Episode 703: Maura Quint and Rebecca Vallas

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Maura Quint is a humor writer and activist whose work has been featured in publications such as McSweeneys and The New Yorker. She was named one of Rolling Stone’s top 25 funniest twitter accounts of 2016. When not writing comedy, Maura has worked extensively with non-profits in diverse sectors including political action campaigns, international arts collectives and health and human services organizations. She has never been officially paid to protest but did once find fifteen cents on the ground at an immigrants’ rights rally and wanted to make sure that had been disclosed. She was the co founder and executive director of TaxMarch.org

She is now the Wealth Tax Campaign Director at the Americans for Tax Fairness

Rebecca Vallas is a senior fellow and co-director of The Century Foundation’s Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, where she leads TCF’s work to achieve economic justice for people with disabilities and their families. Vallas joins TCF after seven years at the Center for American Progress, during which she helped to build and lead CAP’s Poverty to Prosperity Program, in a range of roles, including as the program’s first policy director and managing director, and later as vice president. During her time at CAP, Vallas also helped to establish CAP’s Disability Justice Initiative—the first disability policy project at a U.S. think tank—as well as the organization’s criminal justice reform work.

Much of Vallas’s policy and advocacy work flows from her years as a legal aid lawyer. In partnership with her legal aid alma mater, she co-developed the “clean slate” model of automated, automatic criminal record-clearing that is now law in Pennsylvania, Utah, Michigan, Connecticut, Delaware, Virginia, and advancing in additional states—while advancing national momentum for removing barriers to economic opportunity for justice-impacted individuals and families. In 2019, she co-founded the Clean Slate Initiative, a national organization supporting state efforts to adopt clean slate policies.

Vallas previously served as the deputy director of government affairs for the National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives, working to protect and strengthen the Social Security disability programs, including as co-chair of the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities (CCD) Social Security Task Force. Forever a legal aid lawyer at heart, Vallas spent several years representing low-income individuals and families at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, where she began her work as a Skadden Fellow, and was the inaugural recipient of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association’s New Leaders in Advocacy Award.

Vallas has authored dozens of policy reports on antipoverty policy, income security, disability policy, access to justice, and criminal records/reentry policy; testified before Congress and state legislatures on numerous occasions; and been cited and quoted in media outlets across the country. She is also the creator and host of Off-Kilter, a nationally distributed podcast about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with. Vallas serves on the Board of Directors of the National Academy of Social Insurance and is a member of the Academy’s 2020–2021 Economic Security Study Panel. Vallas was twice named to Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” for law and policy, and later to Emory University’s “40 Under 40.” She received her law degree from the University of Virginia and graduated summa cum laude from Emory University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in psychology. In a past life, she was an operatically trained mezzo soprano. She’s the proud mother of three rescue kitties.

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