MCAN Board
Janet Hartke Bowser, (she/her/hers) President, Point of Contact, Dover
Janet is an environmental attorney with over 30 years of experience working with federal, state and local government and nonprofits on a wide range of environmental law, policy and regulatory issues including climate change adaptation and mitigation, natural resources protection, clean energy, toxics reduction and sustainable land use and smart growth. Janet served as Director of the Town of Wellesley Natural Resources Department for over 16 years and previously was Director of the Needham Conservation Dept., worked with the Mass. Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs and began her career at the Mass. Department of Environmental Protection.
Janet holds a B.A. in Environmental Science from Middlebury College and a J.D. from the Boston University School of Law where she was elected President of the Environmental Law Society. She has worked on a wide range of political, community and grassroots campaigns and has served on a number of governmental advisory committees and organizations including the Mass. Municipal Association’s Committee on Energy and the Environment, Vice President of the Mass. League of Environmental Voters, President and Co-Founder of the New England Environmental Law Society and the Dover Conservation Commission. She lives in Dover with her husband and has two grown children.
Email: [email protected]
Ted McIntyre, (he/him/his) Board Secretary, Franklin
Ted McIntyre has been a member of MCAN since 2003, and helped establish the Franklin Area Climate Team. His grassroots activities include numerous educational presentations on global warming to diverse audiences. Ted is also a physicist, and is currently working to develop advanced equipment for use in the manufacture of computer chips. He holds seven patents and has authored more than twenty technical publications. He lives in Franklin with his wife and son.
Phil Thayer (he/him/his) Board Treasurer, Concord
Phil is retired from 30 years in the financial services industry. Over the past 20 years, he volunteered on a dozen decarbonization efforts including helping to run grassroots solar, EV, and heat pump programs and advocating for solar net metering and Zero Net Energy municipal new construction. He helped to draft and pass five pro-climate Town Meeting warrant articles. He helped stop the Palmer biomass plant in the environmental justice community of Springfield. Prior to moving to Concord in 2022, he served as Chair of Sustainable Belmont and served on the Sustainable Middlesex Steering Committee. He is a member of Building Electrification Accelerator (BEA), ZeroCarbonMA, FixTheGrid, and HeatSmartAlliance and serves on ConcordCAN’s Steering Committee. An active MCAN member since 2015, he currently serves on MCAN’s MLP Leadership Team and moderates monthly MLP Chapter zooms. Phil has an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Evaluation Research.
Mary Dewart, (she/her/hers) Board Member, Brookline
Mary Dewart is a grass roots organizer connecting people to personal action and partnerships. She was drawn into climate action through her friends, Ross Gelbspan, The Heat is On and Boiling Point and the late Paul Epstein, Changing Planet, Changing Health. Her goals are moving individuals, communities, Massachusetts and beyond toward 100% renewables and keeping fossil fuels in the ground. During thirty years of civic engagement she has served as Campaign Coordinator for MCAN’s Climate Action Brookline chapter and is now a board member. With a background in art and public policy, she initiated and collaborated on dozens of projects including Climate Week (starting 2010) now featuring events with leaders from around the state. She also incorporated Climate Week art installations and co-created a giant labyrinth with climate warnings and opportunities at Brookline’s town hall center. She pioneered new ground when she co-founded the Brookline GreenSpace Alliance and served as member of both the Park and Recreation Commission and Selectmen’s Climate Action Committee. She has been an elected Town Meeting member since 1991. The Massachusetts Commission on Women recognized her commitment and work on behalf of Brookline in 2016.
Richard Halpern (he/him/his) Board Member, Franklin
Richard had a nearly forty five year career in marketing, communications and business research services for technology and scientific firms (including public and private start-ups as well as local and global enterprises.) In his business career Richard worked for four successful start ups focused largely on direct response marketing in support of sales. He is also a published author in the MD&DI journal about how to use research to help product development.
Richard wants to engage in endeavors which have meaning and could benefit from his marketing skills background. After retirement, he began volunteering with MCAN in 2021, providing business research in support of various initiatives including the residential multifamily housing market landscape and efforts to stop the Peabody Peaker Plant.
Richard holds an Honors Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University. He also attended University Cardiff Wales (UK) as part of a junior year abroad study program He earned a certificate in direct response marketing from Boston University. Richard is a member of the Franklin Democratic Town Committee (FDTC), and Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Fred Davis (he/him/his) Board Member, Medfield
Fred Davis has been a leader in energy efficiency and climate action for over 40 years. His start was in residential retrofitting. In the 1980s he founded Fred Davis Corp. which then continuously drove adoption of ever-more-efficient lighting. Since 2013, they deployed 60,000 LED streetlights in 55 municipalities.
Fred has spearheaded substantial community-level decarbonization efforts. As Chair of the Medfield Energy Committee from 2019-2022, he oversaw renewable energy and efficiency projects and explored net-zero redevelopment. His town organizing increased EV, solar, and heat pump adoption.
Since 2015, Fred has served as the top decarbonization expert for the Jewish Climate Action Network. As JCAN’s President since 2021, he continues to speak and train communities on effective climate action.
With experience spanning from the Energy Crisis to the Climate Emergency, Fred is a leading authority on rapidly transitioning communities to a low-carbon future.
Jerry Halberstadt (he/him/his) Board Member, Peabody
Jerry Halberstadt has had a lifelong concern for empowering people as consumers of programs provided by governments and institutions.
His interest in renewable energy and the environment goes back to consulting for LUZ, a solar energy company in Israel (1970s). He was a co-founder of the Breathe Clean North Shore citizen group that helped to lead the opposition to the Peabody Peaker, and that became an MCAN chapter. He used photography and articles at CleanPowerCoalition.org to document the protests and the issues.
He attended the Houghton School, an integrated grade school at a time (late 1940s-early 1950s) when integrated schools were rare. His appreciation of other cultures is demonstrated by his work to bridge employment opportunities for Black residents of the Mission Hill neighborhood with the Harvard teaching hospitals. In Israel he lived in a multicultural immigrant neighborhood (as an immigrant) and advised the City of Jerusalem and the Israel Ministry of the Interior on empowering residents. For his MA in Anthropology, he lived with Dine (Navaho) in New Mexico, and wrote a study on religion, community, healing, and intercultural tensions.
Halberstadt has experience in policy advocacy on behalf of elderly and disabled tenants and has been a publisher of health handbooks.
He is developing the Healthy Air program that will reach out both to established groups as well as environmental justice groups with a focus on mitigating the health burdens of pollution---the same pollution driving climate warming.