National Coordinating Committee (NCC)

The decision-making body of PBI-USA is the National Coordinating Committee.

Its current members are:

Erica B. Askin, Esq.
Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) Local 483
Ms. Erica B. Askin is an organizer with LIUNA Local 483, which represents municipal employees in Portland, Oregon. Erica is former Law Clerk to the Honorable Francine Schott in the Superior Court of New Jersey and graduate of the School of Law at Rutgers University-Newark, where she co-chaired the Human Rights Forum and led funding drives for the Public Interest Law Foundation. Equally concerned with grassroots politics as she is the law, Erica believes that legal advocacy is most effective when combined with movement organizing.

Before attending law school, Erica received her Bachelor’s in Social Work from Florida State University and worked at Florida Impact in Tallahassee, where she advocated for food policy reform with low-income community and religious organizations. Erica’s international work experience includes volunteerism at Clinica Primeros Pasos in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and 8 months of stacking, lifting, and taping plastic at a factory for Kibbutz Ramat HaShofet in Israel. Erica contributes as a PBI-USA NCC member in solidarity with labor rights defenders around the world.

Robin Fazio, Ph.D.
Baylor School
Chattanooga, TN
Mr. Robin Fazio is a teacher at Baylor School in Chattanooga, TN, and speaks fluent Spanish and travels often to Latin America for various humanitarian and human rights projects. He also is a specialist in organic farming.

Alex Hildebrand
La Piana Associates, Inc.
San Francisco, CA
Mr. Alex Hildebrand is a nonprofit organizational development consultant who is dedicated to helping nonprofits work more effectively towards their missions. He specializes in strategic planning, process improvement, nonprofit board development, and whole systems change. He has also served as an evaluation consultant to nonprofits and foundations, executive director of the Maine Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and director of a transitional living shelter for homeless youth in Portland, Oregon.

His interest in peacebuilding began as a young Quaker meeting attendee and blossomed in college where he studied abroad in Nepal and co-founded an umbrella group for student activists of all stripes. Mr. Hildebrand holds an MS in Management from Antioch New England Graduate School and a BA in Political Science from Cornell University. He lives with his wife, Carol, and daughter in San Francisco, CA, where he can often be found playing soccer or in the mighty Pacific Ocean on a surfboard or sea kayak.

Angie McCarthy
American University, Washington College of Law
Washington, DC
Ms. Angie McCarthy holds an MPhil from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland in International Peace Studies with a focus on Women, Peace and Security and a BA in International Studies with a Minor in Women’s Studies from Manhattanville College in New York.

She currently serves at the Program Coordinator for the Women in the Law Program at the American University Washington College of Law (WCL) where she is at law school. Prior to working at WCL, she has worked and volunteered with several women’s organizations both domestically and abroad including the NGO Committee on the Status of Women at the United Nations and the New Women’s Movement in South Africa.

Matt Messier, Ed.D.
Burlington, VT
Matt is a teacher of English and history at the Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in Burlington, VT.  He also teaches courses in history, humanities and education at Community College of Vermont.  Matt is on the board of Volunteers for Peace and has co-led work camps with them since 1997.  He also serves on PBI's Volunteer Support Working Group.

Steve Molnar, International Council Representative
Little River Community School
Canton, NY
Mr. Steve Molnar currently serves as the President of the PBI International Council, as well as PBI-USA’s Representative to the PBI International Council.

Amelia Parker, LLM
Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment
Lake City, TN
Ms. Amelia Parker is the Executive Director of Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM), a statewide grassroots, member-run community organization that works for social, economic and environmental justice.  She was previously the Program Coordinator at the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law where she received both her J.D. (2006) and LLM (2009). 

As a student at WCL, Amelia co-founded the Genocide Teaching Project, which teaches high school students the lessons of genocide using Rwanda and Sudan as case studies. Prior to working at WCL, Amelia received a bachelor's degree from the University of Tennessee (Knoxville) in Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity and a second major in Italian. After receiving the Patrick Stewart Human Rights Scholarship in 2000, she traveled to Ghana and worked for the Legal Resources Centre, where she researched the right to work of Sierra Leonean refugees, as well as the human rights implication of water privatization in Ghana.

Most recently, Ms. Parker’s focus has been on the domestic implementation of human rights laws in the U.S. In 2007, she published an article in Human Rights Brief concerning racial inequalities in the U.S. public education system and U.S. non-compliance with international treaty norms, which led to her being a contributing author to the U.S. Human Rights Network’s shadow report on U.S. compliance to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in 2008.

Sarah Simonson, J.D.
Charles S. Beach, P.C.
Chicago, IL
Ms. Sarah Simonson joined the NCC in 2008. She graduated from The John Marshall Law School in 2007 and is currently a criminal defense attorney in Chicago. Beyond her involvement with in PBI, she is the secretary of The Women's Criminal Defense Bar Association in Chicago and also volunteers for numerous programs through the Chicago Bar Association and as an alum of her law school.  She has studied abroad in London, South Africa, and Peru and hopes to continue her travels.

Katherine Hughes-Fraitekh, Staff Representative
Executive Director, PBI-USA
Washington, DC/Albuquerque, NM
See staff bio.

Last updated November 2010