Activist Sandra Faiman-Silva Receives Human Rights Champion Award
Longtime activist and founding member of No Place For Hate Falmouth Sandra Faiman-Silva was honored recently with an award that acknowledges her lifelong dedication to human rights on Cape Cod and beyond.
Dr. Faiman-Silva, who received her doctorate of cultural anthropology from Boston University, was honored with the Tim McCarthy Human Rights Champion Award on December 10 at the Barnstable County Human Rights Commission Breakfast. The award was created in memory of longtime activist Tim McCarthy and recognizes activism leaders in the community. Massachusetts legislators including William R. Keating, Susan L. Moran, Kipp A. Diggs, and David T. Vieira were present at the awards ceremony and commended Dr. Faiman-Silva for her work across various fields.
“Sandy is one of those people who devotes herself to so many causes that you wonder when and if she finds time to sleep,” Rep. Keating said. “From her accomplished career in academia and her local work with groups like the Falmouth No Place For Hate Committee, Dr. Faiman-Silva continues to impact the lives of so many of us.”
Dr. Faiman-Silva was honored specifically for her work on ensuring that all Massachusetts families have access to high-quality, affordable early childhood education and childcare, as well as her fieldwork that led to her book “The Courage to Connect: Sexuality, Citizenship, and Community in Provincetown,” which was published in 2004. In the book, Dr. Faiman-Silva examines the late 19th- and early 20th-century history of the town to discern how a once small Portuguese fishing village became a hub of acceptance and liberty for people across a divide of differences, especially LGBTQ+ individuals.
“The childcare work I’m doing is an ongoing activity,” she said in a phone interview this week. “It’s a campaign for affordable, accessible, high-quality early education and childcare for all Massachusetts families. It’s called the Common Start Campaign, which has given rise to a piece of legislation called the Common Start Bill that is now before the Massachusetts Legislature. It’s being considered in the Legislature’s state education committee at the moment [and]… it’s really a template for how that would be accomplished.”
Dr. Faimain-Silva said she was honored to be recognized with this award, as social justice is something she has been passionate about since she was a young girl. She said that in high school, she first got involved in civil rights after participating in a campaign to boycott the segregated Boston Public School District. Despite living in Needham, Dr. Faiman-Silva traveled to Boston with her sister to participate and speak with fellow boycotting students. Her activism work continued through college and by the time she moved to Falmouth in 1984, she was already pretty established as an activist for environmental, human, civil, and labor rights. She soon started as a professor of anthropology at Bridgewater State, where she taught for about three decades.
“In a way, I essentially view it as my teaching and activism were in a dialectical relationship where teaching informed my activism and my research also informed my activism,” Dr. Faiman-Silva said. “I was very interested in workers and labor and inequality in the workforce, economic inequality in particular, and that gave rise to my work for my PhD dissertation in anthropology of the Choctaw Tribe of Oklahoma.”
In 1997 Dr. Faiman-Silva’s first published work focused on the relationship and history between the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and Choctaw Tribe, a group in southeastern Oklahoma that once was the proprietor of a 10 million-acre estate but was living in absolute poverty at the time of her fieldwork.
“They were all poor people who lived amidst tremendous wealth in timber,” she said, “so how did it come to pass that these people inhabited rich lands but were so impoverished? I explored how Weyerhaeuser came to own that land through a long history of the stealing of land from Native American people in rural southeast Oklahoma, forcing them to sell their land… So that was sort of my first research project as a professor, integrating some of the areas of my own life that I thought were really crucial to understanding why we have so much poverty in the United States against so much wealth.”
Dr. Faiman-Silva’s activism in Falmouth is perhaps the most obvious example of how wide her reach is and how deep her impact on the community has been. Since her move here in 1984, she has served as president of the board of directors of Independence House, a community-based Cape Cod organization that provides assistance and safety to domestic violence and sexual assault survivors and promotes empowerment.
“I sat on the board [of Independence House] for a few years and I’ve been sponsoring a fundraising team for the Falmouth Road Race for about 12 years,” she said. “We have a team of usually about 10 runners who raise money as a numbers for nonprofits team organized through the Falmouth Road Race committee. We’ve raised probably close to $200,000. It’s quite a bit of work, but we have really done a good job.”
Over the decades, Dr. Faiman-Silva has also been a member of various grassroots human rights organizations that promote diversity. One of these groups was Falmouth Diversity 2000, which served as the blueprint for the establishment of No Place For Hate Falmouth, of which Dr. Faiman-Silva was a founding member.
As a Town Meeting member, Dr. Faiman-Silva has spearheaded a number of articles intended to benefit the community through promotion of diverse acceptance and unity against high-profile problems, such as discrimination and unfair labor practices. Some of the articles she has sponsored and helped pass include the establishment of Falmouth’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer position that is now filled by Jacquelyn Hartman, the adoption of new language for Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and the establishment of a townwide task force on workforce sustainability aimed at solving the crisis of the diminishing workforce of young people on Cape Cod. This latest initiative is currently being worked on by the town, and the select board is working with Town Manager Julian M. Suso to establish a functioning task force. She has also been an advocate for environmental justice in Falmouth and is a strongly opposed to the military base machine gun firing range, for example, due to the threat it poses to the town’s sole-source aquifer.
“I’m happy to be part of it,” Dr. Faiman-Silva said of her activism work. As a retiree, she says she feels as though she is in a privileged position to use her time and resources in a way that will bring about the betterment of Falmouth and beyond.
“I hope that my work is a model for people to do what they can, whatever that is, for social justice [and] progressive change. Whether it’s making phone calls to their state legislators, writing letters to the editor, or giving donations to progressive causes… We’re at a very dangerous time, and I feel like it’s particularly crucial for us to continue this kind of work and make citizens aware that they have the power to be the best country we can be and the best town we can be.”