Steering Commitee
Jack Irvine (Chairman)
Jack Irvine is a retired physician of Internal Medicine who practiced in Humboldt County for 38 years. He has been an active volunteer for a number of community organizations including St. Joseph’s Hospital Board of Trustees, Clarke Memorial Museum Board of Directors, Humboldt County Historical Society Board of Directors, and currently serves as the Board President of the Humboldt Senior Resource Center and Board Member of the Humboldt Library Foundation. He has been an anti-war and peace activist for many years.
Jim Hubbard
Jim is a retired software developer but his true passion is music, performing, directing, recording production, and education. Jim was the director of the Arcata Interfaith Gospel Choir for 6 years and has been in numerous music projects. Jim’s musical background began when he was 10 years old in Scotland where he learned to play guitar and sing. Since then Jim has crafted his own music and spent many hours in the studio as a writer, performer, and engineer. He characterizes himself as a “jack-of-all-trades” when it comes to music production. He has produced 2 CDs of his own music and many other cd projects.
Jim was also the C.E.O and principal of a local software company with 22 employees with various skill sets. The customer base ranged from small organizations with 3 to 10 employees to government agencies with enterprise-level technologies.
Peter Aronson
Peter Aronson served as an Army combat medic from 1966-1968. While in the Wildlife Department at HSU he was a respiratory therapist at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Eureka. He completed training as a physician assistant - (PA) at Stanford University in 1978 and served as an internal medicine PA in Eureka for 35 years. He joined Veterans For Peace (VFP) over 20 years ago and currently maintains a leadership role with the Humboldt Bay Chapter. He has been interested in nuclear issues and physics for decades and chairs a related committee for VFP. He served on the first Golden Rule Committee and remains an active worker & supporter of Golden Rule’s mission and purpose since her discovery and restoration on Humboldt Bay in 2010.
Dale Preston
Dale L. Preston, Ph.D., is a biostatistician with almost 40 years’ experience describing and quantifying the long-term health effects of radiation in humans. He played a central role in developing the modern methods and tools used to characterize radiation effects and has authored or co-authored almost 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications. Between 1981 and 2004, while living in Hiroshima, Dr. Preston worked on studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic-bomb survivors, at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation and remains active in the Foundation’s research. Since 1987 he has been involved in studies of various Russian populations, initially Chernobyl victims, but primarily people exposed to radiation as a result of the operations of the Russian reactor and plutonium production complex (Mayak). He has served as a consultant for the United Nations Scientific Committee on Atomic the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), the US National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, and other groups around the world. Dr. Preston is a Fellow of both the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2017 he received the Failla award in recognition of a history of significant contributions to radiation research by the Radiation Research Society.
Laura Muñoz
Laura Muñoz (she/ella) is a bilingual dance and theater maker, educator, somatics practitioner, and community organizer. Laura loves serving in CUNA and is honored to be part of a grassroot effort to make the Valley West community's vision for itself a reality.
Laura Muñoz (ella/elle) es una creadora de danza y teatro bilingüe, educadora, practicante de somática y organizadora comunitaria. A Laura le encanta servir en CUNA y se siente honrada de ser parte de un movimiento de base para hacer realidad la visión de la comunidad del Norte de Arcata.
John Heckel
John Heckel is a retired professor of theatre and film at Humboldt State University. John has directed both film and theatre, educationally and professionally. He has been fortunate enough to have lived, taught and directed in multiple foreign countries. After serving as his mother’s primary care-giver until her death at the age of 95, John went back to school to receive a Ph.D. in psychology. He currently advocates for seniors, directs the occasional play, does gender and couples therapy consulting, and writes articles and a monthly column on the difficulties of aging.