Nordhaus works with a diverse client base of political, corporate, governmental and non-profit agencies, including the Apollo Alliance, a national effort to initiate a crash program to transition the United States to a clean energy economy. He is also the co-founder and director of Strategic Values Science Project, a joint venture of Evans/McDonough, the Canadian market research firm Environics, and Lumina Strategies, a political strategy firm. Strategic Values has been commissioned to use corporate marketing research to create a Values Road Map for creating a progressive majority around core values, not political issues. Mr. Nordhaus and public relations consultant Michael Shellenberger are currently working together in a joint market research venture, American Environics, Inc.

Prior to joining Evans/McDonough, Mr. Nordhaus was a principal at Next Generation, where he developed winning campaigns for Environmental Defense; the California Futures Network; and Clean Water Action. He was formerly Executive Director of the Headwaters Sanctuary Project, campaign director for Share the Water, and state campaign director for the California Public Interest Research Group, and has worked with organizations ranging from the Sierra Club to the California Democratic Party. Mr. Nordhaus has a BA in history from the University of California, Berkeley.

David Novogrodsky has been the Executive Director of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 21, AFL-CIO, since 1981. During that time, the union has grown from 500 to nearly 6000 members. The membership comprises local government employed professionals, and administrative and related employees in Bay Area cities and counties, including San Francisco and Oakland. Occupations represented include engineers, architects, programmers, accountants, planners, and others. Mr. Novogrodsky previously worked for a number of other unions, including the AFSCME, SEIU, and the AfofT, as well as for the AFL-CIO. He organized and represented social service employees, university and college professors, and a multiplicity of other occupations in a number of industries. Mr. Novogrodsky is the Vice-Chair of the Council of Engineers and Scientists Organizations (CESO) and has served as Western Vice President of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers. He currently serves on the executive board of the San Francisco Labor Council. He has been a university and college instructor at a number of institutions, including Rutgers, San Francisco State University, and San Francisco City College. Mr. Novogrodsky's degrees are BA in Sociology & Psychology from Reed College and MA in Political Science from the University of Oregon.

Geoffrey Nunberg, PhD is an adjunct full professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as being a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. He is chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. Since 1989, Dr. Nunberg has done a regular language feature on the NPR show, "Fresh Air," and his writing about language and other topics is regularly seen in The New York Times, The American Prospect, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other publications. Dr. Nunberg has worked for many years on behalf of language rights and was active in organizing opposition to the English-only movement. He has written a number of articles on technology policy and the need for universal access, and recently served as the expert for the American Library Association's successful challenge to the mandatory Internet filtering provisions of the Children's Internet Protection Act. He was also the expert witness for the group of Native Americans who successfully petitioned for the cancellation of the trademark of the Washington Redskins in 1999. Some of his writings are available at his web site. Until 2001, Dr. Nunberg was a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He has also taught at UCLA, the University of Rome, and the University of Naples. Dr. Nunberg received his BA from Columbia University, MA from the University of Pennsylvania, and PhD from City University of New York (CUNY). His books include Going Nucular and the recent Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned LIberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.

Dennis Paull has been a grass roots political activist for over 30 years, and is currently deeply involved with the promise and problems of electronic voting machines. Now retired from a career as a software development engineer and instrumentation engineering consultant, he devotes his time to several nonprofit organizations. For the California Democratic Council (CDC), he has been a Regional Vice President, Secretary, President of a local club, webmaster, and manager of CDC e-mail discussion groups. He was webmaster and a member of the Board of the Campaign Ethics Foundation in Santa Clara County, California; a member of the Board of the Silicon Valley Public Access Link, a 501(c)3 internet service provider; and was First Vice President of the Southern Peninsula Emergency Communications System. Mr. Paull holds BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology.

