Member Spotlight: Betty Morningstar

In 1969, Betty Morningstar was finding her calling. The anti-war movement was at full tilt. Marches regularly shut down Boston’s main thoroughfares. Howard Zinn and other protest leaders were speaking to thousands of people at mid-day rallies.

“There was something electrifying about hearing people give speeches about why we have to mount active protest against the war,” said Morningstar. “That’s when I got my first hit of what was possible.”

Since her senior year at a progressive Boston-area high school, Morningstar has made a life and career of playing what she characterizes as a “more behind the scenes” role in a range of public service organizations.

And while her education in protest began with the Vietnam War, her interest in public service began at the dinner table as a child. Morningstar’s mother was active in the temple and in immigrant aid societies that helped Russians escape trying conditions in the former Soviet Union. Dinner conversation often centered on finding a family a place to live, reuniting relatives or securing a job for an immigrant in the throes of poverty.

“I have become my mother,” said Morningstar. “All she ever said she wanted me to do with the money left behind was make sure I continued supporting these types of causes.”

And Morningstar did, but carrying on her mother’s legacy was deeper than philanthropy alone. After college, Morningstar became a social worker and later a teacher at Simmons School of Social Work. Central to her teaching and client work became helping people understand there are reasons beyond personal failing that bring about suffering.

“There are global means to correct the conditions that have brought so much suffering in the first place,” she said.

To advocate for systemic change, she become a leader of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), becoming the president-elect of the Massachusetts chapter in 2009. The NASW is how she first became involved with Corporate Accountability International (then Infact), when a representative from the organization came to speak about the Nestlé boycott at a chapter meeting in 1982.

“I was very taken with the fact that what Nestlé was doing was so ghastly and the boycott was really a way anybody could get involved and have an impact,” she said.

Since that time Morningstar has supported Corporate Accountability International’s work and nominated the organization for a NASW-MA Public Citizen of the Year Award in 2000 (which it won) for its work on the global tobacco treaty.

Morningstar’s continued support of the organization also has much to do with growing up with a father in the plastics industry.

“My father was very generous to the people who worked for him and knew everybody by first name in his plants,” said Morningstar. “The corporation contributed a great deal to scientific and medical research, but it also had its environmental impacts. I’ve benefited greatly from the company’s success, but it came with a serious amount of guilt. Guilt is a good thing in a situation like that because it makes you want to do something to atone...to make things right.”

Morningstar has more than “made things right.” She has remained a faithful supporter, while managing to become a leading advocate in the field of social work and a quiet force in the lives of people in every corner of the globe.