Friends Center City Board of Directors

Mignon Adams, Board Co-Secretary

A college librarian in small towns for many years, Mignon came to Philadelphia in 1985 as the library director at the University of the Sciences and discovered that she is a city person. She chaired local chapters of college, medical, and health science librarians, as well as a national organization of college librarians. For 20 years she organized an annual national workshop for new college library directors and spoke around the country on teaching students information literacy.   Now retired, she spends many hours planning events for Friends in the City. She is a member and current treasurer of the Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia and is a docent for the Arch Street Meetinghouse.

Tom Bowen, Board Chairperson

Tom Bowen holds a degree in economics from the Wharton School and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He served two years in the U.S. Army after law school, including a tour in the Quartermaster Corps in Vietnam. He practiced law in his home town of Salem, NJ, until being appointed Judge of the Superior Court in Salem County, a position he held until his retirement in 2007. During this time, he also served as an adjunct professor at Widener Law School in Wilmington, Delaware. Tom moved to Center City Philadelphia in 2010, where he attends the Fourth and Arch Street Friends Meeting. He has served on FCCRC’s board of directors since 2018 and leads a non-fiction bookclub for FitC. He is also a member of Jefferson Hospital’s Center City Family Practice Patient Advisory Committee.

Ginny Christensen

Ginny Christensen is a long-time educator, having worked as a teacher, head of school, and mid-level administrator in Quaker schools, public schools and the Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship. Since 2006, she's run a consulting business, Strategy for Growth, LLC, which provides a wide range of coaching services and professional development to independent school leaders. In addition to FCCRC, she serves on the Boards of Haverford College and the Friends Fiduciary Corporation. Ginny lives in Center City. She's a member of Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting and the proud mother of two grown children.

Joan Countryman

Joan Countryman was born and raised in Philadelphia. A member of Germantown Monthly Meeting, she is a graduate of Germantown Friends School, Sarah Lawrence College and Yale University. A math teacher then a Quaker School head, she has had considerable non-profit board service. Married to Ed Jakmauh, she has two children and four grandchildren. A poet, Joan returned from Rhode Island to live at Riverfront.

Pamela Freyd, PhD, Board Co-Secretary

Pamela Freyd has taught in the Philadelphia Public Schools, been a principal investigator on two science education grants from the National Science Foundation while at the Institute for Cognitive Science at Penn, and served as Executive Director of a small foundation. She has served on the numerous local boards including the Friends of the Philadelphia City Institute Library and the Friends of Curtis. She has been a member of FCCRC since 2008 and is active in the Program Committee.

KC Goodman
KC Goodman, retired IBM Distinguished Engineer and global IT consulting executive - BA - Haverford College, MBA - LaSalle University. KC is a passionate global traveler and lifelong learner who enjoys all the cultural, educational, recreational, and dining opportunities Philadelphia offers. With his late wife, Dr. Sharon Curlik, he has two daughters and three delightful young grandchildren who all live in the Philadelphia area.

Sally Harrison

Sally Harrison is retired from Bryn Mawr College where she served as the Senior Philanthropic Advisor. She is a member of Downingtown Friends Meeting, but attends Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia. She is a member of the Haverford College Corporation, and is the president of Historic Fair Hill, where she also volunteers as a Reading Buddy at the Julia deBurgos School in the Fairhill section of the city. She has recently completed her term of service as a board member of Kendal-Crosslands Communities.

Charlotte Heller

Charlotte has been a resident of Center City for over 40 years and the last 30 years of those have been in Society Hill. She has a MSW degree from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from Temple University. Throughout her career, she has worked in various positions in hospital departments and healthcare management, as well as medical practice management. Charlotte is currently an active docent at the Barnes Foundation, and the Secretary for the townhouse association in which she resides.

