MARY POOLE

Mary has co-directed MERC since 2008 and serves on the boards of MERC in both Kenya and the U.S. Mary is on the faculty of Prescott College, Arizona, teaching in the areas of U.S. history, gender studies, race relations in the U.S., history of East Africa, global development studies, Indigenous research methods and Maasai history. She helped to create and teaches in the masters program for Social Justice and Community Organizing. Prior to Prescott College she has worked in public policy, serving on the staff of the Washington State Senate Ways and Means Committee designing fiscal policy for social service programs, and also as the Executive Director of Early Options in New York City, a reproductive rights organization. She has been involved with community development work in Africa beginning as a teenager in the late 1970s. Mary earned a Ph.D. from Rutgers University in U.S. History in 2000, and a B.A. from the Evergreen State College in Education and Political Economy in 1988. She is the author of The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2006) and co-author with Meitamei Olol Dapash of the forthcoming Decolonizing History in Maasailand.