Paul Ray, PhD, is CEO of Integral Partnerships, LLC, a consulting firm that helps those organizations whose constituencies or customers are Cultural Creatives to be more successful, by aligning their internal activities and values with the values and needs of their constituencies or customers. He is co-author of The Cultural Creatives (Harmony Books, 2000). Over a 14 year period, while he was Executive Vice President of American LIVES, Inc., Dr. Ray studied over 100,000 Americans, showing how the subcultures of values permeate all aspects of American life, including consumer behavior, politics, media use, and altruism. His evolving analysis of the American political landscape, The New Political Compass, can be seen at www.culturalcreatives.org. Dr. Ray's earlier positions include: Chief of Policy Research on Energy Conservation, Department of Energy, Mines and Resources of the Government of Canada; Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Vice President of Set Theoretic Information Systems Corp. He co-developed the world's largest, most complex, and realistic urban gaming simulation, METRO-APEX, used to train managers in over 100 universities and in governments in 5 countries. Dr. Ray has a BA in Anthropology from Yale University and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan.

Einat Sandman, is a representative of the newest generation of progressives. Einat Sandman, is a recent graduate of Santa Clara University School of Law. She is currently an Associate at Cooley Godward LLP. In her years of political activism, she served on the opposition research team for Gore 2000 and created Spanish-language radio ads for the campaign. She worked for various state and local political campaigns, and in House and Senate offices. Ms. Sandman has also worked in the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, DC, policy think tank; the DNC/Brown-Tully Institute Training Academies; and Sun Microsystems' Global Public Policy department. She has trained activists around the country to integrate the Internet strategically into political campaigns. At the age of 21, Ms. Sandman co-founded the Institute for Silicon Valley Public Affairs, a non-profit promoting interactive voter education on the Internet for the 1998 local elections. Ms. Sandman, whose parents are Uruguayan, received her undergraduate degree in Political Communications from George Washington University (Washington, D.C.), where she was a National Hispanic Scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Paul Sheldon, Consultant, is Senior Manager for Policy and Research programs in the Durango, CO office of Ecos Consulting. He serves as Senior Consultant with Natural Capitalism Solutions (www.natcapsolutions.org), and previously taught "Principles of Sustainable Management" and "Implementing Sustainable Business Practices" at the Presidio School of Management (www.presidiomba.org) in San Francisco, CA, with Hunter Lovins and Bob Dunham. In addition, he acts as a private development consultant specializing in sustainability, non-profit fund raising, board development, and philanthropic advising. Mr. Sheldon helped organize the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Los Angeles-based TreePeople, Friends of the Los Angeles River, and many other progressive organizations. He has been a motivational consultant to General Motors, Bank of America, Muzak, and the City of Aspen, CO. Mr. Sheldon is a former Board member of Colorado Mountain College, the City of Aspen Planning and Zoning Commission, the Aspen Lodging Association, and several Chambers of Commerce in Colorado and California. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Human Development from Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, CA.

Brooke Warrick is founder and President of American LIVES, Inc., a marketing research firm specializing in psychographic market segmentation. He has been a leader in value- and lifestyle-based market research for almost two decades. He specializes in turning quantitative and qualitative data into rich and insightful stories about how to reach and sell to different kinds of consumers. He is also an international speaker on the impact of value and lifestyle trends on consumer behavior and new developments in market research. Before becoming President of American LIVES, Mr. Warrick was the Director of Marketing at the VALS program at SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute), where he created the well-known video, ãAn American Portraitä. He later authored The Builder's Guide to Moveup Buyers, about the present and future state of the homebuilding industry and home buyers. Mr. Warrick holds an MS degree in Psychology from San Francisco State University.

David Zucker is a Senior Vice President of the multinational, multicultural public relations firm, Porter Novelli, and is the director of CauseWorks, Porter Novelli's cause-related marketing and strategic philanthropy specialty. Mr. Zucker is a recognized leader in the field, having worked on a broad variety of issues in the US and throughout the developing world. In addition to counseling corporate clients, he has provided training and technical assistance to community-based organizations and government agencies in social marketing, strategic planning, issues management, research and evaluation, message development, mass media, and workplace and community-based interventions. He has also served as the global key account leader for all of Porter Novelli's anti-tobacco projects, and has had extensive experience developing communications programs addressing particularly challenging behaviors and audiences. Prior to joining Porter Novelli in 1989, Mr. Zucker was a Vice President at Jordan, McGrath, Case & Taylor, where he managed marketing planning, research and advertising for corporate clients; he earlier worked for several advertising agencies in Boston and New York. Mr. Zucker has a B.A. in French Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Back         Top