Board of Directors

The Peace Development Fund board of directors is composed of dedicated people from across the country that reflect the communities that we serve. Many are activists within their own communities and all understand the importance of peace and social justice and supporting oppressed communities. This is important to the foundation, as it is a way to ground and tie our work directly to those who we support. Watch “In Our Own Words” where PDF’s board talks about PDF’s place in the social justice movement.

Teresa Juarez is a long time social activist. She runs the Teh-Luh-Lah Learning and Healing Center and is the lead organizer of the New Mexico Alliance.

Tricia Lin is Director and Professor of the Women’s Studies Program at Southern Connecticut State University, where she works for gender, racial, socio-economic and other forms of justice, in the classroom and beyond. She is the editor of a special issue on transnational Indigenous feminism with Lectora (University of Barcelona), forthcoming in 2016. Tricia is also the recent President of National Women’s Studies Association.

Dr. Mildred McClain AKA Mama Bahati, a 50-year veteran of the People’s Movement for Justice and Self Determination worldwide, is the Executive Director Emeritus for the Harambee House / Citizens for Environmental Justice which she founded in 1990. Mama Bahati has worked in the fields of education, community development, public health, Environmental Justice, and People’s Liberation struggles for over 5 decades. She has championed youth leadership development through the Black Youth Leadership Development Institute (BYLDI) since 1988, where over 3,000 young adults have been trained and put to work for their people. She is a high school graduate of the Commonwealth School of Boston, Graduate of the University of Massachusetts – Boston, has a Master of Education from Harvard and Antioch and a Doctorate in Education from Harvard School of Education. She is the 2017 Recipient of the Sierra Club’s Robert Bullard Environmental Justice Award and the American Public Health Association’s Damu Smith Environmental Health Achievement Award. Mama Bahati is a devout believer and a staunch Pan-Africanist. She has been serving God since the age of 12, when she was baptized in Second Arnold Baptist Church, Savannah, Georgia. She has studied meditation, healing arts, Tai Chi, yoga and African Spiritual Practices since 1969. She is a mother, grandma and Godmother.

Tina Reynolds is Co-Founder and Chair of Women on the Rise Telling HerStory (WORTH). She is an adjunct professor at York -CUNY, and is a board member of JusticeWorks Community and the Coalition for Parole Restoration. In her work over the past 15 years, Tina has partnered with formerly and imprisoned women to challenge and offer solutions to policies and other barriers women and families face during and after incarceration. She has published pieces on the abolition of prisons, the impact of incarceration on women and children and is an editor of an anthology Interrupted Life.

Daniel Schreck has been in the foundation world for nearly 30 years, including the Abelard Foundation (where he was also president), National Network of Grantmakers and The Funding Exchange. He continues his work through his donor-advised fund at PDF, The Aztlan Fund. It supports work in indigenous country, and tries to, at least at a seed level, continue the work of the Paul Robeson Fund for Film and Media at The Funding Exchange. The late Saul Landau was very instrumental in mentoring Daniel on the idea of becoming an executive producer, and to fund indigenous people to retain their intellectual property rights by filming their own cultural material. Daniel is the producer of “The St. Patrick’s Battalion.”

Donté Smith (they/them) is a national lecturer, health educator, and cultural curator known for their diverse range of clients from large Southern US county health departments to DIY punk rock of colors music festivals and innovative approaches to community engagement and public health.
Donté is an alumnus of Georgetown University and co-creator of the Black & Brown Punk Show (Chicago 2009-2015), which spurned 6 direct spin-off festivals also nurtured by Donté’s guidance (in the last decade, which all blended cultural events with STI testing initiatives. A previously incarcerated political prisoner from the School of the Americas Watch movement in 2006, Donté’s riveting jailhouse sentencing speech was recently published by University of California in “Solidarity Witness: Collective Resistance to the US Security State” by Chandra Russo.

Diagnosed as living with HIV in their early 20s, Donté led a Chicago AmeriCorps AIDS United team in 2012 to be awarded the Alexian Bros. Award of Excellence for their sustainable garden project for a community of people living with HIV in a food deserted South Chicago and was also a 2020 Human
Rights Campaign ELEVATE fellow linking people of color of transgender experience across the South who were changing the face of the US public health workforce during COVID-19.

Earl Tulley, a lifelong activist for the Navajo Nation, is co-founder and Vice President of Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment.

Note: organizations are listed for identification purposes only.