User:MaynardClark

User:MaynardClark is Maynard S. Clark of Boston. http://Maynard.Clark.GooglePages.com and Maynard (dot) Clark (at) gmail (dot) com
 * http://Maynard.Clark.GooglePages.com has photos of Maynard and links to all his several blogs.
 * Maynard (dot) Clark (at) gmail (dot) com

Maynard S. Clark of Boston has been featured in Marquis's Who's Who since the early 1990s, presumably because of his visionary early-adopter use of new technologies in advancing vegetarianism, vegetarian ideas, and the participatory development of vegetarian community, activities, and social culture. He has been listed also in several Who's Who volumes by competitors of Marquis.

He was born a Southerner and reared as a Midwesterner; educated in Chicago, California, and Massachusetts; and adopted internationally by the global vegetarian, humane, global health, professional, educational, and bioethics communities.

He is single and has never married. He credits his becoming and remaining 'an early vegan' for his perpetual singleness, despite a nearly 3.5:1 female-to-male ratio among vegetarians and vegans in the Americas and the English-speaking world; alternatively, he credits being 'holding moderately conservative social views' and 'not feeling overt hostilities for religious communities' for his not 'matching' among visible and vocal vegans. This 'bland' non-antagonism may be part of why, throughout his adult and professional life, he has been invited to participate in the lay and leadership communities of a variety of disparate religious communities who are often at odds with one another, communities with which he was not affiliated.

Profitable Employment
Maynard S. Clark of Boston is employed by the Harvard Medical School of Boston and has been employed there since the 1990s. In the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, he has served (when GHSM was DSM) on the Green Team, the Website Committee, and the Social Committee and over the years (covering two decades) has volunteered for various special projects and events. For roughly a decade he served as Faculty Assistant to the late Dr. Leon Eisenberg, GHSM Department Founder and former Chair of Social Medicine.

He also has since 2007 been Program Manager for the annual Ethical Issues in Global Health Research course in the Department of Global Health and Population in the Harvard School of Public Health, previously known as the HSPH Department of Population and International Health. EIGHR was begun in 1999 with a 2-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to Dr. Richard A. Cash, a medical doctor teaching in GHP who is famous for developing oral rehydration therapy (aka ORT) in the developing world, with the 3rd party claim that Dr. Cash's ORT has saved more lives less glamorously and less expensively than all HIV work today. The intensive summer course, which has run successfully and profitably for 11 years, draws from the developed and developing world medical experts involved with designing, conducting, supervising, funding, or approving health research across several nations.

For both jobs, he was for two years seated physically in the Francis Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health & Human Rights at 651 Huntington Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts, near Brigham Circle. Now he's seated (for both jobs) at the newly-renovated ('green', ecologically responsibly LEED 4) building next door to FXB at 641 Huntington Avenue in Boston (a historic building which was carefully preserved during the 18-month renovation), where he is on the Department's 'Green Team' (until they rename their stewardship effort).

He is currently researching and archiving the entire set of published writings of the late Professor Leon Eisenberg, MD, whom he had supported from 1999 through Dr. Eisenberg's death in 2009. A nearly complete electronic archive of Eisenberg's writings and speeches will be available through the Countway Medical Library's Center for the History of Medicine.

Maynard has been named to be on the Green Committee for HUCTW at Harvard.

Previously, Maynard had since the turn of the century been (full-time) Senior Production Coordinator for the Tape Transcription Center, owned by The Skill Bureau, a 40+-year old staffing agency in the heart of Boston, where in addition to other duties (supervision, marketing, and client relations), he had been responsible for most of the training of new employees (developing the 'inductive approach to audio transcription'), and for which he had written and rewritten the training manual. There, in face of his fastidious editorial precision, he was at times introduced as ‘a man who loves commas, lots of commas’ (for whom ‘heaven is filled with commas deftly placed outside every clever turn of phrase’).

Before that, he studied in a variety of universities and graduate schools, including California State University, Hayward, Harvard Divinity School, Wheaton College (Illinois), Tufts University, etc. He was employed while studying at each school.

