Directors

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Brendan Walsh - President

Marshall Strauss - Vice President

Don Gay - Secretary/Treasurer

Brendan Walsh – President

Brendan Walsh has been active in the community for decades. Professionally, he began as a classroom teacher in the Salem MA school system, teaching history and serving as a career education specialist for 17 years. For the next 20 years, Mr. Walsh served as the Salem school system’s director of the U.S. government’s Title 1 program. During this period he served two terms as President of the Massachusetts Council of Administrators of Compensatory Education and as a national delegate to the National Association of Federal Program Administrators.

While Title 1 director, Mr. Walsh inaugurated publicly funded Early Childhood Education in Salem, first by establishing a pre-school for 4 year olds. He subsequently began the Parent-Child Home Program, which teaches parents of two and three year olds how to increase their child’s readiness for school via verbal communication. Now retired from the school system, Mr. Walsh has continued to educate parents on the importance of reading aloud to children through his company, “The Wonders of Reading Aloud.” In 2005, he was elected to the Salem School Committee.

Among his other community activities, Mr. Walsh has served on the boards of a number of not-for-profit organizations. Currently a member of the Massachusetts Advisory Committee for the Parent-Child Home Program, he has for more than a decade been a trustee of the Plummer Home for Boys in Salem, serving as chair three times. For six years he was a member of the Board of Directors of My Brother’s Table, a soup kitchen in Lynn MA, serving as the group’s second president. An active member of the Voice of The Faithful, he is also a member of the Board of directors of Axis Mundi, a not-for-profit organization active in Washington DC and Brazil.

Mr. Walsh earned his bachelor’s degree at Merrimack College, his masters at Salem State College and his doctorate in Educational Administration at Boston College. He lives in Salem with Katherine, his wife of many years who is a Nurse Practitioner.

Marshall Strauss – Director

Marshall Strauss has been active in the not for profit field for more than a quarter century and has been involved in the CFC for much of that time. He is the CEO of the Workplace Giving Alliance, a collaboration involving several federations including this one.

Mr. Strauss served as chair of the National CFC Committee for two years and has helped found several CFC federations. He has also served on a number of national and local not for profit organization boards.

During the early 1990s, Mr. Strauss helped establish and served as the initial CEO of two international organizations whose programs supported democracy activists overseas: The Democracy for China Fund and Freedom Channel. As executive director of the former, he organized and participated in the 1991 human rights delegation to China led by Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. During his tenure at Freedom Channel, that organization produced and aired on nationwide Russian television numerous human rights documentaries.

During the 1980s, Mr. Strauss served as associate director of Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Child Welfare League of America. Earlier, he served as special assistant to Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent and special assistant to U.S. Senator John Durkin, among other positions. Strauss was a research associate at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy from 1994-96, and an adjunct member of the faculty of Emerson College in 1995. Here and overseas, he has been interviewed extensively on issues of human rights and philanthropy by, among others, the Associated Press, UPI, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, ABC News, Actuel (Paris), BBC, Russian National Television, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Don Gay – Secretary/Treasurer

Donald Gay is a managing director of Dynamic Capital Mortgage, a firm specializing in residential financial services based in Vienna VA. He has been active in placing such loans for more than a decade.   The Dynamic Capital group in Vienna was founded in 2003. It has grown rapidly and now arranges approximately $250 million in loans each year.

Mr. Gay has been a supporter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) for over 7 years and is an advisor and major supporter of The Julie Duggan Memorial Fund, a Massachusetts 501c3 organization. The Julie Duggan Memorial fund was established in 2002 and seeks to raise donations to help find a cure for CF, and to support the education of children with CF.   Mr. Gay is a graduate of Northeastern University in Boston and currently resides in Arlington, VA.