Who We Are

Margaret Carey (she/her) is the Chair of the Racial Justice Coordinating Committee at First Parish Unitarian Universalist of Arlington, currently focusing on both reckoning with its 18th century entanglement with slavery and offering reparations to the community.  Maggie recently retired from UMass Medical School where she worked closely with MassHealth on health equity programs for low income disabled adults.  She has dedicated her retirement to educating herself and others on how pervasive slavery was in Massachusetts, and how remnants of that horrific harm are still impeding necessary progress today.

First Parish Unitarian Universalists of Arlington 

Hannah Hafter (she/they) participates in the Reparations Interfaith Coalition through their role as Lead Organizer at the Episcopal City Mission (ECM) in Boston, MA. At ECM, Hannah works with Episcopal churches throughout the state on campaigns to shrink the racial wealth gap through solidarity economy, state policies, and reparations. Previous to ECM, Hannah organized nationally around immigrant justice at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, and lived and worked at the U.S./Mexico border in Arizona with the border justice organization, No More Deaths. Hannah lives in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston with her daughter and two small dogs, and loves being outdoors and all things fungi-related in their free time.

www.episcopalcitymission.org

Connie Holmes (she/her) Connie Holmes is a retired psychologist who counseled cancer patients and their families for 29 years in Boston and in the Bay Area. Connie is a member of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Watertown, MA. She comes to reparations through the experience of her Viennese refugee mother who fled Hitler, leaving everything behind. Her grandfather, Armin Wallesz, perished in Theresienstadt at age 86. Margaret, Connie’s mother, received reparations from the Austrian government over 20 years, 45 years after the Anschluss.

Church of the Good Shepherd

Nakhie Faynshteyn (he/him) is an activist based in the land of the Massachusett people (known as Boston, MA) and member of the board at the Boston Workers Circle. As a first-generation immigrant originally from Odessa, Ukraine, he sees reparations as the only way for everyone to equitably have access to the American Dream that he and his family were promised. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking and drawing.

Boston Workers Circle 

Sue Lanser is a member of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek in West Newton, where she serves on the organizing committee of her synagogue’s Undoing Racism project.  She is Professor Emerita of Humanities at Brandeis University with specialties in eighteenth-century European and Atlantic studies. Sue has been active for many decades in antiracist teaching, scholarship, and professional service.  She lives in Cambridge.

Lynne Layton (she/her) has had the honor of being a member of the national Black-led Grassroots Reparations Campaign since its inception in 2018. She is a long-time member and current co-chair of Boston Workers Circle's Acting for Racial and Economic Justice Committee. As a psychologist/psychoanalyst, she is dedicated to disrupting the conscious and unconscious reproduction of racially unjust and abusive systems and building a culture of repair.

Boston Workers Circle

Susan Redlich (she/her) participates in the life of First Church in Cambridge as a member of the Beloved Community group supporting the congregation in becoming an anti-racist church.  She volunteers with various groups that organize for climate justice, food security, land sovereignty, and ecological sustainability.  Susan lives in Cambridge next to a community garden.

Naomi Scheman (she/her) moved to Arlington in 2016 after retiring from 39 years at the University of Minnesota as a professor of Philosophy and Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies. She found a home at Boston Workers Circle, a perfect fit for her diasporic, secular, politically left-wing Jewish identity; and she is currently a co-facilitator of AFREJ (Acting for Racial and Economic Justice). She is also a BWC liaison with UJIMA and FJAH (Families for Justice as Healing) and BUPNP (Building Up People Not Prisons). She sees both solidarity economy work and the movement for prison abolition as components of reparations--that is, building a world that will not repeat the afterlives of enslavement. 

Rev Dan Smith (he/him) is a husband, father and pastor with over 25 years experience leading local congregations, most recently as a former Senior Minister at First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, UCC. He is a Lecturer on Ministry at Harvard Divinity School and the UCC Chaplain for Harvard University. He has also been a Strategy Team Member and Vice President of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO) and was a founding member of the MA Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence. Dan has worked at First Church, Harvard and in Cambridge on efforts towards reckoning and repairing the lasting and ongoing harms of  slavery and colonization. In 2019, he served on a university-wide faculty committee guiding the multi-year Presidential Initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. 

www.firstchurchcambridge.org

Jane Stephenson (she/her) lives in Western Massachusetts, in what is now called Montague. She is a life-long educator and has been a racial justice agitator for 35+ years.  Jane represents the Reparations Collective, Western Massachusetts Showing up for Racial Justice and the Race and Class Work Group of Mt. Toby Friends Meeting. She is also active with the Grassroots Reparations Campaign. 

Western Mass Showing Up for Racial Justice

Mt. Toby Friends Meeting

Grassroots Reparations Campaign

Peter Wood (he/him) is a father and partner, therapist and active with the Jewish Community of Amherst. He serves on the Reparations Committee and is a facilitator of the Stolen Beam series. Peter is committed to facilitating real change through dialogue and taking action towards reparations for the enduring wrong committed against enslaved people and their present day descendants. He is motivated by his understanding that history has a tendency to repeat itself, especially when we are collectively ignorant of all but one side. He is committed to learning the lies and disinformation that have intentionally shaped the White American narrative...and continue to do so.