MAAP TEAM
MAAP STAFF
Cassie Hurd (she/her), Executive Director
Cassie Hurd(she/her) is the Executive Director of the Material Aid and Advocacy Program (MAAP) where she offers direct support to, learns from, and organizes alongside unhoused community members and people who use drugs. She has been with MAAP since 2006, was integral in establishing MAAP as an independent organization that is responsive, accountable, and shares power with our community members. She continuously works to uphold MAAP’s organizational values in our work and organizational planning, and dismantle the false binary between direct service and community organizing. Cassie runs our community drop-in space, conducts outreach, engages in sweep response alongside Rachel. She also leads MAAP’s advocacy and organizing work, and engages in participatory action research.
Prior to working with unhoused community members she worked as a sexual health, substance use prevention and harm reduction community educator and crisis responder at a community health center. She is a founding member of the Boston Homeless Solidarity Committee and SIFMA Now!, and organized with No Boston 2024 whose efforts defeated the proposed Boston 2024 Olympic bid. She is a lifelong resident of Great Boston and holds a B.A. in American Studies and Sociology from UMASS Boston.
Rachel Bolton (she/her), Program & Outreach Coordinator
Rachel Botlon is MAAP’s Program and Outreach Coordinator. Rachel runs our community drop-in space, conducts outreach, and engages in sweep response alongside Cassie. She also develops and leads our training program, and engages in participatory action research and community organizing. Rachel first worked with MAAP as a volunteer in 2021, partnering up with Cassie and Sarah on outreach at Mass & Cass, where they shared safer use supplies, food, and survival supplies with community members surviving outside during the first winter of COVID. When an opportunity to join MAAP’s staff popped up it was really exciting!
Rachel comes to MAAP with a background in harm reduction and crisis response. Rachel has worked alongside unhoused community members and people who use drugs in Greater Boston since 2018. Rachel was the Outreach Coordinator at ACCESS: Drug User Health Program, the local needle exchange and naloxone distribution spot. Prior to that she worked on the drop-in floor at Women’s Lunch Place, a space that served about 150-200 unhoused women daily. She worked on Massachusetts’s suicide hotline, and on a warm line that supported survivors of sexual violence after assault, offering support and information to help people navigate complex process of reporting. She also did wilderness search and rescue, which involved extensive first responder training and triaging medical emergencies.
MAAP BOARD
Sarah Casey (she/her), Chair
Sarah Casey is a founding member of the MAAP Board of Directors, and has served as Board Chair since 2019. She is a harm reductionist who currently works at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) as a Clinical Research Coordinator in their Substance Use Disorders Initiative. Sarah has been involved in harm reduction work since 2012. She is a founding member of SIFMA Now!, a grassroots advocacy group focused on changing drug policy in Massachusetts to authorize overdose prevention centers, and is passionate about meaningful inclusion of people who use drugs in policy and decision making processes and increasing autonomy for people who use drugs. Prior to working at MGH, Sarah worked at various syringe service and drug user health programs in Massachusetts. She is honored to continue to work in partnership with community members at MAAP.
Abby Kim (she/her), Treasurer
Abby Kim has served as Treasurer of the MAAP Board since joining 2021. Abby is the Policy Director for the MA Department of Public Health Bureau of Substance Addiction Services. Prior to joining BSAS, she was the Senior Director of Public Policy at the Association for Behavioral Healthcare (ABH), responsible for the legislative, budgetary, and regulatory agenda for 80 community-based mental health and substance use treatment providers. Prior to working for ABH, Abby was Legislative Director in MA State Senator John F. Keenan’s office and a clinical researcher in addiction medicine. Abby is a former Rappaport Public Policy Fellow and New Leaders Council Fellow and has a Master’s in Public Health in Health Policy and Law. She is passionate about leveraging policy to reduce the harms of drug use and to ensure the dignity and autonomy of people who use drugs.
