Shriver Center Staff Biographies

Administration

John Bouman
President

John Bouman was named president of the Shriver Center effective January 1, 2007. He also remains the Shriver Center's director of advocacy, his position since 1996. He joined the Shriver Center in May 1996 after twenty-one years at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, where he supervised public benefits issues and policy advocacy from 1985. Prior to that, he provided multi-issue direct representation in several Chicago neighborhoods for nine years and held a position as a specialist in the foundation's Elderly Law Project. He has won numerous awards for his career and accomplishments in antipoverty legal and advocacy work. He is recognized for being one of the most effective and thoughtful public-benefit advocates in the country. He was a leader in the design and implementation of positive aspects of Illinois's new welfare law in 1997. Recently he led the successful statewide effort to create the FamilyCare program to provide health care insurance to up to 300,000 working poor parents of minor children, and he was a leader in the successful advocacy to create All Kids, the first state program of universal coverage for children. Bouman is lead counsel in Memisovski v. Maram, a successful case establishing substantial reforms in children's health care in Illinois. He is a founding and current member of the steering committee of the National Transitional Jobs Network. He is a frequent lecturer and trainer on a variety of social policy, advocacy, and lawyering subjects. He is a 1975 graduate of Valparaiso University School of Law and member of the Chicago Council of Lawyers and the Chicago Bar Association.

Molly Bartlett
Vice President of External Affairs

Molly Bartlett, who joined the Shriver Center in February 2008, is responsible for managing various facets of external relations, including media, public relations/marketing, and fund-raising. A major area of responsibility is the national State of Poverty Campaign, a communications, advocacy, and revenue development initiative to strengthen the Shriver Center's antipoverty efforts. Previously she worked with the Community Renewal Society, University of Chicago Divinity School, Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, Chapin Hall, and Metropolitan Planning Council. She earned a B.A. in the humanities at the City University of New York and an M.A. in public policy/political science at the University of Illinois.

Ilze Sprudzs Hirsh
Vice President of Communication Programs

Ilze Sprudzs Hirsh, who has been with the Shriver Center since January 1989, has overall responsibility for the publication of Clearinghouse Review: Journal of Poverty Law and Policy and facilitates the development of the Shriver Center's poverty law library and website. She transforms exchanges of ideas with advocates into themes for Review articles or entire issues. She previously served as the Shriver Center's deputy director as well as acting executive director. With a J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law, she began her legal career as a staff attorney in the general counsel's office of the Illinois Department of Public Aid in Springfield, Illinois. She was an associate with Friedemann, Stone, LaScala, Keto & Fingal in Orange, California, before returning to her native Chicago to work as a legal editor at CCH, a major legal publisher. She has a bachelor's degree in German and health studies from St. Olaf College.

Elizabeth Ring
Vice President of Operations

Elizabeth Ring is responsible for overseeing the human resources, procurement, information technology, financial management, and other operations of the Shriver Center. Before her arrival at the Shriver Center in April 2007, she served as vice president-operations at the Alliance for Illinois Manufacturing, where she was a major architect in the transformation of NORBIC, a 30-year-old local industrial retention organization, into a regional alliance that helps lift people in Illinois out of poverty by creating and retaining the best paying jobs for women and minorities in underserved communities--manufacturing jobs. She also served as NORBIC's director, Small Business Development Center, and director, International Trade Center. Her past experience includes preparing cost proposals and administering international health care programs for a global nonprofit health care organization, and market research and industry surveyor for an international management consulting company. She also served as a White House Fellow, responsible for international economic and trade research. She has an M.B.A. in international management from Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management, and a B.A. in international relations and economics from Wellesley College.

Nancy E. Carey
Receptionist/Administrative Assistant

Nancy Carey rejoined the Shriver Center in 1999 (she was with the organization from 1977 until 1996, when the organization lost all its federal funding). She is responsible for processing document orders from the Poverty Law Library, providing technical assistance on the website, maintaining subscriptions (data entry, logging incoming checks, and processing all checks for bank deposit), preparing RTA transit benefits fare information, and giving secretarial support. She attended Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi.

