Pre-Conference Institute Speakers
Melissa Scaia,
MPA, Advocates for Family Peace, Grand Rapids, MN
Melissa Scaia is the executive director of Advocates for Family Peace (AFFP), a six-program agency that provides services to families experiencing domestic violence and child abuse in Itasca County, Minnesota. As the executive director of AFFP she provides leadership to the organization, coordinates the Itasca County Coordinated Community Response (CCR) to domestic violence, co-facilitates a group with men who batter, and co-facilitates a group with women who have used violence. She provides training and technical assistance as a consultant for Praxis International and serves as a faculty member for the Family Violence Department for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. She has also conducted trainings for the Battered Women’s Justice Project, Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Program, and the National Network to End Domestic Violence. She has testified as an expert witness on domestic violence in criminal court cases. She wrote her master’s thesis on the effects of domestic violence on children and wrote her doctoral dissertation proposal to address supervised visitation services for battered women. She has contributed to numerous publications related to supervised visitation and domestic violence. She recently co-wrote a curriculum and DVD for working with men who batter as fathers entitled, “Addressing Fatherhood with Men Who Batter”. She recently partnered in completing a curriculum with Ellen Pence, PhD and Laura Connelly entitled, “Turning Points: A Nonviolence Curriculum for Women.” She has also participated in numerous roundtable advisory discussion groups for the Office on Violence Against Women through the National Judicial Institute on Domestic Violence related to: differentiating types of domestic violence, custody, and batterers intervention programs. Recently, she attended a United Nations Expert Meeting on Domestic Violence in Almaty, Kazakhstan as a US representative on Coordinated Community Response to domestic violence. Outside of her work she is a wife, mother of two young children involved in hockey and figure skating, a local school advisory board member to her children’s elementary school and a former United States Figure Skating Association instructor.
Scott Miller,
Domestic Abuse Intervention Program, Duluth, MN
Scott Miller has worked for the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project since 2000. As the Team Leader for the DAIP, Scott coordinates Duluth’s Coordinated Community Response to domestic violence. Serving as both system advocate and coordinator of the men’s nonviolence program, he is instrumental in the evolving work being done in Duluth. Scott trains nationally and internationally on the components of the Duluth Model of intervention and helps develop new resource materials and curricula for use in communities working to end violence against women. Scott has also co-authored the new DAIP men’s nonviolence curriculum Creating a Process of Change for Men Who Batter.
Scott is a contract trainer and forensic interviewer for First Witness Child Abuse Resource Center in Duluth. Scott is responsible for conducting forensically sound interviews of children suspected of being physically or sexually abused as part of a criminal investigation. Scott also conducts trainings nationally on how to conduct interviews with children and work from a multidisciplinary team approach in the investigatoin of child abuse.
Scott Miller has been working in the women’s movement since 1985.
Conference Plenary Speakers
Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem is a writer, lecturer, editor, and feminist activist. She travels in this and other countries as an organizer and lecturer and is a frequent media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She is particularly interested in the shared origins of sex and race caste systems, gender roles and child abuse as roots of violence, non-violent conflict resolution, the cultures of indigenous peoples, and organizing across boundaries for peace and justice.
In 1972, she co-founded Ms. magazine, and remained one of its editors for fifteen years. She continues to serve as a consulting editor for Ms., and was instrumental in the magazine’s move to join and be published by the Feminist Majority Foundation. In 1968, she had helped to found New York magazine, where she was a political columnist and wrote feature articles.
Her books include the bestsellers Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Moving Beyond Words, and Marilyn: Norma Jean, on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Her writing also appears in many anthologies and textbooks, and she was an editor of Houghton Mifflin’s The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History.
