James Dubick

James Dubick, a long-time PIRG student leader and staff person, died on Aug. 24 due to heart issues.

James volunteered for MASSPIRG when he was a student in the late 1990s at Amherst College. Before he graduated in 1999, he represented Amherst on the MASSPIRG Students board of directors and was elected the statewide board chair. After graduating, he joined the PIRG campus organizer team. Over the next 18 years, James would serve as a regional administrator for the Fund summer canvass, program director and internet director for the Student PIRGs, director of the Student Government Resource Center, and director of the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness. For the past six years, James worked with Public Interest Network alum Kathryn Poindexter at Movement Labs, as operations director of its Contest Every Race project, which sought to recruit and help Democratic candidates win elections across the country.

Those who knew him best described James as “a total mensch”: gentle, thoughtful, unassuming and unflappable, with a wry sense of humor. He could disarm his adversaries with kindness. At one point, for example, James and the MASSPIRG chapter were meeting opposition from the “hat boys” on student government. (The “hat boys” were a tight-knit crew that wore baseball caps with precisely curved visors, often shaped by sticking the hat in a tube sock and running it through the dishwasher.) James had managed to get himself onto the student government executive committee. The night that MASSPIRG was on the agenda, James brought fixings for making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to donate to the Amherst Survival Center, which supports area residents in need of food, housing or other essentials. By the end of the meeting, at least one of the hat boys was helping James make sandwiches.

May James rest in peace, and condolences to all of James’s loved ones.