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Class Action Staff
Class Action Board
Class Action Associates
Felice Yeskel, Executive Director
 Felice
Yeskel, a co-founder of Class Action and United for a Fair Economy, comes from a working-class Jewish family from New York
City's Lower East Side. She was a founder of the UMass
Stonewall Center: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender
Educational Resource Center and served as the director
for 20 years. Felice is also a founder and co-director
of DiversityWorks, Inc. an organization of social justice
educators that provides training and consulting on issues
of diversity and multiculturalism.
She is an adjunct faculty
member of the Social Justice Education Program at UMass
Amherst where she has taught both undergraduates and
graduate students. She has led hundreds of workshops across
the country about economic inequality and about healing
divisions among Americans of different class backgrounds,
races, genders, and sexual orientations. She is the co-author,
along with Chuck Collins, of Economic Apartheid in
America, published by The New Press in fall 2000.
The second edition was published in the fall of 2005. Felice
has a doctorate in Organizational Development and Social
Justice Education.
Rhonda Soto, Race/Class Intersections Program Coordinator
Rhonda Soto knows how important and challenging the work is to build  awareness around issues of race and class, specifically what it can mean to a low income person of color. Being bi-racial, born and raised in Harlem, New York, Rhonda has been exposed to various forms of racism and classism. As a single parent on welfare, she moved to a culturally all white suburban area. She continued her education and worked her way towards earning a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College, where she was inspired by her professor, Beverley Tatum, Author of “Why Are all the Black Kids Sitting in the Cafeteria Together?,” to deeply examine the impact classism and racism has on society. Upon completing her bachelors, Rhonda worked with teens in a transitional shelter, then with GED students preparing for college. Most recently she taught middle school where she also chaired their diversity committee.
Her long-standing interest in social justice has led her to become a vocal advocate, trainer, and consultant around issues of diversity, including facilitating workshops for teachers who serve a diverse population of students. She also participated in a federal funded project on the impact of welfare reform with presentations at national conferences, dialogues on race/class, and interviews in the media. “I have a passion for this work and a commitment to keeping it going.”
Kristen Golden, Deputy Director
Kristen is a feminist activist with more than 20 years of stories to tell from a variety of social justice movements.
She grew up middle class in a suburban Long Island, NY town peopled with working class and middle-class families. With an undergraduate degree in theatre, she moved to NYC and briefly pursued an acting career, before  landing a day job at CBS Records. While advocating for the right to a workplace free of sexual harassment for 3,000 female employees at CBS, she met Gloria Steinem. Kristen followed her home and worked for Gloria at Ms. magazine (where she also met her lovely wife Barbara) for a number of exciting years, eventually becoming a contributing editor to the magazine. She earned an MBA from Simmons College School of Management, and then became the original project director of the Ms. Foundation for Women’s runaway hit Take Our Daughters to Work Day. She and Barbara co-wrote Remarkable Women of the Twentieth Century: 100 Portraits of Achievement.
In 1999, with two small kids in tow, Kristen and Barbara moved to Amherst, MA where Kristen was the executive director of Safe Passage, a community-based agency supporting survivors of domestic violence. She greatly expanded the agency’s programs, and purchased and renovated two facilities, including the unique, art-filled, celebrity-designed shelter called Safe Passage House. She’s excited to help Class Action put the issue of class on the national map.
Dana Gillette, Associate Director of Development and Communications
Coming from an upper-middle class family in a small town, Dana experienced class culture shock when she attended private high school in Connecticut. Her experiences there, and her studies of race, class and gender in college spurred her commitment to social justice work.
Dana co-chaired the founding board of Resource Generation, a national organization promoting innovative ways for young people with wealth to align their personal values and political vision with their financial resources. Her volunteer work has included serving on the board of Women in Philanthropy, chairing the finance committee at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence, and participating in a LGBT speakers’ bureau. Dana also consults with organizations to increase their impact by developing effective fundraising programs and improving their communications with constituents. She is a graduate of Barnard College.
Sarah Reid, Office Manager stanttive Assistant
At the end of an unimpressive adolescence, Sarah became a mother to son Zane, who is the best thing that ever happened to her. After living on welfare for two years she was ready to go back to school and did so at Greenfield Community College where she received her Associate’s Degree in Women’s Studies. After an internship with Ms. Magazine and a year of teaching homeschoolers at a non-profit learning center, she enrolled in the Ada Comstock Scholars program at Smith College to finish her BA.
Shortly after graduation she opened and managed a successful café in Montague, MA for three years. Feeling sidetracked and unhappy with this line of work she sold the café and is currently delighted to find herself in the world of social justice once again. She serves on the board of the Brickhouse Resource Center in Turners Falls, MA as well as on the Advisory Board of the Rendezvous Bar in the same town.
She lives in Turners Falls with her partner Matthew and son Zane. Their house is blue. Zane is not fond of blue houses.
Erin Van Anglen, Administrative Assistant
Erin is a feminist, pacifist, activist, and a student at Mount Holyoke
College studying International Relations. She is finishing up her year 
off which she has spent most of her time interning here at Class Action
and the rest building up her right arm muscles scooping ice cream at
Herrell's Ice Cream.
She grew up in a working class family with her two younger sisters in
rural Pennsylvania. While she had many experiences with class when she
was younger, her first realization of being of a lower socio-economic
status was when she attended a prestigious preparatory high school while
she was on scholarship. She was the first of her family to attend college
and recently has been struggling with the inevitability of a future as a
straddler.
Erin is the youngest staff member at Class Action therefore she has much
less to say about her life thus far. She currently lives in Northampton
with her Matt and is looking forward to taking the bike trail to work this
summer.
Debbie Lopes Da Rosa, Training Intern
Debbie is a graduate student at the School for International Training in
Brattleboro, Vermont, where she's been studying training, social justice
and conflict transformation ... quite a change of pace from her previous
life as a Foreign Service Officer and working for the Department of State
overseas and in Washington. She's delighted to have traded in that hectic
life for living in beautiful southern Vermont and doing two personally
meaningful internships in western Massachusetts.
Debbie grew up in the white, middle-class suburbs of the southwestern
United States, experienced the push to move towards the upper middle
class, and is now enjoying the privilege of voluntarily giving up that
lifestyle and working with organizations promoting social justice and
peaceful resolution of community-based conflicts.
Click here to read about our ASSOCIATES such as Jenny Ladd, Chuck Collins, Zoe Greenberg and Peter Redington.
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