WAMM Activist: Marie Simpson

by Lynne Gildensoph, WAMM

I am very happy to be writing this column about my good friend Marie Simpson. She seemed surprised when I asked her if I could interview her for this piece. After all, she is usually the person who writes the column, and she was a bit shy about being the person who would be featured this month.

Marie wasn't sure she was really an activist. My dictionary defines activism as the "policy of taking positive, direct action to achieve an end" and I think Marie fits that definition perfectly. She has been an active WAMM member for about a decade, and has given much of her time and expertise to the organization.

Marie grew up in a union household. In fact, both of her grandfathers participated in the sit-down strike which resulted in the UAW being recognized by General Motors. It is not surprising, then, that after law school in Iowa, Marie sought a position with the National Labor Relations Board in Minneapolis.

Marie has been in the Twin Cities area for about 12 years, and she has been an active participant in the peace and justice community for most of those years. She learned about WAMM from a brochure she picked up at a WAMM table during a 1990 performance of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the Twin Cities.

Later, when the Persian Gulf War started, she was distraught and needed to find folks who felt the way she did about bombing Iraq. She was immediately connected to one of the empowerment groups that came into being at that time. She also joined a progressive group of people who had children in the military, as she had a son in Germany at the time. In addition, Marie worked phone banks set up by a local coalition against the war. She took calls, helping people with questions and concerns, and setting up buses to take people from the Twin Cities to Washington, D.C., for a demonstration.

The WAMM empowerment group (which is where I met Marie) was very active for quite some time. Members took on tasks such as educating themselves about various issues, rewriting the Empowerment Group handbook, and meeting weekly to determine actions they could take to work against injustice. Marie also trained to be a group leader, and actively worked to get other groups started.

One of the members of our empowerment group suggested to her that she be on the steering committee, and she agreed. Over the past ten years Marie has been on the steering committee more than she has been off of it, and she has served as its co-chair for many of those years. She has been an active leader in WAMM and, although she recently retired from her current steering committee term, Marie continues to participate in WAMM activities and writes for the newsletter.

Marie is also the WAMM representative to the Minnesota Alliance for Progressive Action (MAPA), and has served on MAPA's administrative committee for the past three years. She has been an active member of MAPA's undoing oppression committee.

After hearing on National Public Radio that the U.S. Congress had granted 1,000 visas for Tibetans to come to the U.S., and that the Twin Cities would be one of ten sites to receive them, she went home and decided, with her husband Tom Ozzello, to be a host family. Marie and Tom hosted four Tibetans over the course of two years, and helped them get established in this country.

Marie is a member of the Tibetan-American Foundation of Minnesota, and she has continued to work to successfully reunify families that were split when one person in a family was allowed to immigrate to the U.S. In addition, she works to educate others about Tibetan culture, history, and current issues facing Tibetans here and abroad.

So, I'm proud to be Marie's friend. She is an intelligent, caring, thoughtful person with a big heart, and she eagerly embraces leadership challenges. We're lucky to have her as a WAMM activist!