AFR Education Fund Board

AFR has an affiliated 501(c)(3) entity, Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund. The two organizations share a similar mission but pursue that mission with different tactics. These organizations share staff and office operations, but have distinct boards.

Lisa Donner

Lisa Donner is the Executive Director of Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund (AFREF), a coalition that brings together more than 200 national, state and local groups to work together to reform the financial industry. Members of the coalition include consumer, civil rights, labor, community, faith based, and business groups, as well as economists and other experts.  Our goal is a financial system that is fairer for consumers, and that better serves an equitable and sustainable real economy, rather than putting it at risk.

AFR led the efforts of groups on the ground to strengthen and pass the Dodd Frank financial reform legislation, including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Since passage of that legislation AFR has defended the CFPB from continual attacks and pushed for effective consumer protection rules, fought for the public interest perspective as hundreds of crucial regulations shaping the financial system are written, and focused public attention on the need to transform the financial system, help homeowners and communities impacted by the foreclosure crisis and hold Wall Street accountable.

Prior to joining AFR, first as Deputy Director, Lisa was the Executive Director of the Half in Ten Campaign, and the co-director of the Center for Working Families. In these positions she developed and promoted policy on fair taxes, work and family, anti- poverty measures, and green jobs. Before that, Lisa was a union and community organizer and campaign strategist, including fighting big banks and predatory lenders at ACORN as Campaign Director, and Director of the Financial Justice Center.↑

Anna Lefer Kuhn

Anna Lefer Kuhn (Board Treasurer) is the former Executive Director of the Arca Foundation, which seeks to advance a world based on respect for human dignity and the just distribution of economic, democratic, and cultural power. During Anna’ s tenure, Arca has turned its attention toward racial and economic justice by supporting multi-racial grassroots organizing that challenges the structures upholding inequality. Prior to Arca, Anna was a Program Officer at the Open Society Foundation, where she conceived of and led initiatives to support youth media, organizing and leadership development.

Anna is on the board of directors of the Solidaire Network, United for Respect Education Fund and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund. Anna previously served on the boards of the White House Project, the Center for Working Families, the Urban Justice Center, the League of Young Voters Education Fund, and was the co-chair of the Funders Committee for Civic Participation. Anna was a 2019-2020 Aspen Institute/Neighborhood Funders Group Philanthropy Forward Fellow and was a member of the 2004-2005 class of Coro Leadership New York.↑

Saqib Bhatti

Saqib Bhatti is the co-founder and Co-Executive Director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy and ACRE Institute. Saqib works on campaigns to win racial and economic justice by taking on the corporations responsible for extracting wealth and resources from communities of color and poor people. Saqib started organizing with the student anti-war movement following 9/11. He spent 10 years working on corporate campaigns with the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas and the Service Employees International Union. He was previously a fellow at the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Roosevelt Institute. Saqib is a co-founder and Executive Committee member of the Bargaining for the Common Good Network. He serves on the boards of the Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, the Climate Organizing Hub, the Midwest Academy, and Political Research Associates. He is also on the Advisory Council of Community Labor United. Saqib received his bachelor’s degree from Yale University and his master’s degree from the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.↑ 

Pat McCoy

Patricia McCoy, a nationally prominent scholar in financial services regulation, is a law professor and fellow at Boston College Law School.  In 2010 and 2011, she joined the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where she helped form the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and, as the CFPB’s first assistant director for mortgage markets, oversaw the Bureau’s mortgage policy initiatives.  She teaches banking regulation, insurance law, and a full array of other financial services regulatory courses as the Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor of law.  After receiving her law degree from U.C. Berkeley, Professor McCoy clerked for the late Hon. Robert S. Vance on the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and was a partner at Mayer Brown in Washington, D.C., specializing in complex securities, banking and constitutional litigation.  Before joining the Boston College law faculty in 2014, she was the Director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

Professor McCoy’s research interests focus on the nexus among financial products, consumer welfare, and systemic risk, analyzed through the lens of law, economics, and empirical methods.   In A Tale of Three Markets: The Law and Economics of Predatory Lending in the Texas Law Review in 2002, Professor McCoy was among the first to raise alarms about the dangers of subprime loans.  She has three books to her credit, the most recent being The Subprime Virus with Kathleen Engel, published by Oxford University Press in 2011.  The author of numerous book chapters and articles, she has testified before Congress and been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post and on National Public Radio.  Previously, Professor McCoy was a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Economics Department and served on the Federal Reserve’s Consumer Advisory Council and on the board of the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association.  In 2012, the American Law Institute named her as an Adviser to the Third Restatement on Consumer Contracts.  She is also a former member of the Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve’s Insurance Policy Advisory Committee.↑

Darrick Hamilton

Darrick Hamilton is the director of the doctoral program in public and urban policy, and jointly appointed as professor of economics and urban policy at The Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy and the Department of Economics, The New School for Social Research at The New School in New York.

