Who's Who
Members of the Board and leadership team of the HGSC
Board of Directors, Officers, and Committee Chairs
(Directors are elected for two-year terms, Officers for one. Terms expire on Commencement Day in late May.)
Joseph Barretto, AB '97 [Board Member 2019-2021, Vice President 2020-2021]
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Joseph Barretto is a nonprofit consultant whose practice is focused on organizational strategy and leadership development, building the capacity of organizations to ensure their sustainability and achieve results that maximize their impact. Throughout his career, Barretto has held positions within LGBTQ+ organizations including deputy executive director at the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project (AVP), director of development at the HIV Law Project, and director of institutional giving for the Hetrick-Martin Institute (HMI). Additionally, as a consultant he has provided leadership development training to managers of several LGBTQ+ organizations including GMHC, SAGE, AVP, and HMI. An active alumnus, Barretto currently serves as co-chair of the National Advisory Board for Public Service at Harvard College, regularly participates in Harvard’s annual Public Interested Conference, and has served as a mentor for the Center for Public Interest Careers since 2008. Barretto is board chair of Filipino American Human Services Inc. and sits on the board of the Association of Nonprofit Specialists. He is also a member of the Selection Committee for The New York Community Trust Nonprofit Excellence Awards and the advisory board of Trestle Art Space in Brooklyn.
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Meredith Cartwright, MTS '95 [Board Member 2019-2021, President 2020-2021]
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Meredith Cartwright MTS ’95 is a human rights lawyer and a private equity investor from Toronto. Meredith graduated with a Master’s Degree in Theological Studies from the Harvard Divinity School in 1995. She worked on the Pluralism Project under the direction of Professor Diana Eck. She played on the Radcliffe Rugby Team and was active in LGBTQ politics while at Harvard. Meredith won same-sex pension rights in Ontario in 1998 in the Dwyer case, and argued for the equal tax –treatment of same in the Rosenberg case. Together with Human Rights Watch (“HRW”) and the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, she advocated successfully against the imposition of Sharia law into Ontario Family Law. She contributed legal argument to “Douglas” (Lesbians and Gays in the Canadian Military) and “M.v.H” (the first gay marriage case to be won in Anglo –American jurisprudence). Meredith is a member of HRW’s Canada Committee and assisted in protesting unnecessary genital surgeries on children born with an intersex condition. Meredith has taught courses to undergraduates at the University of Toronto in sexuality, law, and religion. She taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in business studies and innovation. She is Managing Director at DonBow Capital www.donbow.com Toronto and High Level Capital, Calgary. She is an accredited Corporate Director from the Director’s Program at the University of Toronto Rotman School. Meredith lives in Toronto with her Partner Vicky Bassett, and her daughter Brooke Darling-Cartwright.
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Eric Cervini, AB '14 [Board Member 2019-2021]
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Eric Cervini is an author and PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. A historian of queer American history, Eric is completing his forthcoming book, “The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America,” an exploration of the 1960s homophile movement’s fight against the federal government and its purges of LGBT+ employees. Eric currently serves on the Board of Advisors of the Mattachine Society of Washington D.C., Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of LGBT+ American history. At Harvard, Eric’s digital production, “Before Stonewall,” won the History Design Studio Exhibition Prize and was featured in the Hutchins Center’s Rudenstine Gallery. He also served as co-president and CEO of Harvard Model Congress, Inc. He now resides in Los Angeles with his two plants, Coco Montrese and Fig O’Hara. |
Cody Dean, A.B. '14 [Board Member 2020-2022]
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Cody Dean is a management consultant at Alpha Financial Markets Consulting serving the wealth and asset management industry. His work focuses on strategic business and technology transformation initiatives on behalf of the world's top buy-side financial services firms. Throughout his career, Cody has made diversity and inclusion a central part of all of his personal and professional endeavors. He has served in various leadership positions for LGBT employee resource groups at many of the world's largest money management firms in New York, Boston, and Chicago. While living in Boston, Cody partnered with Pride in Our Workplace to plan and execute a large industry event for LGBT professionals in finance. He is currently active in the greater-Chicago area as a volunteer with the Center on Halsted's youth homelessness program. The Center on Halsted is the largest LGBT community center in the Midwest and provides support, counseling, and a social safety net to youth, adults, and seniors in the Chicagoand area. Additionally, Cody serves as the Treasurer of Out in Finance --an active group of professionals in the financial services industry that seeks to advocate, support, connect, and empower LGBT professionals. Cody maintains a connection to the university through participation in the First Generation Student Union's events and the HGSC. While at Harvard, he served several years on the Board of Directors of the Harvard Cooperative Society "The Coop" and was active in the Institute of Politics. |
Jesse Leon, MPP '01 [Board Member 2020-2022]
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Jesse Leon is gay man of color that was raised in extremely low-income neighborhoods in Southern California surrounded by gangs, drugs, and violence. When many of his friends were dying due to the lack of HIV/AIDS resources in communities of color in the early 1990s, he started to fight alongside many community leaders to ensure that racial and economic justice issues inside and outside the LBGTQ community get addressed. Jesse has a diverse background in philanthropy, social justice, and urban redevelopment in the public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors. He received his master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley where he conducted research on the prison industrial complex and the spread of HIV in US Prison Systems, and a post graduate fellowship from UPENN in urban redevelopment. He lived in Cuba conducting research on HIV prevention strategies. He is also a proud graduate of San Diego Community College.
