15th Annual Fundraiser

Maura Healey is currently in her second term as Massachusetts Attorney General, continuing a career spent fighting for justice and equal right by serving as the “People’s Lawyer.”

As Attorney General, Maura has focused on confronting the devastating opioid epidemic, reducing gun violence, enforcing civil rights, protecting consumers, and addressing the climate crisis. She has also championed access to health care and reproductive freedom.

Prior to starting her career in public service, Maura was a business and commercial litigator at WilmerHale LLP. She also served as a Special Assistant District Attorney for Middlesex County. In 2007, she joined the Attorney General’s Office as Chief of the Civil Rights Division and later became Chief of the Public Protection and Business and Labor Bureaus. During this time, she served as lead counsel in the country’s first successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act.

Maura is a graduate of Harvard College, after which she spent two years overseas as a starting point guard on a professional basketball team in Europe. She received her J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law.

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley is an activist, a legislator, a survivor, and the first woman of color to be elected to Congress from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Throughout her career as a public servant, Congresswoman Pressley has fought to ensure that those closest to the pain are closest to the power – driving and informing policymaking. Throughout her first term in Congress, Congresswoman Pressley has been a champion for justice: reproductive justice, justice for immigrants, consumer justice, justice for ageing Americans, justice for workers, justice for survivors of sexual violence, and justice for the formerly and currently incarcerated. Currently, Congresswoman Pressley serves on two powerful Congressional committees – the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Committee on Financial Services– both of which have remained focused on legislatively addressing issues of care, concern, and consequence to the American people. Prior to being elected to Congress, she served on the Boston City Council for 8 years, and was the first woman of color elected to the council in its 100-year history.

Sonja M. Spears is the Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program where she leads the program through initiatives to center equity in all aspects of their work. Before embarking on her current role, Sonja practiced law in New Orleans then was elected judge, beginning her tenure with her colleague as one of the two first black judges to ever serve in that New Orleans trial court. She served for twelve years before her retirement in 2010.

After her retirement from the bench, Sonja returned to her native Boston, Massachusetts and her alma mater Tufts University where she has been teaching social justice classes to graduate and undergraduate students since 2013. At Tufts she also serves as a member of the Advisory Board to the Masters in Diversity and Inclusion Program. Additionally she teaches with the Trial Advocacy Workshop at Harvard Law School and previously taught Trial Advocacy at Tulane Law School, where she graduated from, for nearly ten years.

Sonja just completed her work as the chair of the Newton Police Reform Task Force and serves on the National Advisory Board for the Vital Village Network and the Executive Council for the AARP Massachusetts chapter. She is the proud mother of two young men who, since they arrived on this earth, have been her inspiration for working to make the world a more just and equitable place for everyone.