Board of Directors:
Bob Park, chairman
Gerda Bikales (emeritus)
Dr. Cliff Colwell
K.C. McAlpin
Dr. Rosalie Porter
Leo Sorensen
Dr. John Tanton
Phil Kent

Gerda Bikales is a naturalized American, a Holocaust survivor, and founding director of ProEnglish. She is the author of Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, an autobiographical account of her and her mother’s harrowing flight across Nazi occupied Europe during World War II. Her interest in protecting English as our unifying national language arose from her personal experience learning English as a sixteen year old immigrant to the United States.

A graduate of Upsala College and Rutgers University, Mrs. Bikales holds a Masters degree in Social Welfare. She has served as program officer in a number of public interest organizations in the fields of environment and population, and has written extensively on immigration, assimilation, and language policy. She was a founding board member and first executive director of US English, the official English advocacy organization founded by John Tanton and the late U.S. Senator S.I. Hayakawa.

In addition her service on ProEnglish’s board of directors, Mrs. Bikales served as the founding chair of the organization’s national board of advisors. She retired from both positions in 2006, becoming ProEnglish’s first director emeritus, but remaining a member of its national board of advisors.

(Read her essay, “Invaluable and Insignificant: A Meditation on U.S. Citizenship.”)