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Meet our Board Members and Advisors
Board MembersRonald W. Fox
Ronald W. Fox has built his life's work around the essential Jewish values of compassion, healing and social justice.
A graduate of Harvard College (class of '60) and Harvard Law School (class of '63), Mr. Fox served in the US Army JAG (the army's legal branch) and spent a few years working in large law firms. But by 1971, he had abandoned the world of corporate law to start a practice representing low and middle-income people with minimal access to legal advice. He became one of the first lawyers in the country to offer divorce mediation, a service that can make the process less traumatic than the traditional adversarial approach.
In 1983, Mr. Fox joined the staff of the Harvard Law School as Public Interest Career Advisor, where he counseled law students who hoped to use their degrees to help the disadvantaged. His experience at Harvard led him to found the Public Interest Law Career Planning Center (later the Center for Professional Development in the Law) with the goal of helping lawyers find ways to make their professional work consistent with their personal values. Since 1990, he has presented workshops at over 20 law schools and bar associations and provided individual guidance to over 1000 law students and lawyers. His book Lawful Pursuit: Careers in Public Interest Law was published by the American Bar Association in 1995.
Mr. Fox has been active in the Jewish community at both the local and national level for over thirty years. In 1971, he and his wife formed a "havurah" with several other families which for fifteen years shared Jewish holidays, retreats and celebrations in a style that emphasized toleration, caring and fairness. The Fox family spent five weeks touring Israel and working on Kibbutz Gevim in 1981. Mr. Fox has served on the boards and social action committees of numerous religious and charitable organizations, including his local United Way and Jewish Federation, the Tikkun Community and the International Centre for Healing and the Law. He was instrumental in raising funds to build a medical clinic for an impoverished community in Israel. Most recently, Mr. Fox and his wife, Joan Fox, have founded a new organization called the Center for Jewish Alternatives (www.ronfox-joanfox.com), which provides resources and support for people who are alienated from their local Jewish institutions and who wish to incorporate Jewish values, principles and traditions into a spiritually meaningful life.
Mikhail KazachkovIn 1975, Mikhail Kazachkov sought permission to leave his native Soviet Union. A physicist and a Jew, Kazachkov was arrested and spent the next 15 years in the Gulag - the Soviet Union's longest serving political prisoner. Labeled "The Man in the Window" by New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal, Kazachkov emerged in the last years of the Soviet Union as a major international human rights figure.
Upon his release in 1990, Kazachkov traveled with his mother to the United States where he took up residence and began what he came to call his "third career" (theoretical physicist and Gulag inmate being careers one and two). For much of the 1990s he focused on human rights and political change in his homeland, increasingly traveling back to what had again become Russia. During this period, he was a Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Law School and a Fellow at the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
During the 1990s Kazachkov played a key role in bringing technical advice, political support and financial aid to those in his native land seeking to build democratic institutions. He assisted in the production of over 20 Russian documentaries, aired nationwide, that educated viewers to a variety of human rights issues. He advised the Duma on telecommunications policy, including on how Russia's legislature could establish the equivalent of C-SPAN. He also assisted Russian efforts to accelerate the introduction of the Internet.
Much of Kazachkov's work occurred under the auspices of not-for-profit organizations. Most important has been the Freedom Channel, a U.S. 501 c3 organization which he helped establish and run. Its mission remains the support of Russian media and other groups active in building a civil society. He also joined other boards of directors including that of a CFC federation: Human and Civil Rights Organizations of America.
In the last few years, Kazachkov has added for-profit work to his not-for-profit activity, serving as a link between Russian entrepreneurs and businesses in the United States and European Union. He has specialized in communication and other advanced technologies, a not incidental link to his "first career" in physics.
Jeffrey Musman
Jeffrey Musman has been a lawyer in private practice for more than 30 years. Currently a partner in the Boston firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP, he concentrates in the areas of corporate and commercial law, real estate development, land use, and public and private finance. Before joining Seyfarth Shaw, Musman was for many years a partner in the firm of Goldstein & Manello, which eventually merged with the firm of Schnader, Harrison, Goldstein & Manello where he was also a partner.
Musman received his law degree from William and Mary and his bachelor’s degree from Carleton College. He has been active in community affairs for years and currently serves on the regional boards of the Urban League and the Association of Retarded Citizens.
Neil Singer
Neil Singer is the president of The Cornerstone Companies, with offices in Washington, DC and Tampa, FL. Twenty years of national and international operations have required him to work in widely disparate communities, with contrasting opportunities and needs. New ventures include seeking opportunities to promote ethanol and other clean-fuel alternatives to petroleum power.