Murtle M. English
Administrative Associate

Murtle Mae English has been with the Shriver Center for more than thirty years. She has particular expertise in technical online support. Her duties include managing mail and the Web-based subscription system for Clearinghouse Review, answering subscriber questions, updating subscriptions in the Democracy in Action (DIA) database, assisting the vice president of operations on cost-saving services, and helping organize all operations files. She also provides general office support. She attended Harold Washington City College and has experience in Word, Excel, Access, FrontPage, and the Raiser's Edge database as well as the DIA database entry.

Tim Fluhr
Technology Systems Administrator

Brian Hadd
Development Administrator

Nazim Khan
Accountant

Nazim Khan, the organization's financial officer from 1974 to 2004, came out of retirement in 2005 to be the Shriver Center's accountant part-time. Before immigrating here, he worked as a budget management analyst with the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. He has a B.S. in accounting and management from the University of Karachi.

Emmett Murphy
Financial Manager

Emmett Murphy is responsible for the Shriver Center's internal financial system and external financial reporting. As a controller, a vice president of finance, and a chief financial officer, he served in such organizations as a national medical association, a publicly traded high-technology firm, and a material handling company. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Accountants and the Illinois CPA Society, of which he was chairman of the Controllers and Treasurers Committee. He has a B.S. in business management from Quincy University and an M.B.A. in finance from Benedictine University.

Development Specialist

Juan Francisco Orozco is responsible for managing corporate-development efforts. He joined the Shriver Center in November 2008 after working with Latinos Progresando and the National Museum of Mexican Art. He serves on the board of directors of the Jane Addams Resource Corporation and volunteers with the Foundation Youth Group at Old St. Patrick's Church. He has a B.A. from Saint Edward's University.

Lisa Riley
Media and Public Relations Specialist

Foundation Relations Officer

Brendan Short joined the Shriver Center in May 2006. Previously he worked for several years as a fund-raiser for nonprofit entities serving low-income communities in Washington, D.C. He holds a B.A. in American studies from the University of Notre Dame and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Texas, where he held a three-year fellowship at the James A. Michener Center for Writers.

Communications

Edwin P. Abaya
Associate Editor

Edwin P. Abaya copyedits Clearinghouse Review, WomanView, Inside Housing, and other Shriver Center materials. He has a Ph.D. in analysis of ideas and study of methods from the University of Chicago and an M.M. from Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management. He also taught college English courses. He is looking into the rhetoric and architecture of poverty. He likes taking pictures. At last count he has run and finished twenty-nine marathons: fourteen Chicago, twelve New York, one Paris, one London, and one Rome.

Marcia Henry
Senior Attorney-Legal Editor

Marcia Henry joined the Shriver Center in 2000. In addition to ongoing editing and editorial planning duties, she has planned and coordinated special issues of Clearinghouse Review--on privatization (Jan.-Feb. 2002), representing immigrants (July-Aug. 2004), civil right to counsel (July-Aug. 2006), and representing clients with criminal records (July-Aug. 2007)--as well as the Poverty Law Manual for the New Lawyer. She was the editor of Youth Law News at the National Center for Youth Law for fifteen years and worked at the Child Care Law Center. She received her J.D., with distinction, from Hofstra University School of Law and worked as a staff attorney and Reginald Heber Smith Fellow at Westchester Legal Services. She serves on the board of the Benchmark Institute, which delivers training to enhance the work of poverty lawyers and other advocates. She telecommutes from Oakland, California, and, on occasion, from her Vancouver Island vacation home in Sooke, British Columbia.

Volunteer Attorney-Legal Editor

Kathleen Donahue McNally has been a volunteer attorney-legal editor with the Shriver Center since 2003. She previously worked, specializing in environmental law, at Mayer, Brown and Karaganis, White & Magel in Chicago. She earned her J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law and a B.A. in public affairs management from Michigan State University.