Stephanie Judson

Stephanie Judson has enjoyed serving Quaker institutions.  She taught Religious Thought, organized community service programs and field trips, linked Center City resources, served as Interim Head of Friends Select School, and as Associate Head of William Penn Charter School. Stephanie and her husband, Sandy Rea, spent time and traveled in the Middle East. They taught for a year at Ramallah Friends School and worked and lived at the American University of Beirut. While at Penn Charter, Stephanie traveled each year to Ramallah.  She interviewed to choose a student to spend a sophomore year at Penn Charter.  Stephanie has friends in Ramallah that continue today. Stephanie and Sandy are the proud parents of two daughters and two grandsons. Stephanie looks forward to serving on the FCCRC Board.

Margaret Lord
Margaret, Lord, Smith College B.A. and M.Ed., teaching and administrative career in Independent and Friends Schools. Avid reader, interested in travel, fine arts, crafts, outdoors. Returning to Philadelphia offers opportunities of community exploration. Married to Arthur Kover.

Dianne E. Reed, PhD 

Dianne Reed, now retired, was most recently a Principal at reed group, a marketing research and management consulting firm. She previously served as executive director of three nonprofit organizations, as a senior manager at KPMG, and as budget director of the City of Philadelphia. She serves as President of the 1616 Latimer Fund, as a member of the finance committee of Germantown Friends School Committee, as a steering committee member of the Circle of Aunts and Uncles, and as Treasurer of Friends Center City. A graduate of UCLA, she holds a doctorate from Stanford University and a Master of Government Administration from the Fels Center of Government, University of Pennsylvania.

Ted Reed

Ted heads the reed | group, a marketing research and consulting firm based in Philadelphia. He has long been active in community organizations as founder of Mt. Airy USA, the CDC in Mt. Airy, as a board member and now chair of Cliveden of the National Trust and as the former chair of the Friends Center City board. Ted is trained as a sociologist with a PhD from the University of Michigan and a BA/MA from Oberlin College. Ted and Dianne count four children and six grand-children between them.

Bob Schmidt

My wife Gerrie and I joined Friends in the City in 2009. We have been residents of Center City since 2007, the year we moved here from New York. I am a proud native of the great state of New Jersey, and studied journalism and broadcast communications at the American University in Washington, DC. My career in broadcasting, mostly in news, spanned 46 years with stops in Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia. For 34 of those years I was a network radio news correspondent, first at NBC and later for the bulk of my career at ABC. I produced and anchored hourly news broadcasts and on occasion reported from the field. I covered numerous disasters, presidential campaigns, Desert Shield and Desert Storm (from Jordan,Saudi Arabia and Kuwait), and in 2003 I was embedded with the 3rd Infantry to cover Operation Iraqi Freedom, which culminated in the US invasion of Iraq. Since my retirement, I have been an active volunteer with the American Red Cross, serving as a disaster responder, shelter supervisor and instructor. Gerrie and I have been married for 55 years, have a son and daughter, and 3 wonderful grandchildren. 

Michael Tomalin

Mike Tomalin had an 18 year career as an engineer for General Motors Overseas Operations and then a 30 year career as a corporate banking officer before retiring in 2008. He and his wife Sharon lived in Princeton NJ for 25 years where he was an elected member of the Princeton School Board among many other civic activities. They moved to Philadelphia in 1998 where he became active in the Unitarian Church and Friends in the City and has been helping tutor a first grade class at Andrew Jackson School since retiring.

Richard Wolgin

Richard Wolgin, a graduate of Friends' Select School, class of 1967 has diverse life experiences ranging from real estate as a builder/developer in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a licensed Pennsylvania Realtor and notary to health care and manufacturing. In the mid 1970s with the introduction of HMOs and evolutionary health care options, he was the executive director of the South Philadelphia Medical Group, a multi-speciality medical group operating the out patient department of the Albert Einstein Hospital-Daroff Division and four community medical offices. In the 1980s he was owner/operator of Webb Manufacturing, a textile and silk screening serving the advertising speciality industry. He also served as a development consultant to the Transitional Hospital Corporation and later as an archivist for a poster printing subsidiary of Barnes and Noble Books.