The Vegetarian Part
Before attending graduate school at Harvard in Cambridge, where he became vegetarian then vegan (he has continued being vegan for over half his natural life now), he was designated a "most widely-read undergraduate" while at California State University in Hayward (CSUH has since become CSUEB, California State University, East Bay). He had long resisted 'going vegetarian' with the excuse, "I'm NOT a 'do-gooder'."

As a vegetarian community organizer and planner and developer of events, he helped (with several national vegetarian organizations) to organize several national, continental, and international-scale vegetarian events, such as the 8th International Vegan Festival (in San Diego, CA, in 1995), the Great American Meatout (organized by FARM, where he was regional or national outreach coordinator for several years in a row around the late '80s and early '90s), and the 1996 World Vegetarian Congress (held with NAVS in Johnstown, PA). He also developed the groundwork for the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival, organizing a team and helping directing its first several years of development, before passing the event over to the Boston Vegetarian Society, an organization which he ALSO founded in the mid-1980s. Further, during the late 1990s and the turn of the 21st century, he laid the groundwork of networking, which eventually emerged as the Christian Vegetarian Association (CVA) in 2002, after Rev. Frank L. Hoffman of New York developed the All-Creatures.org website portal, which hosts a CVA mirror site.

He has reviewed vegetarian books social science and religion books since the early 1970s and continues to do so.

He is currently (the unpaid) Executive Director of the Vegetarian Resource Center, based in Cambridge, MA, an all-volunteer organization, where he serves without financial compensation, and he hosts the Boston Vegan Meetup and the Boston Vegetarian Meetup, local social networking groups respectively for vegans and vegetarians, often attracting newcomers to two who are looking for veg*an connections; these 'tire kickers' are welcomed and then encouraged to network both immediately (in the Meetups) and also in local vegetarian and/or related interest, networking, activist, and/or social groups). He has also served as Volunteer Coordinator of the Boston Vegan Association and as Acting President of its Public Speakers' Workshop.

He continues to manage numerous online resources for vegans and vegetarians: some controlled-access networking venues, and some open-ended discussion venues.

Maynard S. Clark reflects on WHY Make the Vegetarian Part SO Very Public?: "Why Did I Become PUBLICLY Vegetarian?"
"In pondering the question, 'If you left this planet today, what would "history" say about you? can only think of my efforts to manage my historical epitaph. Because of my efforts in public, 'historians' today would likely say that Maynard S. Clark was a vegetarian, a long-term vegan, who worked and studied at Harvard and promoted animal rights.

I worried about this question decades ago and figured that, if I served as a clergyman (I studied for 5 years in the Harvard Divinity School), historians would overlook 'the vegetarian part' as they did for religious leaders and reformers like Charles Wesley, the famous Christian hymnwriter, brother of John Wesley, founder of Methodism; the various religious orders who were also vegetarian; and countless others, as well as those 'on the fringe' such as Ellen G. White (founder of the Seventh Day Adventist movement engaged with food reform and vegetarianism), Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science), and Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society; as they forgot that Gautama Buddha was vegetarian, Guru Nanak (founder of Sikhism) was vegetarian, and King Asoka of India (273?-232 BC ), who reportedly helped converted India from meat-eating to largely vegetarianism. Though these religious leaders were vegetarian, their presumed 'followers' today are not, though the symbolism of the plant-based elements are used in even the most intimate symbols of religious fellowship, where the fruit and grains become part of the very cells and tissues of our bodies. To me, it seemed very clear that 'the vegetarian part' ought NOT to be overlooked. That (by some means of grace?) becomes part of us in nondestructive, wholistic, and constructive ways.

In light of our global ecological crises, the recognition of the personhood of nonhumans, and the great social injustices to human beings - as well as the nutritional inefficiencies and harms - of meat-eating, overlooking one's historic vegetarian contributions would be a great injustice. I shifted the course of my personal life and work."

