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DIANE B. PATRICK WAS BORN IN BROOKLYN to an activist family: her grandfather, a West Indian immigrant, became the first African-American to hold public office in Brooklyn, when in 1948 he was elected to represent the district in the New York State Assembly, where he served 22 years and co-sponsored the state’s fair housing law. She remembers him well, telling one interviewer, “He was a firebrand.”
After graduating in 1972 with a degree in early childhood education from Queens College, Diane taught for five years in the New York City public schools, an experience that has influenced her ever since. As she noted last year in remarks given at the annual gala of The Guidance Center, a provider of developmental services to vulnerable children in Cambridge and Somerville, “The quality of a child’s early start influences the success of that young person well into adulthood.”
Diane has many duties today, between her public role as First Lady of Massachusetts, and her professional role as a partner specializing in labor and employment law at the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray. But she still makes time to promote equity in education at all levels. She has been a strong voice for the state’s Early Education for All campaign, a statewide public and private coalition seeking to mandate public, high-quality pre- kindergarten and kindergarten classes for all children. And both she and her husband are board members and committed supporters of the Posse Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps public high school students succeed in college via multicultural support teams, or “posses.”
Diane also sits on other nonprofit boards for social causes, including that of Jane Doe Inc., The Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence. As she has said many times since she entered the public eye as First Lady, she is not shy about making her views known on matters she considers critical, whether domestic violence or equality in education. “If I can do anything to give more prominence to the issues and the solutions there,” she has said, “then that’s what I would like to do.”
Diane is well-known, both as successful lawyer and as wife and confidente to Massachussetts governor Deval Patrick. Yet she deserves to be celebrated for one other role as well, of the greatest importance to us all, as a fierce and lifelong advocate of equality in education for all children and youth, from the critical years of early childhood all the way through college. Diane is the quintessential Ronald H. Brown awardee.
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