Margaret Miles
VISTA-Communications Program Associate

Michelle Nicolet
Web and eCommunications Director

Michelle Nicolet ensures that the Shriver Center maintains high-quality content standards in its website. Working with the Shriver Center's technology and editorial staff, she develops content for www.povertylaw.org and implements other electronic communication activities. She has twenty years of editorial experience, having worked as the copy editor and later a legal editor on Clearinghouse Review and other Shriver Center publications. She serves on the board of directors of Near North Montessori School and enjoys cooking and knitting.

Catherine Dorn Schreiber
Staff Attorney-Legal Editor

Catherine Dorn Schreiber edits substantive articles and helps develop Clearinghouse Review's contents. She planned and coordinated the 2005 special issue on "Our Commitment to Youth," the 2007 special issue on "Legal Recourse for People with Disabilities," and the 2008 special issue on "Let Elders Age Independently and with Dignity: A Call for Advocacy." A Georgetown University graduate, she worked as a technical editor for ten years before attending law school part-time at the American University Washington College of Law. Throughout law school, she worked at the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, D.C. During her last year, she also represented low-income clients in landlord-tenant disputes at a nonprofit clinic. After receiving her J.D. magna cum laude, she moved to California and worked for two years in civil litigation before joining the Shriver Center in 1999. She telecommutes from Southern California, where she enjoys winters without snow and volunteering at her daughter's elementary school.

Advocacy

Supervising Attorney, Community Investment Unit

Karen K. Harris became supervising attorney of the Shriver Center's Community Investment Unit in October 2008. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, she worked in private law firms, such as DLA Piper and Seyfarth Shaw LLC, for over fourteen years in the area of health care law. Along with her private practice, she has published and presented on numerous health law issues as well as diversity issues in the legal profession. A native of Chicago, she lives with her family in the West Loop.

Andrea Kovach
Staff Attorney

Andrea Kovach is with the Community Investment Unit and the Health Care Unit. She joined the Shriver Center after working at the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, where she handled a wide range of legal matters, including felony preliminary hearings and bond hearings, bench and jury trials, and civil hearings for orders of protection. She was the lead attorney in a courtroom that handled hundreds of cases weekly, and she argued before the First District Appellate Court. She wrote and advocated enacted legislation on prosecuting domestic violence cases. She trained law enforcement officers on legal issues and led discussions with religious and social service organizations. She is a proud alumna of Wellesley College and the University of Illinois College of Law, where she graduated magna cum laude and was administrative editor of the University of Illinois Law Review.

Dan Lesser
Senior Attorney

Dan Lesser has been a senior attorney with the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law's public benefits unit since 1996. He specializes in child care and early education, immigrant access to public benefits, TANF program, tax and budget, and climate change issues. Dan helped design the Illinois child care assistance program for low-income working parents in 1997 and since then has led several successful efforts to improve that program through changes in governing laws and program policies and increases in funding. Dan received Action for Illinois Children's Unsung Hero award in 2002 for his work. Dan has also played a leading role in coalitions that have succeeded in restoring immigrants' access to public benefits that was lost pursuant to the 1996 federal welfare law. Dan is also in charge of the Shriver Center's annual Congressional Poverty Scorecard project. Before joining the Center, Dan worked at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago for eight years after graduating from Northwestern University School of Law in 1984.

Wendy Pollack
Director, Women's Law and Policy Project

Wendy Pollack is the founder and director of the Women's Law and Policy Project (WLPP) at the Shriver Center. The WLPP draws on the experiences of women and girls and brings those experiences to the forefront in the Shriver Center's analysis of poverty and the development of solutions to end poverty permanently. Pollack has been working extensively on public benefits and work supports, workforce and economic development, education, employment, family law, violence against women and girls, gender equity in schools, and other issues affecting low-income women and girls, on the local, state, and federal level. She is the editor of WomanView, a newsletter on developments in legal issues affecting low-income women and girls. Her most recent publication is a chapter in the three-volume set, Bringing Human Rights Home (Praeger Publishers 2007), which chronicles the history of human rights in the United States from the perspective of domestic social justice activism. Before coming to the Shriver Center in May 1996, she worked on the welfare law team at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago and as one of its neighborhood staff attorneys. Before becoming a lawyer, she was a union carpenter and cofounder of Chicago Women Carpenters in 1979 and Chicago Women in Trades in 1982. She serves on the board of directors of the Chicago Jobs Council. She is a 1989 graduate of Harvard Law School.

