About Free Speech For People

John Bonifaz is the Co-Founder and Director of Free Speech For People. Mr. Bonifaz has served as the Legal Director of Voter Action, a national voting rights and election integrity organization in the United States. Prior to joining Voter Action, Mr. Bonifaz worked for more than 12 years (as the executive director and then general counsel) with the National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI), an organization he founded in 1994. Mr. Bonifaz has been at the forefront of key voting rights battles in the country for nearly two decades: pioneering a series of court challenges that have helped to redefine the campaign finance question as a basic voting rights issue of our time; leading the fight in the federal courts in Ohio for a recount of the 2004 presidential vote in that state; and prevailing in federal court in Pennsylvania on the eve of the 2008 election to ensure that Pennsylvania voters would receive emergency paper ballots when they faced long lines caused by voting machine breakdowns. Mr. Bonifaz is a 1992 cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and a 1999 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. 

 

Oske Buckley is the Administrative Director for Free Speech For People. Ms. Buckley has served as the Administrative Assistant for Voter Action. Prior to joining Voter Action, Ms. Buckley worked as the Development Associate and Administrative Associate for the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri where she managed the organization’s donor database, engaged in event planning, coordinated and supervised volunteers, and carried out numerous administrative responsibilities. Ms. Buckley is a 2005 graduate of Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, where she received her B.A. in history.

 

Jeff Clements is the Co-Founder and General Counsel of Free Speech For People. Mr. Clements is also founder of Clements Law Office, LLC. Mr. Clements served as Assistant Attorney General and Chief of the Public Protection & Advocacy Bureau in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office from early 2007 to 2009. As Bureau Chief, he led more than 100 attorneys and staff in law enforcement and litigation in the areas of civil rights, environmental protection, healthcare, insurance and financial services, antitrust and consumer protection. Mr. Clements also served as an Assistant Attorney General in Massachusetts from 1996 to 2000, where he worked on litigation against the tobacco industry and handled a wide range of other investigations and litigation to enforce unfair trade practice, consumer protection and antitrust laws. Mr. Clements filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC on behalf of five public interest groups arguing that the First Amendment did not shield corporations from campaign finance laws. In private practice, Mr. Clements has been a partner in the Boston law firms of Mintz Levin and Clements & Clements, LLP. Mr. Clements is a 1988 magna cum laude graduate of Cornell Law School. Mr. Clements is the author of Corporations Are Not People (Berrett-Koehler, 2012), with a foreword by Bill Moyers.

 

Steve Cobble is the Senior Political Advisor for Free Speech For People. Mr Cobble is also an Assistant Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Mr. Cobble is a longtime activist on both voting and campaign finance reform issues. He is a co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and Progressive Democrats of America, and has written for The Nation, HuffingtonPost, TomPaine.com, The Progressive, and many other magazines and newspapers. Mr. Cobble is a former Political Director and speechwriter for the National Rainbow Coalition, served as the National Delegate Coordinator for Jackson for President ’88, and directed the Keep Hope Alive PAC. He has worked on electoral campaigns at every level from state legislature to mayor to Congress to Senate, and has had a serious role in seven presidential campaigns, from McGovern to Kucinich. Mr. Cobble once directed the Arca Foundation, served as a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, and conducted election training workshops for the African National Congress in South Africa in 1991.

 

Alex Russell serves as the Development Director for Free Speech For People. Ms. Russell was most recently the Program Director at FreePress, a national nonprofit organization working to transform the US media system. Prior to that she was the Director of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation and the Political Director for the Lee Family Office. Ms. Russell has extensive grassroots organizing and fundraising experience and was the Director of Mass Voters for Fair Elections, a statewide grassroots advocacy organization working to restore publicly financed campaigns. She also worked as a fundraiser and events planner for Citizen Schools, and ran various consumer and environmental grassroots campaigns with the State Public Interest Research Groups in Seattle, WA and Washington, DC. Ms. Russell earned her Masters degree at Boston University in theological studies and social ethics. 

 

Peter Schurman serves as the Online Organizing Coordinator for Free Speech For People. Prior to joining Free Speech For People, Mr. Schurman was the founding Executive Director at MoveOn.org (2001-2005).  Mr. Schurman also has extensive previous experience directing national and regional advocacy campaigns, and building organizations, having served as National Student Organizer for the Sierra Club, New England Clean Air Coordinator for the American Lung Association, Issue Organizer for the Safe Energy Communication Council, Associate Director at Adopt-A-Watershed, and National Student Organizer for the Lead... or Leave campaign, a tripartisan deficit-reduction campaign endorsed by former Senators Warren Rudman (R) and Paul Tsongas (D) and by Ross Perot.  Mr. Schurman’s undergraduate degree is in history from the University of Pennsylvania, and he also earned an MBA from Yale in 2000.