Early Life and Career
From 1986 until 2006, Ritchie served as the president of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a non-profit organization working with businesses, churches, farm organizations, and civic groups to foster long-term sustainability for Minnesota’s rural communities. Among other issues, it looked into how global trade rules impact family farmers and rural communities. He also founded the League of Rural Voters.
In 1994, Ritchie was a co-founder of the Global Environment & Trade Study, located at Yale University, which conducted research on the linkages and potential synergies between international trade and the environment. That year, he also organized a conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Bretton Woods conference. The 1994 conference, held at the Mt. Washington Hotel, featured a return of many of the "old timers" who had attended the 1944 conference or other founding conferences for the postwar economic system.
In 2000 during the presidential election, Ritchie was one of 52 farm and rural activists who formed "Family Farmers’ National Alliance for Nader/LaDuke" to support the presidential campaign of Ralph Nader.
In 2004, Ritchie took a leave of absence from the Institute to lead National Voice, a national coalition of non-partisan organizations from across the country made up of church, business, and community organizations. National Voice included over 400 Minnesota organizations that formed the Minnesota Participation Project. The national media campaign called "November 2" and the constituent organizations helped voters find new ways to get involved in the elections. Their goal was to register and turn out over 5 million new voters nationwide. As part of this work, he appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Election Night 2004.
Ritchie was asked in 2005 to testify before the Midwest Regional Hearing of the National Commission On The Voting Rights Act about the importance of voting and the challenges minority voters faced in 2004.
Ritchie was re-elected as Secretary of State on November 2, 2010, defeating Republican challenger Dan Severson.
Read more about this topic: Mark Ritchie
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“The East is the hearthside of America. Like any home, therefore, it has the defects of its virtues. Because it is a long-lived-in house, it bursts its seams, is inconvenient, needs constant refurbishing. And some of the family resources have been spent. To attain the privacy that grown-up people find so desirable, Easterners live a harder life than people elsewhere. Today it is we and not the frontiersman who must be rugged to survive.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)