His undergraduate work at Cornell University in both Natural Resources and Business management was followed by graduate work at American University in International Development. These programs provided a foundation for Mr. Singer to bring the priorities of continuing education and fair labor practice into the world of entrepreneurial business.
Mr. Singer has been a frequent volunteer tutor and reading coach for grade school age children, and a guest lecturer on personal financial health and savings at the secondary and post-secondary level. He has been a fundraiser for international children's charities, and a voter registration volunteer.
Marshall Strauss
Marshall Strauss has been active in human rights and the charity field for most of three decades. During much of this period he has been deeply involved in the operation of the U.S. Combined Federal Campaign.
Strauss is currently president and a member of the board of directors of Human & Civil Rights Organizations of America, a tax exempt organization authorized by the Federal government to admit charities to the CFC. HCROA currently has more than 60 member organizations which participate in the Federal government's fundraising drive.
In 2002 and again in 2003, Strauss was elected Chair of the National Combined Federal Campaign Committee, a coordinating body whose members includes CFC federations, local Federal volunteers from around the country, and local CFC administrators. Representatives of the U.S. Office of CFC Operations, in Washington DC, also participate in the work of the committee.
From 1993-1995, Strauss was executive director and board member of Freedom Channel, an organization of Russian political activists and American supporters he helped establish. During this period Freedom Channel worked with Russian journalists, pollsters, and politicians to use television in support of democratic reforms. Strauss conceived and helped Russian activists and film-makers to produce that nation's first get-out-the-vote public awareness advertisements, broadcast on national television; co-authored a report to Russia's Duma on how Western legislatures employ television to document and broadcast their activity; and advised Russian political operatives in the use of polls, convening one of that nation's first meetings involving political activists, pollsters, and reporters.
Prior to his involvement in Russia, Strauss was deeply involved in efforts to foster democratic change in China. From 1989-1993, he was the founding executive director and board member of the Democracy for China Fund, an organization of Chinese political activists and American supporters established in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Strauss organized and participated in the 1991 Human Rights Delegation to China led by Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. In 1992, he was denied entry to China due to his human rights work.
From 1986-89, Strauss served as associate director of the Child Welfare League of America, the leading association for state agencies and charities dealing with the care and treatment of children. From 1984-86, he was associate director of Physicians for Social Responsibility. PSR shared in the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for its work in educating the public and political leaders as to the dangers of nuclear weapons. Prior to 1980, Strauss held various positions including special assistant to Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent and special assistant to U.S. Senator John Durkin.
Strauss was a research associate at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy from 1994-96, and was an adjunct member of the faculty of Emerson College in 1995. Here and overseas, he has been interviewed extensively on issues of human rights by, among others, the Associated Press, UPI, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, ABC News, Actuel (Paris), BBC, and Russian National Television.
Advisors:
Judi Holley
Judi Holley was for several years president of Do Unto Others, a CFC-approved federation representing emergency relief, development and humanitarian charities. A retired federal employee, she has been involved in the Combined Federal Campaign for almost thirty years. Her experience ranges from that of being a donor, to a local CFC volunteer, to a founder and board member of three federations. She also currently sits on the National CFC Committee, as the designated representative of her federation.
Ms. Holley brings particular expertise in the process of admission and fiscal oversight. As she has remarked, "Contract negotiations, financial oversight, budgeting, regulation compliance, eligibility assessment and processing, are all part of a federal manager's responsibilities. To transfer these skills to the world of the non-profit has been a relatively easy process."
Ms. Holley volunteers extensively outside the CFC. The community organizations with which she has been involved in her home state of Washington have included: The Governor's Advisory Council for Vocational Rehabilitation, the Criminal justice Training Commission, South Puget Sound Cultural Diversity Coalition, the Pierce County Sheriffs Advisory Board and Jail Citing Task Force. She is currently leading a Pierce County pilot program in community involvement sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Richard O'Connor
General CounselRichard O'Connor has been in private practice as an attorney for fifteen years, with an emphasis on civil, not for profit and environmental law. A partner in the Rockville, MD firm of Shure, Perez and O'Connor, he is admitted to practice law in Maryland and the District of Columbia at both the state and federal level.
Mr. O'Connor has advised numerous not for profit organizations, and in several instances served as a member of the board of directors. He is a director of the CFC federation, Human & Civil Rights Organizations of America, having served as both treasurer and secretary. Before entering private practice, he spent nine years in federal service, with NOAA's Office of Coastal Management.
