Secretary

Vincent McGee

Vincent McGee is senior advisor at The Atlantic Philanthropies and board chair of The Overbrook Foundation. He served as vice president and secretary of the Irene Diamond Fund from January 1994 to March 2002 and as executive director of the Aaron Diamond Foundation from May 1985 to December 1996. Prior to that, he was executive director (1980-1985) of the Hunt Alternatives Fund, vice president for development (1977-1980) at the City College of New York, and executive director (1973-1975) of the DJB Foundation. He also spent a year in jail in the early '70s for his anti-war activities, where he broke bread with the likes of Carmine DeSapio and Bobby Baker, and rubbed shoulders with several small-time embezzlers, a two-star general, a couple of high-level Mafia types, a group of Jehovah's Witnesses, and other war resisters.

"My higher education," Vinny says, "was enriched by working on the production line at Eastman Kodak while attending the University of Rochester during the mid-'60s racial struggles in that city and by working for a New York City law firm while attending Hunter College at night." His legal challenge to the Vietnam War reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where Justice William O. Douglas dissented in support of Vinny's position that cooperation with the Selective Service was "consent" to the war. He received a pardon from President Gerald Ford in 1975.

Vinny's career has combined activist participation, human rights and nonviolence efforts. He chaired the board of Amnesty International USA in the early '80s and the executive committee of The Fund for Peace. He has continued to work and consult for a number of individual donors and foundations, including The Overbrook Foundation and the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Epstein Philanthropies, and is on the boards of the Gagarin Trust, the Baker Foundation, the Balm Foundation, the Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society at the City College of New York, FoodChange, PATH, the Rockefeller University Council, as well as The Sister Fund. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in Law from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2002 and is an overseer for Smolny College, St. Petersburg State University, Russia.