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, early, life and/or career:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“In a period of a people’s life that bears the designation “transitional,” the task of a thinking individual, of a sincere citizen of his country, is to go forward, despite the dirt and difficulty of the path, to go forward without losing from view even for a moment those fundamental ideals on which the entire existence of the society to which he belongs is built.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)