Bellows on the road to nowhere
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Born Shenna Lee Bellows
March 23, 1975 (age 48)
Greenfield, Massachusetts,
U.S.Political party Democratic
Spouse Brandon Baldwin (m. 2012)
Education Middlebury College (BA)
Shenna Lee Bellows (born March 23, 1975) is an American politician and a non-profit executive director. On December 2, 2020, the Maine Legislature elected her to serve as the 50th Maine secretary of state.[1] She is executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine, and the former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maine.[2]
Bellows was the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate in Maine in the 2014 election, and was defeated by incumbent Republican Susan Collins. In 2016 she won election to the Maine Senate, and she served until resigning in 2020 when she became a candidate in the legislative election for secretary of state.
Early life and education
Shenna Bellows was born on March 23, 1975, in Greenfield, Massachusetts, the eldest daughter of Dexter Bellows, a carpenter, and Janice Colson, a nurse. She grew up in Hancock, Maine, where she attended Hancock Grammar School. Bellows grew up in a struggling family; she claims her family did not have running water or electricity, which the family could not afford, until she was in the fifth grade.[3][4]
When Bellows was 15, she was an AFS-USA foreign exchange student in Campos, Brazil. Bellows graduated from Ellsworth High School in 1993. During high school and college, Bellows worked as a research assistant at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory.[5] She then attended Middlebury College, graduating magna cum laude in 1997 with highest honors for her thesis on economic and environmental sustainability.[6] During her junior year, she studied for a semester as an exchange student in San Jose, Costa Rica.
Early career
Bellows served as executive director of the ACLU of Maine for eight years. In that role, she built coalitions with both Republicans and Democrats to pass privacy and civil rights laws.[7] She was a leader of Mainers United for Marriage, working for seven years to pass same-sex marriage in Maine.[8] She was a leader on voting rights and co-chaired the 2011 Protect Maine Votes campaign to restore same day voter registration.[9][10] Most recently, she organized a successful privacy campaign to require warrants for access to private cell phone communications, and she led the opposition to warrantless drone surveillance.[11]
During her time at the ACLU, Bellows was a leader in the Maine Choice Coalition and the Coalition for Maine Women.[12] She was recognized for her work to advance women’s health and reproductive choice by awards from the University of Maine Women’s Studies Department,[13] Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Center,[14] the American Association of University Women,[15] the Frances Perkins Center[16] and the Maine Democratic Party.
Prior to her work at the ACLU of Maine, Bellows was the national field organizer at the ACLU in Washington, D.C., organizing nationwide civil liberties campaigns including opposition to the Patriot Act, where she built broad coalitions that included librarians and gun owners alike.[17]
Bellows was an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer in Nashville, Tennessee. There she assisted a start up non-profit, Community IMPACT! in developing an asset building program to promote educational and economic empowerment for young people in Nashville’s largest public housing project.[18]
Bellows served as a small business development Peace Corps volunteer in La Arena de Chitré, Panama. In Panama, she launched a micro-lending program for artisans, started a Junior Achievement entrepreneurship program at a local high school, and was President of Women In Development/Gender and Development, dedicated to advancing economic and educational opportunity for women and girls.[19]
From 1997 to 1999 Bellows worked as a researcher and recruiter for Economists Incorporated, a privately held economic consulting firm specializing in microeconomic analysis in antitrust, regulatory and legal contexts in Washington.
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