Shriver Center Staff Biographies

Senior Management

John Bouman
President

John Bouman, president and advocacy director of the Shriver Center, is widely recognized as 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' new welfare law in 1997, and he spearheaded the statewide efforts in Illinois to create both the FamilyCare program, which provides health care insurance for up to up to 400,000 working poor parents of minor children, and All Kids, the first state plan to extend health coverage to every child. He has consulted and co-counseled with advocates in many states; helped draft numerous pieces of legislation; given hundreds of presentations; published extensively; and served as counsel in numerous federal and state cases, including Memisovski v. Maram, which established substantial reforms in children's health care in Illinois. He currently is working on state-based implementation of federal health care reform, serves on the steering committee of the National Transitional Jobs Network, and leads the Responsible Budget Coalition in Illinois, an effort bringing together more than 200 diverse organizations to advocate for state revenue and budget reform in Illinois. Before joining the Shriver Center in 1996, he worked for two decades at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago, where he supervised public benefits advocacy. Among his honors, he has received the Kutak-Dodds Prize from the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, John Minor Wisdom Public Service and Professionalism Award from the American Bar Association's Litigation Section, Child Health Advocate Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and Excellence in Pro Bono and Public Interest Service Award from the United States District Court and Federal Bar Association. A 1975 graduate of Valparaiso University School of Law, John serves on the boards of the Chicago Transit Authority, the Donors' Forum of Chicago, and the Center for Law and Social Policy (Washington DC).

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.

Ellen Hemley
Vice President of Training Programs

Ellen Hemley brings over 30 years of experience in the equal justice community to her role as Vice President of Training Programs. Prior to joining the Shriver Center, Ellen served as executive director of the Center for Legal Aid Education, which provided training and leadership development programs to equal justice advocates nationally. Previously, Ellen was Director of Training at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute where, among other things, she oversaw CLAE's predecessor, the Legal Services Training Consortium of New England. She also served for many years as an independent consultant; her clients included the American Bar Association, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the Florida Bar Foundation, the Washington Access to Justice Commission, the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, the Massachusetts Union of Public Housing Tenants, and scores of other legal aid networks, bar foundations and justice-related programs across the country.

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.

Advocacy Directors

Director, Asset Opportunities

Karen K. Harris became the supervising attorney of the Shriver Center's Community Investment Unit in October 2008. She has advocated for the development of asset building policies and programs for low-income and minority communities, including an Illinois Task Force on Children's Savings Accounts, a statewide multi-entity public and private working group on improving financial education in Illinois schools, and a coalition to develop alternatives to payday loans by encouraging mainstream financial institutions to offer small dollar loan products. Karen has testified before the FDIC as well as written and presented on numerous asset building topics, and in 2009 she initiated a national webinar series on topics such as Universal Voluntary Retirement Accounts, Asset Building in the Disability Community, Integrating Asset Building into Domestic Violence Advocacy and Alternative Credit Reporting. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, she worked in private law firms for over fourteen years in the area of health care law before coming to the Shriver Center.

Director, Economic Justice

Dan Lesser has been a senior attorney with the Shriver Center'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. He 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. In 2010, Dan was appointed by Illinois Governor Quinn to the state's Commission to End Hunger. 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 at the Shriver Center. A renowned advocate, she was part of the team that drafted the Family Violence Option in the 1996 federal welfare act and led the successful campaign for state adoption in Illinois. She has also contributed to the drafting of the federal Violence Against Women Act of 2000 and 2005 and successfully advocated for the Victims' Economic Security and Safety Act in Illinois. She was recently appointed to the Illinois Commission on the Elimination of Poverty and the City of Chicago's Mayor's Task Force on Single Mothers. Women Employed named Wendy one of its 35 "Champions for Change" in 2008, and in 2010 she received an Impact Award from the Chicago Foundation for Women. Before coming to the Shriver Center in May 1996, Wendy worked on the welfare law team at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago. Before becoming a lawyer, she was a union carpenter and cofounder of Chicago Women Carpenters in 1979 and Chicago Women in Trades in 1982. Wendy is a 1989 graduate of Harvard Law School.

Director, Community Justice

Margaret Stapleton, senior attorney, has more than 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. Throughout her career she has served as counsel in many federal and state cases, helped draft numerous pieces of legislation, and consulted and co-counseled with advocates in several states. 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. In 2009 she was awarded the Chicago Bar Foundation's Thomas H. Morsch Public Service Award recognizing her distinguished career in public interest law, and in 2010 the National Child Support Enforcement Association honored her with its Private Sector Individual Award, which recognizes an individual who has advanced the value of life for children as it relates to child support enforcement. 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 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School.

Director, Housing Justice

Kate Walz, senior housing staff attorney, advocates on behalf of low-income individuals living in or in need of public, subsidized, or affordable housing. She has served as class counsel in Concerned Residents of ABLA v. CHA, a suit challenging the demolition of public housing and displacement of residents; Wallace v. CHA, a suit challenging the resegregation of former CHA residents through the Housing Choice Voucher program; Teresa Davis v. City of Joliet and City of Joliet v. Mid-City National Bank, a multi-case project attempting to stop the taking of a project-based Section 8 development by eminent domain; Dorothy Jones v. HUD, a suit to stop the demolition of public housing in Rockford, Illinois; Chicago ACORN v. HUD, a case challenging HUD's termination of the project-based Section 8 contract of one of the biggest developments in the country; Jane Addams Senior Caucus v. Moody Bible Institute, a suit challenging the illegal conversion of project-based Section 8 housing into a student dormitory; and Kathy Cleaves-Milan v. AIMCO Elmcreek L.P., a suit challenging the eviction of a woman and her child because she was the victim of domestic violence. Kate spearheads the housing policy work for the Shriver Center and has successfully passed legislation protecting low-income renters facing condominium conversion, experiencing violence, seeking to improve housing conditions, and maintaining the confidentiality of juvenile court information. In 2006, she was awarded a Housing Justice Award by the National Housing Law Project for her work on affordable housing and low-income housing rights. She is the co-coordinator of the Safe Homes Initiative, a project aimed at ensuring that survivors of domestic and sexual violence have access to safe, decent and affordable housing.