CONSUMER ACTION - Key Persons
Anna Flores is the former executive director of the Credit Abuse Resistance Education (CARE) program. Founded in 2002, the CARE program educates high school and college students on the responsible use of credit and other fundamentals of financial literacy, as well as the potential consequences of poor money management and credit card abuse. The American Bankruptcy Institute administers CARE. Prior to joining the CARE program, Flores was the executive director of Veterans Assistance for Learning, Opportunity & Readiness (VALOR), where she worked on strategic planning, fundraising, brand awareness and partnership development to ensure financial independence for America's veterans and servicemembers. She also was the vice president of consumer and community affairs for American Express for 15 years, where she established long-term relationships with consumer advocacy organizations, community-based organizations, government agencies and industry representatives. She also served as director of the Office of Consumer Affairs for the District of Columbia Public Service Commission and as executive director of the National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators.
Job Titles:
- Secretary of the Consumer Action Board
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- Member of the Consumer Action Board
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- Member of the Consumer Action Board
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- Member of the Consumer Action Board
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- Community Outreach Manager
Jamie Woo, who joined Consumer Action's outreach and training department in 2006, works to help monolingual and limited-English speaking Chinese immigrants learn their rights as consumers.
Woo also networks with Asian-American/Pacific Islander (AA/PI) community-based organizations and community leaders to increase the effectiveness of Consumer Action's outreach to underserved minority groups. Her efforts help break down barriers- difficulty of communication, lack of access to information and distrust of government officials-that prevent AA/PI Americans from fully understanding and asserting their consumer rights.
Woo, who leads frequent educational workshops in the Chinese-American community on fraud prevention, financial services, privacy and telecommunications. Fluent in the Cantonese, Mandarin and Taiwanese dialects, Woo frequently participates in community events such as health fairs, conferences and senior center presentations.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Consumer Action Board
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- Member of the Consumer Action Board
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- Emeritus Member of the Consumer Action Board
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- Senior Fellow
- Treasurer of the Consumer Action Board
Ken McEldowney is Senior Follow of Consumer Action, a San Francisco-based national consumer advocacy and education membership organization. Consumer Action has worked on food, insurance, utility, privacy, toxics, health care, banking, postal and telephone issues for 35 years. The organization's current focus is on ensuring that the interests of low income and limited English-speaking consumers are protected during this period of deregulation and corporate mergers.
McEldowney is immediate past president of the Consumer Federation of America (CFA)-a federation of nearly 300 pro-consumer organizations with more than 50 million individual members. He now serves as CFA's vice president.
Job Titles:
- Community Outreach & Training Manager
Linda Williams joined the Consumer Action Los Angeles Office Outreach and Training Team in September 2006. As Community Outreach & Training Manager, she aggressively pursues the team's mission to ensure that all individuals, regardless of their income level, are able to learn about their rights as consumers. She has carried out this mission by networking, coalition building, and training case managers, counselors, social workers, educators, librarians, and front-line advocates who serve low-income and hard-to-reach consumers from coast to coast in the fundamentals of financial literacy .
Williams' passion for training and her belief that all consumers should know their rights and how to assert those rights in the marketplace has led her to conduct trainer workshops at numerous national, state, and local events including the NAACP Financial Empowerment Tour in Cincinnati, OH, NABVETS National Conference in Seattle, WA, California WIC Annual Conference in Sacramento, National Coalition of Homeless Veterans Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., National Day of Honor for World War II Veterans In Philadelphia, PA; Blacks In Government National Conference in Maryland; Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, DC; and Georgia Cares Senior Summit in Peachtree, GA. Well versed in the education and training modules created by Consumer Action, Williams has trained over 75 Los Angeles County social workers on how to prevent and protect themselves and others from identify theft, trained over 1000 Public Health Foundation Enterprises WIC Program employees on money management and staying fiscally healthy in a tough economy, and trained the staff of the Center on Deafness in Riverside, California, on credit card fraud and identity theft.
Prior to her position with Consumer Action, Williams was a front-line advocate with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA). For 16 years, she provided direct service to individual consumers, worked one-on-one with community-based organizations, and helped form coalitions to protect the rights of low-income and hard-to-reach consumers in Los Angeles County. During her tenure at LAFLA, Williams established herself as an assertive advocate for consumers' rights.