He loves creating, leveraging, and implementing triple bottom line philanthropic and cross-sector strategies with foundations and corporations across the US, Canada and Mexico for greater community impact. Throughout his career he has built over 5,000 units of mixed-income, multifamily, senior (including LGBT senior), and homeless housing representing over $2.3B in real estate investments. He has created and managed grant portfolios ranging from $10 million to over $200 million, including Program Related Investments (PRIs), to fund affordable housing and urban redevelopment, STEM education programs, arts and culture, community advocacy and organizing, Native American issues, economic development, place-making, and intergenerational public spaces for improved health outcomes. Currently, Jesse is the president of his own consulting company where he provides services for foundations (private, family, and corporate), real estate developers (affordable and market rate), and property owners in opportunity zones across the country to identify community benefit strategies to avoid displacement. Yet, his passion is making sure that a safe space is created within the LGBTQ community for LGBTQ people of color regardless of gender, ethnic and racial identification, or income levels. |
Daniel Stephens, AB '98 [Board Member 2019-2021]
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Daniel is a Pediatrician and non profit leader with a career of working with marginalized youth. He studied History at Harvard and has an MD from Columbia University. While at Harvard, he was an active member of the then named BGLTSA, also of the BSA (Black Students Association), and served as a co-director of CONTACT a peer counseling group focused around issues facing LGBTQIA+ students. Since leaving Harvard, he’s worked on intersections of sexuality, race, ethnicity, gender and class that affect queer youth in various roles from an Americorps classroom teacher to clinically serving youth in Harlem and the Bronx. He has benefited from HGSC over the years has allowing him to connect with friends old and new. Currently a Vice President at Children’s Aid in NYC, he is committed to integrating clinical services and health programming in underserved communities. Recently, as the director of Adolescent Medicine at a health center in the Bronx he lead community outreach and program support including an LGBTQ youth group in the Bronx. He’s interested in the intersectional experiences of students of color in the LGBTQIA+ community as well as mentoring for students by the HGSC.
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John Sylla, AB '81 [Board Member 2018-2022]
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John Sylla is President of the American Institute of Bisexuality (AIB), of which he has been a Director since its founding in 1998. In addition to promoting and funding scientific research, AIB publishes an academic journal, conducts public outreach and education, and works to empower the building of bi communities. AIB’s social media engages millions of people every week, not only spreading accurate information about bisexuality but also creating bi visibility and modeling bi pride. John’s work advocating for bisexuality in the field of sex research was the “through line” of a landmark 2014 NY Times Magazine cover story. In the past two years, John participated in Bangkok at a conference of ILGA, an LGBTQI+ association with consultative status at the United Nations, and in further meetings in Geneva with the U.N. Independent Expert tasked with making recommendations for reduction of violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. John is a lawyer with a J.D.-M.B.A., practicing mostly in high technology and venture capital but with forays into nonprofit law and litigation. At the University of Chicago he taught law to business school students from 1999-2014 and has been teaching accounting to law students there since 2004. He has one son and resides with his partner in Hollywood, California. |
Tom Watson, AB '91 [Board Member 2017-2021]
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Tom is a lawyer, activist and community organizer. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he was involved in what was then BGLSA and concentrated in Social Studies, writing his Senior Thesis on ACT UP. After graduating, he spent a year in Eastern Europe studying emerging LGBTQ and AIDS movements following the fall of communism as a Pforzheimer Public Service Fellows. A graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, he is currently a Principal in the Los Angeles office of the law firm McKool Smith with a practice focusing on complex commercial, white collar, and international human rights litigation. His work has ranged from advising high tech startups to helping to recover nearly $1 billion for taxpayers from companies that defrauded the government. He has a long history of work for LGBTQ rights. He co-founded Love Honor Cherish, the largest grassroots organization in California dedicated to achieving marriage equality, and led its efforts against Prop 8 and to put repeal of Prop 8 on the ballot. He as authored amicus briefs in LGTBQ rights cases and is currently advising a sodomy law repeal effort in an African nation. In addition, he frequently speaks on LGBTQ issues, serves on the UCLA Williams Institute Legal Council, and advises Democratic candidates for office and elected officials. |
