Roger Hickey
Radio: Bio of Roger Hickey
October 30, 2005
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Roger Hickey is co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, an organization launched by 100 prominent Americans to expand the national debate about America's economic future. The Campaign seeks to empower working Americans, middle class families, and the poor to make their voices heard in support of a populist economic agenda and an expansion of democracy. Most recently, under the auspices of America's Future, Hickey organized and leads a national coalition of citizen leaders known as the New Century Alliance for Social Security and Medicare.
A decade ago he was one of the founders of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington think tank that looks at economics from the point of view of working Americans. Hickey served as the EPI's vice president and director of communications, helping to establish the international reputation of the institute and injecting the work of progressive economists and analysts into the headlines and news programs of the mass media, into the debates of political leaders, and into the hands of citizens and workers fighting for economic change.
A graduate of the University of Virginia, Hickey began his career in the 1960s as an organizer for the Virginia Students Civil Rights Committee and the Southern Students' Organizing Committee. In 1972 he went to work for Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam as a producer for the "Unsell the War" campaign, a million-dollar volunteer TV, radio, and print advertising campaign with creative and production labor donated by the advertising community on the West Coast.
In 1973 Hickey joined with others to help found the Public Media Center in San Francisco. As its media director, he coordinated production and media placement of TV, radio, print campaigns and conducted publicity efforts for consumer, labor, women's, and environmental groups. He won the first successful FCC ruling requiring Fairness Doctrine broadcast spot advertising response time to to oppose nuclear utility advertising.
From 1975 to 1984 Hickey was the media director for the National Center for Economic Alternatives, in charge of all aspects of public education for this economic research group set up to encourage public discussion of new economic ideas.
In the early 1980s Hickey organized and ran Consumers Opposed to Inflation in the Necessities (COIN) a coalition of national labor, consumer, minority and environmental groups to support a progressive program to control inflation.
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