Vegetarian Resource Center Accomplishments
The Vegetarian Resource Center (VRC) is credited with:
 * Establishing on-line resources that have led to the founding of the Christian Vegetarian Association, several Muslim vegetarian networks, Sikh and Bahai vegetarian networks, and the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians
 * Establishing the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival, the major organizing tool and fundraiser for the Boston Vegetarian Society.
 * Instigating community organizing discussions among vegetarians and vegans

Interests and Avocations
He is an avid sudoku player and loves classical music, vegan whole foods cooking, particularly the LIGHT cooking (and even non-heated preparation) of vegetables, Facebook, blogging, meticulous recycler, and digital photographer. He traveled to India in September 2006 for the IVU's 37th World Vegetarian Congress in Goa, after which he vege-toured three of India's many states: Goa, Karnataka, and Maharashtra (where Mumbai/Bombay is located).

He is an avid MBTA rider and advocate of public transportation. Until recently, he interviewed regional and local celebrities, newsmakers, and significant social contributors on his talking heads TV show, "Monday Night Live" on MATV. MNL had run for a decade as "Malden Public Radio" with Joe Mokler, David D'Arcangelo, Jim Dello Russo, and many OTHER politically-savvy Maldonians; Joseph Mokler (with James Chiavelli) had produced a monthly print journal, "Malden Magazine" to accompany the weekly MPR TV broadcast of "Malden Public Radio", ending that publication around 2000.

He's an aggressive blogger and social media advocate; he's lectured to vegetarian conferences on using these tools. His Facebook friends number over 4500, his LinkedIn contacts nearly 1250, and his blog readership passed a million early in 2009 and have now exceeded 1.25 million.

Teaching
In addition to training and mentoring responsibilities for vegetarians and in the context of employment, he gives public talks in vegetarian contexts. The most recent is at the 35th Annual NAVS Vegetarian Summerfest in Johnstown PA" " 'Friend' is a Verb: Vegetarians and Social Media - the Ethics of 'Getting the Word Out' "

Writing
Maynard has contributed to well over 200 accepted Wikipedia articles (plus about a dozen Wikipedia articles that have NOT been accepted; both rejected/deleted articles have been on vegetarianism and veganism). The >200 contributions breaks down as follows:
 * Initiated or Maintained - 18
 * Edited - 14
 * Minor Tweaks - 23
 * Written but Removed - 2

Ideas and Controversies

 * The 30% Solution - http://bostonvegan.blogspot.com/2009/10/30-solution.html

Quips and Humor

 * Most blondes aren't !
 * Vegan over half my natural life, longer than most human earthlings have been alive.

Good Health Habits





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Unpaid (Volunteer) Employment

 * Boston Vegetarian Society - Founder in 1984 through early 21st century)
 * International Vegetarian Union - Vice President of VUNA, Regional Councillor for N Am.
 * FARM = Farm Animal Reform Movement - National Education Coordinator, Great American Meatout annual outreach campaign
 * NAVS = North American Vegetarian Society
 * Great American Meatout
 * Boston Vegan Association - Life Member, Coordinator of Volunteers; Membership Coordinator
 * Annual NAVS Vegetarian Summerfest
 * Boston Vegetarian Meetup
 * Boston Vegan Meetup
 * Greater Boston Veggie Meetup

PAST Massachusetts Cities of Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, and Malden (Recycling committees) Steering Committee of Somerville MA Recycling Committee

Animal Rights Involvements

 * New England Anti-Vivisection Society - Life Member
 * National Anti-Vivisection Society - Life Member
 * American Anti-Vivisection Society - Life Member
 * CEASE - Life Member

Vegetarian Involvements

 * International Vegetarian Union- Life Member, Benefactor
 * North American Vegetarian Society - Life Member, Benefactor, Annual Speaker
 * Boston Vegetarian Society - Life Member, Founder
 * Boston Vegan Association - Life Member; Vice President of Public Speakers' Workshop; Past Roles: Coordinator of Volunteers, Membership Coordinator, Acting President of the BVA Public Speakers' Workshop
 * Vegetarian Union of North America - Life Member, Past Vice President and Regional Council Member
 * Vegan Outreach- Volunteer
 * Blogger

Paid Employment
CURRENT:
 * Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of the Harvard Medical School
 * Program Manager of the Ethical Issues in Global Health Research program
 * Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard School of Public Health

PAST:
 * Tape Transcription Center (TTC)
 * The Skill Bureau (TSB)
 * Fidelity Investments, FTPS
 * Tufts University

Publications
Maynard has authored, co-authored, edited, or modified over 25 Wikipedia articles.