Jim Jacobs, AB ’72, JD ’75, Former Clinical Instructor, Harvard Law School-
Treasurer
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Until 2015, Jim served as Senior Clinical Instructor in the Transactional Law Clinics of Harvard Law School. In that capacity, he supervised, mentored and taught Harvard Law School students as he and they provided legal services to businesses and other clients, including home buyers, community development organizations, charities and other non-profit organizations, composers and artists. Before joining the Harvard Law School clinical program, Jim was the General Counsel of Skyworks Solutions, a publicly traded semiconductor manufacturer, after many years as Senior Attorney in the legal departments of EMC and Data General Corporation (information technology companies). |
Prof. Warren Goldfarb , AB '69, PhD '75 - Cambridge , MA
Emeritus, President of The Open Gate Foundation, Matthiessen Campaign Committee
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Warren Goldfarb, AB '69, PhD '75, is the W.B. Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic, in the Philosophy Department at Harvard. He is one of the founders of the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus, was an HGLC Director for many years and continues as a Director Emeritus. Additionally, Warren has been the President of The Open Gate since its inception in 1986 and is a Board member of The Gay & Lesbian Review / Worldwide. He lives in Cambridge. |
Robert Mack , AB '71, JD '74 - Cambridge , MA
Emeritus, Membership Website
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Bob was a member of the HGLC Board of Directors from 1997 to 2001, and was Co-Chair of the Caucus from 1994 to 1997; he is currently a Director Emeritus of the Board and a Board Member of The Open Gate Foundation, Matthiessen Campaign Committee. He worked at Hale and Dorr (now WilmerHale ) for 31 years, as a lawyer for 15 years and subsequently in Information Technology. He also co-founded FreshAddress.com and created MemDir.org . He works part time as a computer consultant, and is a multiple-prize-winning independent video producer. He lives in Cambridge . |
Robyn Ochs , EdM '89 - Jamaica Plain , MA
Emeritus
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Robyn,www.robynochs.com, has been part of the Harvard community since 1983. She retired from her work in Romance Languages and Literatures in 2009. In addition to past service on the board of HGSE, she was a co-founder of the LGBT Faculty & Staff Group, and the Trans Task Force, and was a co-facilitator of monthly LBTQ Women’s lunches for Harvard staff and faculty. Off campus, she is co-founder of theBisexual Resource Centerand theBoston Bisexual Women’s Network. She is editor of the 42-country anthology,Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World. She has taught in the field of gender and sexuality studies at Tufts University, MIT, and Johnson State College in Vermont, and she currently travels the U.S. (and beyond) speaking on bisexuality and the other middle sexualties, identity and labels, coalition building, marriage equality, and other social justice subjects. An advocate for the rights of people of ALL orientations and genders to live safely, openly and with full access and opportunity, Robyn’s work focuses on increasing awareness and understanding of complex identities, and mobilizing people to be powerful allies to one another within and across identities and social movements. |
Thomas Parry , AB '74 - Los Angeles , CA
Emeritus, 25th Reunion Co-Chair, Matthiessen Campaign Committee
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Tom has been an HGSC Board member since 1998 and is a former president of the Caucus. He also served on the Board of Directors of the Gay & Lesbian Review and in 1995 became the first openly gay Elected Director of the Harvard Alumni Association. Tom has been volunteering for Harvard for the past 35 years. Professionally, Tom is a consultant in computer games and he lives in Los Angeles with his husband, Juan Bastos, a noted portrait artist. |
Rhonda Wittels *, AB '79 - Watertown, MA
Emeritus
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Rhonda has been a member of the Caucus for many years and is past-president of the Board. During her undergraduate years, Rhonda had leadership positions in several gay and lesbian organizations that have morphed into the current QSA. She is a Director of Engineering at athenahealth Inc. Rhonda also serves on the Board of The Open Gate. |
