Bell nominated for national Volvo for Life Awards

Serghino René

Milton resident Ron Bell, former deputy campaign manager for Gov. Deval Patrick’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign and founder of Dunk the Vote, is one of five Massachusetts finalists for the national Volvo for Life Awards. The awards identify heroes from across the country and have picked the five top heroes from every state in the nation for the past five years.

For nearly two decades, Bell has upheld his commitment to increase voter registration and turnout in the city of Boston. His activism began in 1989, when he served as director for the Mission Hill Community Centers. The violations of civil liberties and racial tensions that resulted from the murder known as the Stuart case — in which Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife and blamed a non-existent black suspect, leading to the aggressive pursuit by Boston police of black men without probable cause — so outraged Bell that he began to organize storefront voter registration within the African American community. He engaged young people to exercise their right to vote and, in the process, increased their social and political power in the city.

Not long after, Bell founded Dunk the Vote, a nonprofit, non-partisan voter registration and citizen participation organization. Over the past 14 years, the program has been a raging success, registering over 35,000 new voters.

In the 2000 election, Boston was one of a few cities in the U.S. that showed an increase in numbers of African Americans and Latinos voting. Over the past five years, Boston was the only major U.S. city in which voter turnout has continued to increase each year.

In the fall of 2005, Bell served as project director for the Selma Reenactment March, which drew over 5,000 march participants and involved over 300 professional and nonprofit organizations.

Bell recently served as volunteer coordinator for a local Hurricane Katrina relief fund, raising money, providing food and finding jobs and housing for 21 evacuee families.

To combat the rising rate of violent crime, particularly in Boston’s communities of color, he took a leadership role in organizing neighborhood walks to meet with and counsel gang members, providing them with programs and services for rehabilitation and diverting their attention from gang life to jobs and education.

Online voting in the Volvo for Life Awards ends Sunday, Feb. 4. After the close of voting, a panel of celebrity judges will pick the winner from the finalists. Votes for Bell can be logged at www.volvoforlifeawards.com/cgi-bin/iowa/english/vote/index.html.