Below is a list of Legal Defense Fund staff who are available to talk to your group.

Thomas Linzey is a cum laude graduate of Widener University School of Law in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and is a three time recipient of the Schools' Public Interest Law Award, a 2003 recipient of the Law School's Young Alumni Award, a 2003 finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, and a 2004 recipient of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union’s Golden Triangle Legislative Award. He has served as an independent candidate for Attorney General, receiving over 65,000 votes statewide, and is the co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit law firm that provides free and affordable legal services to community groups and over three hundred local governments.
    Tom is admitted to practice in federal and state courts, including the Third Circuit, Fourth Circuit, Eighth Circuit, and Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals; and the U.S. Supreme Court. He serves as coordinator of the Franklin County Coalition - a county-based association of twenty-one community groups and over thirty locally owned businesses; and for a Caucus of local governmental officials in Pennsylvania. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of several nonprofit organizations in Virginia and Pennsylvania, is a frequent lecturer to groups and municipal governments across the United States, and recently delivered speeches to the Bioneers Conference in California and the National Network of Grantmakers conference in Miami. He is a co-founder, with Richard Grossman, of the Daniel Pennock Democracy School - now taught at fifteen locations across the United States - which assists groups and communities to reframe seemingly “single” environmental issues into ones focused on eliminating the ability of corporate “rights” to trump the rights of communities.
    Thomas is the Executive Director for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF).

  





Stacey Schmader is a graduate of Shippensburg University with a degree in Biology. After college, she was employed as a bank manager at Citizens National Bank, where her duties included loan processing, investing, scheduling, and mortgage closings. She is co-Founder of the Legal Defense Fund, with Thomas Linzey, and currently serves as the Secretary and Treasurer for the Legal Defense Fund.

    Stacey has also served as a Director on the Board of the American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA) and as President of the South Central Farmers Market Association. AMIBA is a national organization with a mission to help communities around the country maintain their unique character by supporting community-based businesses and the South Central Farmers Market Association is a Pennsylvania organization dedicated to preserving the family farm by assisting with direct marketing opportunities.  

  




Mari Margil is our first Associate Director.  She opened our West Coast office in Portland, Oregon, in 2007.  Mari was trained as a lecturer at our 2007 Training for Lecturers and is now teaching Democracy Schools across the country.  She most recently worked with Corporate Ethics International conducting corporate accountability campaigns.

Ben Price is a graduate of West Chester State University, Pennsylvania. He has been an activist for Campaign Finance Reform, Electoral Reform, and Fair Trade issues, and past president of the Pennsylvania Consumer Action Network. He served as contributing editor for the monthly newsletter “Groundswell” (1995 – 1999) and in 1997 began writing about the distorting effects of corporations on democracy.
    After attending the Legal Defense Fund’s Democracy School in 2003, Ben attended “Guiding the Conductors” classes to prepare to teach the history, law and lore of corporations. He is now a certified lecturer for the Democracy Schools.
    Ben accepted the position of Project Director in the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund's Corporations and Democracy Program in 2005. As Project Director, Ben organizes and educates community groups to challenge corporate usurpations of people's rights and governing authority. He also recruits local governments to join the Quality of Life and Local Control Caucus of Township Supervisors – an association of rural Township governments in Pennsylvania working to protect local governance and community authority over quality of life issues.

Eme Lybarger  is a community organizer and Democracy School lecturer for CELDF, initiating the Democracy School model for organizing in Ohio in the fall of 2005.  She has a master’s degree in Intercultural Communications from the Modern Language and Linguistics department of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.  She also completed a year of doctoral studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  At both universities, Eme researched language, power, and violence, and spent 8 months in Latin America furthering her studies.
    Prior to joining CELDF, Eme worked for or was affiliated with Nationwide Insurance Company for fourteen years.  During that time she fulfilled numerous roles, including project management, training and development, and facilitation. She has volunteered as a court mediator in Virginia and in a variety of other programs and organizations in Ohio.

  Shireen Parsons is a graduate of the University of Maryland , College of Education . After raising her two children while working as a preschool teacher and technical writer, she moved to Southwest Virginia ’s New River Valley in 1990, where she served as an information officer at Virginia Tech’s Water Resources Research Center and, later, as a news bureau writer at Radford University .
    As an activist, she was chair of the Sierra Club’s New River Valley Chapter, a founding board member of Appalachian Voices, and has served on the steering committee for Virginia Forest Watch since its founding. She was assistant editor and a contributing writer for the regional newspaper Appalachian Voice, and researched, wrote, and produced Virginia Mountain Treasures – The Unprotected Wildlands of the Jefferson National Forest for the Wilderness Society. As a grant-funded grassroots organizer, she worked with communities threatened by woodchip mills, and served as an appointed member of the Governor’s Commission for the Study of the Effects of Chip Mills in Virginia . Her commentaries on environmental and social justice issues have been published in local, regional, and national media.

    Shireen is CELDF's community organizer in Virginia.

Gail Darrell began her education career in 1971, while attending teacher’s college in Plymouth, NH,  as a volunteer for the Pemigewassett Community Head Start Program, tutoring children with autism. Gail home schooled all of her four children through the eighth grade level while working alongside her husband of 33 years as a homesteader, gardener, poet and artist - embellishing many of the hand made and restored musical instruments which he produces at his home shop. From 1996 - 1998, she was assistant to chef Sonia Bowden of the Caribbean Oasis, a local eatery and employed at the Granite State Health Food Store in Concord. In 1999, she was assistant teacher at the Montessori Children’s Center in Concord, N.H. When her residence was threatened by the practice of spreading sludge and septage on nearby fields and woodlands, she became involved in local affairs.
    In 2002, Gail tesified at Senate hearings at the state level to discourage the incineration of Construction and Demolition debris (C&D). As a result of the networking of individuals who had brought information forward, N.H. Governor John Lynch signed a ban on the incineration of C&D in 2007. In 2005, Barnstead voters wanted an ordinance which protected the town from water withdrawal.
    Gail spearheaded the motion which led to Barnstead’s adoption of a rights - based ordinance against corporate water withdrawals. The Alliance for Democracy hired Gail to work on their Water For Life Campaign in the summer of 2006. She now works as a community organizer for the Alliance and the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and resides on a small farm in Barnstead, N.H.