MEET US
The "OUR" in Finding Our Voices
Finding Our Voices is led and driven by Maine survivors of domestic abuse, boosted by caring and creative community members who help get us louder and brighter across the state.
FINDING OUR VOICES BOARD
Patrisha McLean, Founder & CEO of Finding Our Voices, photojournalist and women rights advocate, based in Camden. Patrisha is the author of All Fall Down (2013), the biography of the child actor in Shane, and the photo books Maine Street: Faces and Voices from a Small Town (2010) about her neighbors in Camden, and My Island (2015), about summer and year-round children on North Haven, Vinalhaven, and Islesboro. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Farnsworth Museum and Portland Museum of Art. Read More
Photo by Mary Kamradt
Nicole Larrabee of Cushing is the owner of Superior Restoration in Camden. As board treasurer she brings 15 years of experience in financial services. With an MBA focusing on management she wants to help spread awareness of domestic violence in the workplace, highlighting its financial impact in the business community.
Photo by Patrisha McLean
Pamela Gagnon da Silva, LCPC, of Hancock, is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC) dedicated to fostering interdependence, equality, and resilience in response to oppression and trauma and has worked exclusively with domestic abuse survivors for the past decade. She is the founder of Resilient Women, a place of support and connection for women impacted by abuse. She teaches Intimate Partner Violence Dynamics and Community Response and Introduction to Feminist Therapy at College of the Atlantic and is the recipient of the John D. Burchard Award for her contributions to the mental health field specific to her work with Maine teenagers seeking to end dating violence.
Dr. Elizabeth True of Sedgwick is the Vice President for Student Affairs at Eastern Maine Community College in Bangor. She also serves as the college’s Title IX Coordinator, and is the Maine State Community Colleges’ representative to the Maine Higher Education Interpersonal Violence Advisory Commission.
Liz previously worked at Maine Maritime Academy. She first became engaged in the work of preventing and responding to incidents of interpersonal violence as a volunteer on the crisis hotline for the Rutland Vermont Women’s Shelter.
Alex Kasser of Cape Elizabeth is an advocate, attorney and former Connecticut State Senator. In 2018 she flipped a seat to become the first Democrat in 90 years to represent Greenwich, CT in the State Senate. In 2021, she introduced and championed Jennifers’ Law, which became one of the first laws in the nation to define coercive control as domestic abuse.
Alex is a graduate of Phillips Academy, Andover, Wesleyan University, University of Chicago Law School and the Yale School of Environmental Studies.
Director of Operations
Mary Kamradt brings over 20 years of administrative management in Human Resources and data administration. Before joining Finding Our Voices, she worked as the data coordinator for the largest domestic violence agency in Seattle, WA, where she performed data reporting in compliance with all government contracts and also maintained the confidential client database. She is committed to utilizing her professional skills and lived experiences to support survivors and educate the community about domestic violence in Maine.
Listen to Patrisha’s Podcast with Mary here.
Sisterhood of Survivors
Hundreds of Maine domestic abuse survivors get strength from each other by connecting in person and also online. We gather for healing retreats and workshops, to get our posters up in downtown business windows, and to talk about the pattern of injustice in our personal experiences that speak to systemic shame, and how to bring about the necessary change.
When a survivor wants to publicly share their story, we provide a platform for them to help us spread awareness, including with our panel discussions, Patrisha’s podcast, and most visibly the ground-breaking and award-winning Finding Our Voices posters that in more than 100 Maine towns are alerting the general public to the raging public health emergency that is domestic abuse, erasing the stereotype, and letting our sister-survivors know they are not alone, it is not their shame or their fault, and there IS a way out.