Professor Hamilton is a stratification economist, whose work focuses on the causes, consequences and remedies of racial and ethnic inequality in economic and health outcomes, which includes an examination of the intersection of identity, racism, colorism, and socioeconomic outcomes.  He has authored numerous scholarly articles on socioeconomic stratification in education, marriage, wealth, homeownership, health (including mental health), and labor market outcomes.

Professor Hamilton has provided formal or informal consultation with numerous government and not-for-profit organizations including American Human Development Project, Black Equity Alliance, Brooklyn Friends School, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Center for American Progress, CFED, Center for Social Development, Congressional Black Caucus, Council of Economic Advisors-The White House, Demos, Economic Policy Institute, Empire State Coalition of Youth and Family Services, Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, of Boston, and of New York, Food Bank of New York City, The Ford Foundation, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, NSF’s Social Observatories Coordinating Network, National Urban League, New York City Workgroup on Health and Race for the United Nation’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) Shadow Report, PolicyLink, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, SEIU, the Twenty-First Century Foundation, U.S. Office of EEOC, and the Urban Institute.↑

Rebecca Dixon

NELP is led by President and Chief Executive Officer Rebecca Dixon. Rebecca is a respected national leader in federal workers’ rights advocacy and is in great demand for her thought leadership on issues of labor and racial, gender, and economic justice. Prior to taking the helm in 2020, Rebecca served on NELP’s Executive Management team as Chief of Programs. Rebecca’s commitment to advancing workers’ rights and economic justice is deeply rooted in her lived experience growing up in rural Mississippi at the intersection of race, class, and gender—characteristics that have long defined one’s ability to participate in our democracy and economy. As the descendant of enslaved people and daughter of sharecroppers and domestic workers, Rebecca knows firsthand what is lost when workers of color are relegated to the lowest rungs of our labor market, without respect, rights, and protections. She is a board member of The American Project, the Coalition on Human Needs, the Hope Enterprise Corporation, and the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation; and a member of the Economic Analysis and Research Network in the South, the 2020 Aspen Institute SOAR Leadership Fellowship, and the 2021 National Academy of Social Insurance’s Unemployment Insurance Reform Working Group and COVID-19 Task Force. Rebecca holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Duke University, and a law degree from Duke Law School.↑

Steven Renderos

Steven Renderos is the Executive Director of Media Justice, a national racial justice hub fighting for digital rights of people of color. As MediaJustice’s long time Campaign Director, he led a number of high-profile campaigns like the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice, which lowered the cost of prison phone calls nationwide. Steven also led efforts to win the nation’s strongest Net Neutrality rules, blocked the merger of Comcast and Time Warner and pressured Facebook to ban white nationalists on their platform. Steven came to the organization through the MediaJustice Network, helping recruit and grow the network to its current size of over 100 member organizations.

A native of Los Angeles, Steven grew up in an immigrant household at the height of anti-immigrant fervor in California. The propaganda campaign that fueled the passage of Proposition 187 in the mid-90s motivated Steven to seek out a career to challenge media bias and democratize communications for immigrants, people of color and other communities at the margins. He is the co-founder of Radio Pocho, a DJ collective in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which seeks to reclaim cultural roots through music.↑

Renata Pumerol

Renata Pumerol is the Deputy Director of the Climate Organizing Hub. Previously she was the Chief of Staff at the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE). She was previously the Deputy Director at New York Communities for Change where she worked on housing, climate justice, and Wall Street accountability campaigns among many others. As an internationalist and an immigrant from the Caribbean, Renata is deeply committed to improving the lives of working-class women here and abroad, she has experience with both national and international movements. Renata sits on the board of Americans for Financial Reform and on the advisory council of WILL Empower.  She holds a B.B.A. from the City University of New York and a Master’s degree in Human Rights from the University of Barcelona.↑

Kimberly Longey

Kimberly Longey oversees organizational development, capacity building and financial-management activities at the Free Press. She has more than 25 years’ experience building, growing and reinventing nonprofit organizations. Before joining Free Press, Kimberly served as deputy director of Proteus Fund and executive director of Hilltown Community Development Corp. She has held numerous elected and appointed government and civic positions in Massachusetts. She holds a master’s degree in community economic development from the University of Southern New Hampshire.↑

Learn more about the AFR Education Fund at RealBankReform.org.