Our Board of Directors
Eveline Shen, Executive Director, Forward Together
Since Eveline's leadership began in 1999, Forward Together has become widely recognized for its innovative role in the Reproductive Justice Movement—working with grassroots communities; providing thought leadership; developing effective tools and resources for evaluation, training, and documentation; and organizing for long-term systemic change. Eveline serves on the board of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project and Movement Strategy Center. She has also served as Principal Investigator for two National Institutes of Health grants that explore the intersection between environmental justice and reproductive justice. Women's eNews recently named Eveline one of their 21 Leaders for the 21st Century. She was a 2009 Gerbode Fellow and holds a Masters in Public Health from UC Berkeley in Community Health Education.
Inger Brinck
Inger received her MA in economics (with an emphasis in public policy) from Claremont Graduate University in January 2009. She then joined the Advancement Project in Los Angeles where she developed a new program to increase transparency, accountability and equity in the use of public funds. Inger continues her work in public finance and is currently collaborating on a paper that discusses the application of a model to predict city fiscal distress using California cities as the sample. Inger has been involved in local, national and international efforts to ensure women's human rights. She served on the advisory board of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Hastings College of the Law for 10 years and will soon join the board of directors of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy.
Lani Shaw, Executive Director, General Service Foundation
Lani Shaw is the Executive Director of General Service Foundation, a progressive family foundation based in Aspen with grantmaking areas in Human Rights and Economic Justice, Reproductive Justice, and State-level Community Organizing and Voter Engagement in Colorado. During her years at GSF she has facilitated and overseen a generational transition at the board level, a switch to mission- and values-driven investing, and an emerging commitment to diversity and inclusion throughout the organization. Lani has served on the boards of the Funders Network on Population, Reproductive Health and Rights and the Kenney Foundation, and was a co-founder and chair of the Women of Color Working Group of the Funders Network.
Lourdes A. Rivera, Program Officer, Ford Foundation
Lourdes Rivera joined the Ford Foundation in 2006 as the Program Officer for Sexuality, Reproductive Health and Rights. Her grant making supports building a more diverse and inclusive sexual and reproductive health and rights movement, with a focus on marginalized groups, and securing legal and policy advances in the field. Before joining the Ford Foundation, Lourdes was the Managing Attorney of the Los Angeles office of the National Health Law Program. While there, she provided policy advocacy, training, technical assistance, litigation and research assistance to legal services attorneys and other low-income and women's health advocates nationwide. Prior to her role at the National Health Law Program, Lourdes was a Senior Associate with the Children's Defense Fund, Health Division, where she worked on issues of health access for children. Additionally, she was a Georgetown Women's Law and Public Policy Fellow with the National Women's Law Center. Lourdes has a J.D. from Yale Law School and a bachelor's degree in Latin American studies from Yale University and has bar membership in California, New York and Washington, D.C.
Margaret Chapman Pomponio, Executive Director, West Virginia FREE
Margaret is a seasoned advocate and leader in social justice work with a BA in Sociology and MA in Political Science. She has led WV FREE since 2002 when she began to earnestly expand reproductive health, rights and justice work in her home state. She has received recognition for her work, including a "Woman of Vision" award from Gloria Steinem through the Ms. Foundation for Women. Her career has been varied, from serving in AmeriCorps, working with the Lummi Nation in Washington to teaching Political Science in West Virginia. She deeply values working in coalition and is called upon regularly to speak around the state and country.
Pamela Miller, Executive Director, Alaska Community Action on Toxics
Pamela founded ACAT in 1997. She is a European American. Since 2000, ACAT has been awarded multiple federal grants for which Pam has been serving as team leader and, from 2005 through 2006, as Principal Investigator of a research team that includes faculty from four universities in Alaska and New York. These research projects rely on collaborative efforts with tribes in Alaska to address environmental health and justice issues. Pam Is a leader in Coming Clean, a national network of groups concerned about chemicals policy reform. She is one of the world’s foremost experts concerning the toxic pesticide lindane, serving two governmental organizations (United Nations and the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation) to address international concerns about lindane. She was instrumental in prompting the 2006 decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw agricultural products containing lindane from the U.S., the 2010 decision by the same agency to phase out uses of endosulfan, and the 2011 decision by the United Nations Environment Programme to ban endosulfan worldwide under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. In 2012, she was elected as the only American on the Steering Committee for the International POPs Elimination Network. She was selected as a fellow for the Reach the Decision Makers program from the University of California San Francisco, Reproductive Health and Environment Program (2011); was invited to participate in an unprecedented White House Forum on Environmental Justice (2010); and selected to serve on an environmental justice advisory group for the Centers for Disease Control (2009-2010). In 2012, she received the Meritorious Service Award from the Board of Regents of the University of Alaska for her service to the community. She holds a master’s in environmental science from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio (1981).
Rini Banerjee, Director, Foundation for a Just Society
Rini joined the Simons Foundation Family Giving staff as director of the Foundation for a Just Society (FJS) in 2012. Before joining the foundation, Rini was a senior program officer at the Overbrook Foundation, where she oversaw domestic and international grants portfolios in human rights, youth development, reproductive rights, human trafficking and progressive movement building. Previously, she held positions at the New York Women's Foundation, UNICEF and UNDP, and at several community-based organizations working in the social justice field. Earlier in her career Rini worked in both finance and marketing for the Investment Division of Citibank/Citicorp and for the Samuel Goldwyn Company, respectively. She has a master's in International Affairs from Columbia University and a bachelor's in finance from New York University's Stern School of Business.