Ms. Steinem helped to found the Women’s Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children’s education, and the National Women’s Political Caucus, a group that continues to work to advance the numbers of pro-equality women in elected and appointed office at a national and state level. She was president and co-founder of Voters for Choice, a pro-choice political action committee for twenty-five years, then with the Planned Parenthood Action Fund when it merged with VFC for the 2004 elections. She was also co-founder and serves on the board of Choice USA, a national organization that supports young pro-choice leadership and works to preserve comprehensive sex education in schools. She was the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, a national multi-racial, multi-issue fund that supports grassroots projects to empower women and girls, and also a founder of its Take Our Daughters to Work Day, a first national day devoted to girls that has now become an institution here and in other countries. She was a member of the Beyond Racism Initiative, a three-year effort on the part of activists and experts from South Africa, Brazil and the United States to compare the racial patterns of those three countries and to learn cross-nationally. Now, she is working with the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College on a project to document the grassroots origins of the U.S. women’s movement.
As a writer, Ms. Steinem has received the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion awards, National Magazine awards, an Emmy Citation for excellence in television writing, the Women’s Sports Journalism Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, and most recently, the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism.
She now lives in New York City, and is currently at work on Road to the Heart: America As if Everyone Mattered, a book about her more than thirty years on the road as a feminist organizer. She is also writing for other books and publications and co-founded the Women’s Media Center in 2004.
Rachel Alicia Griffin
Rachel Alicia Griffin (Ph.D. from the University of Denver in Human Communication Studies, M.A. in Communication and B.S. in Communication and Sociology from Central Michigan University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Her research interests span gendered violence, performance, Black masculinity, and critical race theory. All of her current research projects speak strongly to notions of power, privilege, and voice, which she has presented at national conferences, keynote addresses, social justice events, and diversity training sessions.
Rachel has been actively involved in the movement to end violence against women for eight years. Rachel has spoken coast to coast in front of audiences as small as 10 up to audiences as large as 1,500. As a presenter, her ability to relate to her audience is astounding. Her warm demeanor accompanied by her strong voice welcomes students, administrators, and staff to personally engage with gender violence as a tragic issue. Having been assaulted herself, she understands the fear, pain, and denial that often accompanies discussions surrounding the issue. However, with compassion and courage, Rachel gives voice to these issues. She says, “As a daughter, friend, activist, and professor, I often speak to survive. It is my way of struggling against oppression.”
Taking an intersectional approach to her presentations, Rachel will inspire critical thought and deep reflection on how systems of oppression interlock to maintain the status quo. Likewise, her programs are tailored to institutional and organizational needs-she never delivers the same program twice.
David R. Thomas M.S.
Dave Thomas retired from the Montgomery County Department of Police in December of 2000 after 15 years of Service. His final assignment with the department was with the Domestic Violence Unit (DVU), which he helped found. In addition to helping to found the DVU, he was responsible for the department’s curriculum development for domestic violence training, as well as policy development on domestic violence related issues. Upon retirement Dave was honored to be the 2nd highest decorated officer in the history of the department to receive of both the silver and bronze medals of valor. This is in addition to receiving the Women’s Alliance of Maryland Domestic Violence Advocacy Award, the Montgomery County, County Executive’s Award, Johns Hopkins University 21st Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Community Services Award, and he was honored at the White House as a Champion of Change. Dave is involved in violence against women curriculum and policy development, technical assistance, and training at the state, local, federal, and international levels. Presently, Dave serves as the Program Administrator of the Domestic Violence Education Program as well as a faculty member in the Division of Public Safety Leadership at Johns Hopkins University. Dave considers fighting violence against women to be his calling in life.
Gary Barker, PhD
Gary Barker is International Director of Promundo-DC, the US office of Instituto Promundo, a Brazilian NGO, based in Rio de Janeiro, that works locally, nationally and internationally to promote gender equity and to reduce violence against children, women and youth. He was founding Executive Director of Promundo in Brazil,where he lived for 15 years. He has carried out research on men, violence, gender, health and conflict in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, and co-authored numerous training materials, including the Program H series for working with young men to promote gender equality and reduce violence against women. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the International Rescue Committee, UNDP, WHO, UNAIDS, UNFPA, UNICEF, USAID, the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Brazilian government on issues related to gender, engaging men, health promotion and violence prevention. He holds a master’s in public policy and a PhD in child development and is an Ashoka Fellow.
