Debbie Davis – Chair
Debbie Davis is an award-winning performance artist, a Milwaukee Public Schools high school teacher and a community organizer. Special projects have included founding the Midwest Vipassana Meditation Center , Pulaski High School Students United for Immigrant Rights, Good Greens (organic produce) Buying Club, the Gordon Park South Block Club, and the Milwaukee (Area) Time Exchange.
She recently collaborated with the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare to produce a screening and panel discussion of the documentary “The Dhamma Brothers”, drawing 1000 attendees in two days. In the Riverwest she has also been active with La Escuela Fratney, Rethinking Schools , Peace Action and the St. Casimir’s Food Pantry. She is currently on leave from Milwaukee Public Schools while coordinating the Milwaukee (Area) Time Exchange. She was elected to the board of the Riverwest Neighborhood Association with the platform of integrating community asset development and exchange into the work of the RNA.
Leah Dobkin – Co-Chair
Leah Dobkin is a freelance writer with over thirty years experience developing and managing innovative programs for older adults. She is a national consultant and public speaker about senior housing, corporate elder care, and resource development with nonprofits. She writes about innovative people, organizations, and communities that magnify social change, and has contributed to Kiplinger’s, AARP and Milwaukee Magazine as well as other international, national and regional publications and web sites. She is currently a Senior Program and Resource Development Advisor and Trainer for the National Council on Aging (NCOA) and has conducted research and nationwide workshops on the best and most promising fundraising and resource development practices for nonprofit aging services.
Ms. Dobkin previously worked for AARP in Washington D.C. as their Senior Housing Specialist and consumer advocate. There she provided education and advocacy, technical assistance and outreach, public policy analysis, program and resource development and research on financing and developing supportive, affordable housing and long term care options for older people.
Ms. Dobkin has worked with Maggie Kuhn, the Founder of the Gray Panthers, as the Director of Education at the National Shared Housing Resource Center in Philadelphia. In addition, in 1979 she started the nation’s first intergenerational home sharing match-up program in Seattle , Washington . Ms. Dobkin received her masters in social work with a specialty in nonprofit management at Columbia University .
Marc Rassbach – Treasurer
Marc Rassbach has been living and working in the Milwaukee area since the late 1980′s. Marc owns a computer consulting business specializing in finding open-source solutions that work for small to medium sized businesses.
Marc has always been interested in alternative currencies, bartering, and helping in the community. He co-founded the Milwaukee Area Time Exchange in 2010, with the hope that it would provide community members the opportunity to directly help one another, especially those who are resource wealthy but not materially wealthy.
Andrea Gouin
Andrea is a Trinity Fellow at Marquette University where she is pursuing her MA in Public Service, with a specialization in criminal justice administration. Through the Trinity Fellows Program she was assigned to work with a local nonprofit agency for the duration of her academic program. Andrea was placed at Justice 2000 where she is researching national criminal justice policies and programs, such as the Community Corrections Act and community courts. She is also working with a variety of criminal justice and community planning groups dedicated to criminal justice reform.
Prior to beginning her studies at Marquette, Andrea completed two years of service with AmeriCorps. She served one year as an AmeriCorps*VISTA at St. Norbert College where she helped organize an academic service-learning program, and served as a liaison for volunteer coordination and management between SNC and the Boys and Girls Club of Green Bay. She also served one year with the Massachusetts Legal Assistance for Self-Sufficiency AmeriCorps Program in Holyoke, Mass., as an advocate at a legal services agency, and managed a weekly, in-court volunteer program providing legal assistance to tenants on the day of their eviction hearing.
