Board of Directors

Niel Ritchie, Board Chair
John Thorson, Board Treasurer
Charly Leuze
Leone Jose Bicchieri

Niel Ritchie, Board Chair, is a long-time rural advocate. From 1991-2004, he served as a policy analyst and national organizer at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Prior to that, he was the executive director of Minnesota PIRG and development director or Rural Education Resource Center. Ritchie has authored numerous articles and op/eds on food and farm policy. He also helped found the Minneapolis-based Alliance for Metropolitan Stability, a coalition of groups working on issues of regional development, affordable housing and transportation policy.

Ritchie currently serves on the board of the Jobs NOW Coalition and on the political committee of Clean Water Action Alliance of Minnesota. He is the executive director of the League of Rural Voters.

John Thorson, Board Treasurer, is the political representative for AFSCME Council 5, AFL-CIO. In that role, he is an advocate for tax, local government and health care issues for a union of 40,000 state, university, local government and health care workers throughout the state of Minnesota. He previously served as political representative for AFSCME Council 14, representing local government and health care workers in the metropolitan area.

Thorson serves as a board member of Progressive Minnesota, a community-based non-profit coalition working on issues of regional development, affordable housing and increasing civic participation in immigrant and low-income communities. He has served on the board of the Selby Avenue Community Development Corporation (St. Paul) and the St. Paul neighborhood network, overseeing community-access television.

Charly Leuze is a bilingual/bicultural mental health practitioner with more than 12 years experience in children's mental health issues, mental health promotion services, cultural competency public policy development, and community organizing.

Leuze is presently the director for the West Central Integration Collaborative that serves the Minnesota communities of Willmar, Atwater, Cosmos, Grove City; Maynard, Clara City, Raymond; and New London-Spicer. She is also a long time resident of the Willmar community and has been a leader in motivating both European and minority leaders to work together for the betterment of the community.

Leone Jose Bicchieri has almost 20 years experience organizing Latino and other immigrant workers, workers of all backgrounds, and organizing around community and immigration issues. He is currently senior organizer at the Chicago-based Center for New Community, where he is coordinator of the Midwest Immigrant Health Project, a community-based effort to organize immigrant workers (mostly Latinos) around health care access, as well as in-plant health and safety issues in several meatpacking communities in the Midwest.

Bicchieri has played organizing and leadership roles with Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, Interfaith Worker Justice, Oregon's Farmworker Union, known by its Spanish acronym of PCUN, and Witness for Peace in a rural war zone in Nicaragua.