Milestones: Alumni who keep making a difference

A leadership legacy

At some point, every staff person in The Public Interest Network makes a choice: whether to stay and keep working for their team or organization or leave and do something different.

Among those who have chosen other paths, we’re happy to report that hundreds (at least) of PIRG alumni have continued to make a positive difference for the public interest, the environment, political action and community service. All credit goes to them, but we hope that their training and experience with PIRG and other groups in our network helped prepare them for the challenges they’ve faced so successfully. Here are four of these alumni, all of whom have been the recipients of our network’s Alumni Achievement Award.

Ceres President Mindy Lubber

In photos above.

For Mindy Lubber, her career of activism got its start when she joined her campus NYPIRG chapter as a business student at SUNY Buffalo.

By combining her business background with her passion for the environment, Mindy has become a leading presence in the world of social finance. After more than two decades with the PIRG network, as a lobbyist and program director of MASSPIRG and the founding president of Green Century Funds, Mindy joined the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1995 as a senior policy advisor and was named regional administrator for New England in 2000.

Since 2003, Mindy has been president of Ceres, a nonprofit that mobilizes investors and business leaders behind a sustainable global economy. In 2015, Vogue Magazine recognized Mindy as a “Climate Warrior” for her role in organizing business support for the Paris Agreement on climate change.

“My Public Interest Network training has truly helped me in everything I do,” said Mindy. “How do you change something that’s not working out there? The Public Interest Network teaches people how to change something.”

Consumer Attorney Pamela Gilbert

Pamela Gilbert began her career at Ralph Nader’s National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, where he correctly predicted that she “would never leave public interest work.”

While attending New York University Law School, Pam worked for CALPIRG during her first law school summer. After graduating, Pam came on full-time as U.S. PIRG’s first-ever consumer advocate, authoring and lobbying successfully for passage of the federal Art and Craft Materials Labeling Act, which regulated toxic ingredients in school art supplies.

After leaving PIRG in 1989, Pam applied her training and experience at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) under President Clinton

As of 2022, Pam is a consumer attorney with the Washington, D.C., law firm Cuneo, Gilbert & LaDuca, where she has been a partner since 2003. “Not only is Pamela one of the nation’s leading safety champions,” said veteran consumer advocate Rosemary Shahan, “she is an incredible joy to work with. If she were a rock star, she’d be tops on all the charts. Instead, she quietly works away, out of the limelight, to the tremendous benefit of the entire American public.”

Organizer Adam Ruben

Adam began his professional organizing career in 1992 as a member of the inaugural class of Green Corps.

As one of the “stars” of that first Green Corps class, Adam was offered and he accepted the position of Green Corps organizing director in 1995. He later became the U.S. PIRG national field director, expanding our reach in Maine, Texas and other states.

After leaving PIRG, Adam became the field director and political director at MoveOn.org, a role he held for nearly a decade. He spearheaded MoveOn’s 2004 Leave No Voter Behind campaign, an effort that combined cutting-edge online technology with the old-fashioned offline activism he learned and mastered with Green Corps and PIRG. The campaign reached into 10,000 communities to mobilize over 400,000 voters on Election Day.

In the years that followed, Adam consulted with organizations ranging from the Voter Participation Center to Global Zero. As of 2022, Adam is the campaigns director at the Economic Security Project.