Tehya Johnson, NP (she/her), Clerk
Tehya Johnson has served as the Clerk of the MAAP Board of Directors since 2021. Tehya is an active member of SIFMA Now! and works as a Nurse Practitioner in Boston providing primary care and harm reduction services to the community at Mass and Cass and through street based outreach across Boston. She is passionate about working alongside community members experiencing homelessness and people who use drugs, and feels advocacy cannot be done without the involvement of those directly impacted by policy and services. Tehya came to MAAP as she shares this value with the organization and felt her experience in Boston working in both direct service and organizing circles could be beneficial to the work. She is very proud of the work MAAP does supporting community members, and is grateful to work with the Board to support MAAP’s mission.
Jim Stewart (he/him), Director
Jim Stewart is a founding member of the MAAP Board of Directors. He has been Director of the First Church Shelter since 1987. Jim was a founding member of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, Massachusetts Right to Housing, the Boston Homeless Solidarity Committee and SIFMA Now! He also was a founding member of Housing Now, which brought over 100,000 people to Washington DC to demand increased federal support for the creation and maintenance of truly affordable housing. He serves on the MAAP Board as he believes that MAAP is one of the few organizations that engage poor and unhoused people with the respect and compassion they deserve and that is necessary to support them in taking leadership roles to create meaningful change to the interconnected crisis they are surviving.
John Bach (he/him), Director
John Bach is a founding member of the MAAP Board of Directors, where he serves as a liaison to the Friends Meeting at Cambridge where MAAP is located. John has been a Quaker and peace activist for all his adult life. John endeavors to live an engaged life, taking part in the “burning issues of the day” while also pursuing a spiritual path, and refusing to separate the one from the other. John was a draft resister who spent three years in seven different US federal prisons organizing alongside the Berrigan Brothers and unhoused advocate Mitch Snyder. John knows policing, including entities that police and policies that criminalize people, are based on institutional racism and white supremacy, inequality and domination, and result in poverty as a death sentence with many cruel faces. John continues to resist and organize to choke off resources from monsters who police, occupy, criminalize, and kill and demand these resources be reallocated to support our community. John is a member of the Friends Meeting at Cambridge sharing circle for people who have experienced incarceration or who are involved in the criminal legal system. He is the Quaker Chaplain at Harvard and makes his living as a house painter.
Jennifer Hogue, M.Ed. (she/her), Director
Jennifer Hogue has served on the MAAP Board of Directors since 2022, where she serves as a liaison to the Friends Meeting at Cambridge where MAAP is located. Jennifer has been a public educator for over 30 years with a passion for making high level curricula accessible to all students. Her work with students involved in the criminal legal system inspires her activism in a variety of community-based prison justice and abolition organizations. Jennifer is a member of the Friends Meeting at Cambridge sharing circle for people who have experienced previous incarceration or who are involved in the criminal legal system. She has deep roots in the Cambridge community and has been an active member of Friends Meeting at Cambridge for decades. She is drawn to working with MAAP because the organization lives out the Quaker tenets of seeing that of God in everyone and working for a more just world now.
Maia Raynor (she/her), Director
Maia Raynor has served on the MAAP Board of Directors since 2023, where she serves on the Development Committee. Maia is a proud Black feminist from the ancestral Massachuset and Wampanoag lands of Boston. She is an avid organizer, mentor and anti-capitalist strategist. The core of all of her work and relationships is a desire to cultivate community-based modes of collective care with a focus on Black, queer and trans organizing spaces. Led by her experiences working to prevent sexual violence, protect survivors and provide reproductive care, Maia believes we can achieve safety and care for all.
Maia is happiest when pursuing justice in education, housing, health or working with young people to develop tomorrow's leaders. She is fueled by the desire to address and dismantle systems of oppression within institutions to leverage power for long awaited social change. After studying Peace and Justice Studies and Public Health at Tufts University, she began to apply these concepts and methodologies to develop a critical lens—at the core of which lie care, equity, and liberation—with which to undertake the task of creating a more just world. From her experience working with organizers and activists, government agencies, the Massachusetts state legislature, youth organizations, NGOs and nonprofits, she is hopeful for the future and ready to create sustainable change!