Nisha Anand transitioned to becoming a board member after being the Director of Development for San Francisco Women Against Rape for almost 3 years. Before SFWAR, Nisha worked as the Director of Development for The Ruckus Society, a national direct action training organization and the National Field Organizer for the War Resisters League, an 80 year old anti-war organization. Currently, she sits on the advisory board of the Catalyst project of the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop and facilitates trainings on Anti-Racist Organizing, Nonviolence, Grassroots Fundraising, Direct Action, and Conflict Resolution. In the past, Nisha has conducted workshops on a variety of issues including militarization, police brutality, sexual assault, and the FTAA.
In college, Nisha was the founder and coordinator for a yearly conference, the National Conference on Organized Resistance. In 1998, Nisha was arrested passing out pro-democracy leaflets in the military dictatorship of Burma and sentenced to five years in jail with 18 other international activists. This arrest led her to both nationally and internationally delivering speeches at numerous events and conferences and interviewing for radio, T.V, and the press for the Free Burma Coalition. In 1999, Nisha received her Masters Degree in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from The American University in Washington, DC.
Patricia Berne has been active in racial justice and gender based violence prevention fields for over fifteen years. She currently directs the Project on Race, Disability and Eugenics at the Center for Genetics and Society, working with multiple constituencies concerned about the social justice implications and eugenic potential of emerging genetic and reproductive technologies. She is currently a member of Men Overcoming Violence (MOVE),a majority male feminist collective committed to understanding and ending gender based violence. Prior to her work on the SFWAR Board of Directors, she facilitated writing workshops for survivors of sexual violence and worked with SFWAR's Teen Education team facilitating workshops about sexuality, pleasure and consent. Her background includes community organizing within the Haitian diaspora, advocacy with incarcerated youth toward alternatives to the criminal justice system, and cultural activism to centralize marginalized voices, particularly those of people with disabilities. She is earning her Doctorate of Psychology (Psy.D.) at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, focusing on trauma and resilience for survivors of interpersonal or state sponsored violence.
Committed to social justice and radical healing, Mordecai Cohen Ettinger has spent over a decade doing mulit-sector social justice and community service work. For five years he served as Associate Director of Caduceus Outreach Services. He has also served on the Board of Directors of Community United Against Violence. He is currently pursuing his Masters in psychology with an emphasis in somatics and transforming trauma for both individuals and communities.
Hilary Klein was born and raised in Washington DC. She studied political science at UC: Berkeley but learned more about politics doing student activism than in the classroom. She has a long standing commitment to radical, grassroots political work and has participated in activism and organizing around a number of issues, including affordable housing and immigrants' rights. Much of her work has also focused on women's rights, violence against women, and women's participation in social movements.
After college she coordinated the counseling center at La Casa de las Madres, an organization that provides shelter and other services to battered women and their children. She then spent six years living in Chiapas, Mexico and working with women's cooperatives in Zapatista support base communities. She came back from Chiapas committed to putting into practice the Zapatista model of constructing autonomous, community based alternatives to oppressive state institutions. Hilary currently works with Latina immigrant women as a community organizer at Tierra Viva, the health and environmental justice project of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. She recently worked with MOVE (Men Overcoming Violence) to pilot a men's group in collaboration with the SF Day Laborer Program.
