Carmen Vivian Rivera
Carmen Vivian Rivera is a former Puerto Rican activist.
Background
The sixties were a time of motion, disturbance, organizing, and anger over the racism and sexism that pervaded our society. I was strongly influenced by the Civil Rights movement, the opposition to the war in Vietnam, and the women’s liberation struggle.
Racism and discrimination touched my life at an early age, and by the time I was in high school I saw the need to fight against it. In the summer of 1971, when I graduated from college, I joined the Puerto Rican Socialist Party. For the next twelve years I carried out grassroots fundraising efforts, led coalitions, and organized within Puerto Rican communities across the United States.”
Since 1995, Carmen has worked as a consultant for more than 80 nonprofit organizations, coalitions and foundations. She has experience as a community organizer, nonprofit executive and public policy analyst and advocate. Her professional training and social activism has focused on women's rights and social justice causes. One of her personal passions is documenting the history of Puerto Rican political activism in the U.S. from the 1960s to mid 1980s. The "Recovering History Project" hopes to capture this history through archival collections and development of the website .
Carmen has held top-ranking positions in New York City government as Director of the Office on Health Policy under Mayor David Dinkins, and for the City of Boston where she was Director of the Maternal Health Commission.
She is an experienced capacity building consultant and trainer providing coaching, board development, evaluation, planning and leadership transitions and recruitment. Carmen holds a Master of Science degree in Social Work and a Master in Public Health from Columbia University. She is bilingual/bicultural (Spanish/English).[1]
RoadMap
Carmen Vivian Rivera is a consultant with RoadMap, a Freedom Road Socialist Organization affilated consultancy group .[2]