While working full time at LAFLA and raising five children, Williams, a single mother, entered law school. As a Certified Law Clerk, she argued three tenant rights cases in Los Angeles Superior Court-and won all three. Williams also created the Public Housing Outreach Project, which focused on helping public housing residents remove the barriers to employment, higher education, and poverty.
Through the coalitions she helped formed, she successfully secured a reasonable accommodation policy change from the City Housing Authority for disabled Section 8 applicants. She testified before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and Los Angeles City Council and has been quoted numerous times by the Los Angeles Times regarding subsidized housing issues.
Williams, a single grandmother, holds a Juris Doctor degree, and Bachelor of Science Degree in Management and Organizational Behavior. She is a member of ATD-the Association for Talent Development (formerly ASTD) and its local Los Angeles Chapter. She actively participates in ATD continuing education classes for the professional development of trainers. Williams is also a CERTIFIED True Colors Facilitator.
Job Titles:
- Senior Associate, Editorial
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- Community Outreach Manager
Nelson Santiago has worked in the field of consumer protection since the early 1990s. He first joined Consumer Action in 1993 as coordinator of the group's consumer assistance and referral hotline in San Francisco.
In this position, Santiago provided assistance to thousands of consumers in English and Spanish, helping them understand their rights and directing them to appropriate complaint handling agencies. Santiago's direct contact with consumers allowed him to identify trends as they emerged and to warn the public about new scams.
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- Member of the Consumer Action Board
- Emeritus Member )
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- Administrative Assistant
- Safety Coordinator
Ricardo Perez joined Consumer Action (CA) in August 1999. He responds to calls to CA's consumer complaints hotline, while handles all shipping and receiving of mail, deliveries and publications.
Perez runs the Consumer Action mail room which delivers up to one million copies of our multilingual publications to thousands of community-based organizations annually. He maintains inventories, coordinates with our shipping vendors on a day-to-day basis, and records shipment records in both shipping vendor's and Consumer Action's databases.
Meanwhile Perez also provides consumers with advice and referrals to consumers with a complaint, via Consumer Action's free, non-legal consumer advice hotline.
In addition, Perez is Consumer Action's safety coordinator as well as one of the floor wardens for our office building. He is also one of our in-house techie who monitors computers backup routines and software updates.
Job Titles:
- Director of Consumer Protection
Ruth Susswein is Consumer Action's Director of Consumer Protection. Since 2006, she has focused her energies on consumer advocacy, financial literacy, and financial empowerment on behalf of underrepresented consumers.
Susswein works to ensure that the Complaints division of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is providing maximum possible benefit to consumers through its public complaint database and financial complaint process, as the chair of committees for the umbrella consumer group Americans for Financial Reform (AFR). Since its inception, she has advocated to help the CFPB create a comprehensive complaint handling system with state-of-the-art complaint resolution capabilities and public access to detailed complaint information.
Susswein worked on passage of federal financial reform legislation (Dodd-Frank), concentrating on the need to create a national, independent consumer financial protection agency.
She also advocates for vast improvements in mortgage industry practices and meaningful government actions to help homeowners at risk of foreclosure.
Susswein worked to help pass the first credit card legislation in decades, the Credit CARD Act, which has saved consumers millions of dollars from unfair fees and rate hikes. She helps educate community-based organizations on changes in financial consumer protections, credit card law, foreclosure prevention programs, and other personal finance issues, as part of Consumer Action's free financial empowerment training sessions. Among other things, she leads Consumer Action's editorial team in the planning, writing and editing of Consumer Action's topical newsletter, Consumer Action News.
Susswein joined Consumer Action with long experience in consumer advocacy. Previously, she was the executive director of the national non-profit credit education consumer group Bankcard Holders of America (BHA).
Prior to joining BHA, she was the Investigative Consumer reporter for the ABC affiliate in Springfield, MA. where she exposed credit repair scams, second mortgage schemes and unscrupulous practices by landlords and home improvement contractors. She also worked at WABC-TV in New York in the Investigative and Consumer units.
Job Titles:
- President of the Consumer Action Board