1978

Back in 1976 Betsy Fairbanks did a Tucker Fellowship at the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz, Calif. After returning in 1977 and '78 on a policy studies internship, she ended up making a career of the place. These days Betsy is executive director of the Eschaton Foundation, the parent organization of the Resource Center for Nonviolence, as well as the Project for Peace and Reconciliation in the Middle East, the Alliance for Improving Race Relations, and the Peace Project (for which her husband, Phil McManus, is the Latin American program coordinator). "It's hard to quantify the effects of the work we do," says Betsy. "We work a lot on public education, on motivating people to seek change in their lives." The underpinning of her work is nonviolence—that is, using nonviolence as a means for social change, in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Betsy and Phil spent last year in Ecuador working with peace and justice organizations in Central America. They also decided to adopt an Ecuadorian child—a younger sister for Tim 7 and Kevin 4.

This spring Alice Brown is studying domestic poverty issues in a mid-career fellowship program at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy. Ordinarily she is an assistant attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Manhattan.

From time to time Alice runs into veteran civil-rights litigator Juan Cartagena. (In addition to being in the same line of work, they both live in Jersey City.) As general counsel to the Community Service Society of New York, a 149-year-old, non-profit agency dedicated to eliminating the fundamental causes of poverty in New York City, Juan is currently litigating for the Voting Rights Act, "using it as a tool to make sure that more people participate in the political process." He and his wife, Nanette Hernandez, a media buyer and consultant with Vitt Media International, have a three-year-old son, Mateo.

Gail Sockabasin is director of the Penobscot Nation Health Facility in Old Town, Maine. It's a federally contracted health facility available to anyone from a federally recognized tribe. As Community Services Director for the East Tennessee Chapter of the March of Dimes, Judy Roitman sponsors education programs for prenatal care and teen pregnancies, and recently she's done advocacy work trying to get women on Medicaid eligible for prenatal care. Jody's husband, Larry Pounds, is a grad student in ecology at the University of Tennessee. They have two kids, Jessie 7 and Ben 5.

On October 21 The Legal Intelligencer ran a story under its "Volunteer Lawyers" heading entitled "Amy Wilkinson: Committed to Many Causes." Amy, a partner at Duane Morris & Heckscher in Philadelphia, gives her time and expertise to an exhaustive list of important causes: chairing the Women's Law Project, serving on the board of the Family Planning Council of Southeastern Pennsyl- vania, co-chairing the bar association committee on minorities in the profession, and volunteering one-on-one in the College works program, assisting high schoolers prepare for the PSAT and SAT "It is a lot," admits Amy, "but I got involved with each of those things because they were important to me, and they're all still important to me today."

Last July Rob Portman, erstwhile director of the office of Legislative Affairs in the Bush administration and now a partner at Graydon Head & Ritchey in Cincinnati, was elected to the United Nations Human Rights Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection ofMinorities. Now Rob is running for the Congressional seat from Cincinatti that became available with the retirement of Rep. Bill Gradison, for whom Rob campaigned in college. There will be a primary on March 16 and a special general election on May 4. For more information write to Portman for Congress, 7754 Camargo Road, Suite 7, Madeira, OH 45243, or call (513) 561-9993.

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