Susan Ritacca
VISTA-Community Investment Associate

Heidy Robertson
VISTA-Employment and Training

Margaret Stapleton
Senior Attorney

Margaret Stapleton has thirty-five years of experience practicing welfare and civil rights law. At the Shriver Center she focuses on public benefits, health care, child support, and former-offender issues; she is always searching for ways to make government and nongovernment services, programs, and opportunities effective and open to all low-income people--even to less popular low-income groups such as noncustodial parents and people with criminal convictions. She serves on the Illinois Department of Health and Human Services' Social Service Advisory Committee and Food Stamp Participation Advisory Committee and the Illinois Department of Health Care and Family Services' Child Support Advisory Committee. Before joining the Shriver Center in 1996, she worked as a staff attorney in the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago's welfare team for ten years and with legal services and civil rights organizations in Cairo and East St. Louis, Illinois, for fifteen years. She is a member of the Chicago Council of Lawyers and a board member of the Center on Family Policy and Practice.

Marie Claire Tran-Leung
Loyola Fellow/Staff Attorney

Marie Claire Tran returned to the Shriver Center in September 2007 under a two-year fellowship from Loyola of Los Angeles Law School. Her fellowship project aims to reduce employment barriers for people with criminal records. She focuses on increasing the accuracy and reliability of those records as well as limiting their dissemination by private companies. After graduating from Northwestern University with a B.A. in political science in 2002, she arrived at the Shriver Center to work on housing issues originally as a volunteer and then as an Americorps*VISTA. Two years later she went back to her hometown of Los Angeles to attend Loyola under the Public Interest Scholars Program. During law school she clerked for Public Advocates Inc., Asian Pacific American Legal Center, and Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago. She also served as an articles editor for the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. In her spare time she enjoys reading books, gardening, and listening to live music.

Samantha M. Tuttle
Staff Attorney

Samantha (Sam) M. Tuttle, who is with the Housing Unit, advocates on behalf of low-income individuals and families living in or in need of public, subsidized, or affordable housing. She joined the Shriver Center after four years as staff attorney with the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, where she litigated in the areas of housing, employment, consumer, and family law. She also clerked for Judge Terri Stoneburner of the Minnesota Court of Appeals. She is a 2002 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and a 1999 graduate of the University of Minnesota.

Katherine E. Walz
Senior Attorney

A 1996 graduate of DePaul College of Law and a 1993 graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Katherine E. Walz began her legal career at the Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing, where she spearheaded a comprehensive pilot project demonstrating the benefits of providing legal representation to tenants in Chicago's Eviction Court. She then worked in private practice on civil rights and criminal defense cases. She returned to legal aid as executive director of First Defense Legal Aid (FDLA). She served as an adjunct clinical professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. With the Shriver Center since late 2001, she advocates on behalf of low-income individuals and families living in or in need of public, subsidized, or affordable housing. She is class counsel in Wallace v. CHA, a case that challenges the Chicago Housing Authority's discriminatory relocation practices for residents; Concerned Residents of ABLA v. CHA, another class action suit involving public housing demolition and relocation; and Chicago ACORN v. HUD, a class action suit challenging the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's termination of the project-based Section 8 contract of one of the biggest developments in the country. She spearheads the housing advocacy policy work in a lead role on the Source of Income Working Group, the Tenants Rights Working Group, and the Safe Homes Initiative. She serves on the board of directors of FDLA and the Metropolitan Tenants Organization.