Candidate for
State Senator; District 9

Marsha Feinland, age 57, has been a parent, a teacher and a local public official. She was born in Far Rockaway, NY. She has a B.A. in history and an M.S. in education.

She is married and has one adult son.

Feinland began her political activity while in high school and continued protesting the Viet Nam war and working for civil rights and housing rights as a college student.

After graduating college, Feinland began teaching in Philadelphia public schools. She helped to organize workers in her preschool program, assisting teachers' aides who had been kept in substitute status for years in gaining a contract with full benefits.

She moved to California in 1972 and taught in Oakland's Children's Centers, where she helped organize the Children's Centers Employees Union. She spent three years teaching on the Hupa Reservation in northern California. Returning to the Bay Area, she became an elementary school teacher in Alameda. She was named Building Representative of the Year by the Alameda Education Association in 1999. She received the California Teachers Association's regional W.H.O. ("We Honor Ours") award for her work in organizing a successful contract campaign in her district in 2002. She retired from teaching in 2005.

Feinland has not limited her activity to teaching and being a union leader. She was a member of the San Francisco Pro-Choice Coalition and has helped women gain access to medical care when the doors to women's clinics have been blocked. She helped gather signatures for the successful campaign to raise the minimum wage in California ten years ago and worked on the recent attempted initiative. She believes that a much higher level is necessary, and is advocating a $15 per hour minimum wage.

In 1994, Feinland was elected to a four-year term on Berkeley's rent stabilization board. She helped keep rents low, encouraged owners to keep their buildings in good repair, and worked on a program to make residential rental buildings earthquake safe.

Feinland has been State Chair of the Peace & Freedom Party of California. She was the Peace & Freedom Party candidate for president in 1996, for State Senate in 1998 and for U.S. Senate in 2004. She received 243,407 votes in her 2004 Senate race.

As a candidate for U.S. Senate, her top priorities are an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and the Middle East, creation of a single system of health care for all with no insurance company profits, living wages for all with a shorter work week, quality education without endless testing, and protection of our environment.