We appreciate these candidates running for the following Board and Officer positions for the 2021-2022 term!
Co-President
* Lori Bunton is a retired pharmaceutical executive and longtime activist for women’s rights. She spent nearly 30 years working in established companies as large as Eli Lilly and in start-up biopharmaceutical organizations. Her career spanned sales, marketing and market research. Lori has served on the boards of Planned Parenthood in TN and N.C. National Organization for Women, as well as President of the North Carolina Alliance for Healthy Communities in Raleigh. She currently serves as Co-President for the ERA-NC Alliance, where she has been a Board member for four years, serving as Secretary and VP Membership for the Alliance.
Lori has a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Tennessee. In addition to her service on boards, she volunteers with Dress for Success in Durham, NC as a career coach and serves as an advisor on their career curriculum. Lori has lived all over the U.S. and Europe and now resides in the Raleigh-Durham area.
Jimmie Cochran Pratt is a native of Haywood County, NC and holds an MPA degree from Western Carolina University. She spent her professional life in higher education with an emphasis on fund development and career leadership development at Columbia University in the City of New York, NC community colleges, and the University of Prishtina, Kosovo for the U.S. Department of State.
Jimmie is retired and a community/political activist, working for Equal Rights Amendment ratification in the 1970’s and is currently Co-President of the ERA-NC Alliance and a member of the LWVNC-ERA Lead Action Team. She served as ERA-NC Alliance vice-president for fundraising from January 2019 thru June 2020.
Vice President, Fundraising
Carter Worthy is a Raleigh native and a proud alumna of the Wake County Public Schools and St. Mary’s School. She graduated from UNC at Chapel Hill with a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies in 1981. She has been married to Tom Hester for thirty-nine years and they have two sons. She has enjoyed a successful real estate career in the Triangle region of North Carolina since 1982 and has been an active community servant in a wide variety of industry, public and volunteer roles.
Vice President, Legislation
Terry Van Duyn moved to Buncombe County in 1992 upon retirement. She was appointed to the NC Senate in April 2014 to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Sen. Martin L. Nesbitt. She won election to a full term in her own right the following November. Van Duyn served as Minority Whip from 2015-2018. During her time in the NC Senate she has been a champion for the Equal Rights Amendment, sponsoring and co-sponsoring bills to ratify the ERA.
Van Duyn has been awarded numerous honors during her time as a legislator. In 2016, she was named Legislator of the Year by Equality NC and The Arc of North Carolina named her an Outstanding Legislator in 2019.
Van Duyn grew up in the Chicago area and was the first in her family to earn a college degree: she earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Illinois, and a Master’s of Business Administration from University of Connecticut. Van Duyn is married to Ted Van Duyn, the CEO of GPM Corp. Together they have two children.
Vice President, Membership
* J. Denny McGuire I grew up in New Jersey and came to North Carolina to attend Elon College and like many others, stayed. I attended graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill, completing a Master’s Degree in Public Administration. I worked for the state of NC for more than 40 years in inter-governmental relations, public policy and technology, retiring in 2015. As a very junior employee in the NC Department of Administration, I was one of the staff assigned to monitor a Senator on the day that the ERA endorsement went down to defeat in the General Assembly in the 70’s—so you can see that my interest in the ERA is not new!
Because of my commitment to the many policy issues affecting women and girls, I served on the board of Directors of the YWCA of Wake County and have been involved with AAUW for almost 20 years on both the local and state levels. AAUW NC is a lead organization with the ERA-NC Alliance. I was first named to the Board of Directors of the NC ERA Alliance as the representative of AAUW of North Carolina and was subsequently elected to serve a second term. In 2020, I was named to the position of Vice President of Membership and am currently running to continue in that position. I ask for your support for election to the position of Vice President of Membership. Thank you
Vice President, Public Relations
Teri Walley I’ve been a passionate feminist all my life, firmly believing in every person’s right to equal treatment under the law. But by the time I graduated from college, the tide had turned against the Equal Rights Amendment. The 1980s powers-that-be told us that we had so many legal protections in place we no longer needed an ERA. In 2016, I knew the erosion of women’s rights had to end. And when my equally feminist daughter asked me, “What’s era?,” I knew I had to act.
I joined the ERA-NC Alliance in 2018 — as soon as I heard about the organization — and have been Vice President of public relations since 2019. It has been an honor to be part of a dedicated, powerhouse group of North Carolina women. They challenge me every day to bring my best to our unrelenting fight.
Secretary
Linda Stover I was born in Northern California and moved to the Southeast in 1985 for a career opportunity. I received a BS in Business Management/Economics from California State University, Sonoma where I began to recognize the limitation that women faced in their careers. In 1975, I co-founded and was co-director of Working Women, Inc., a non-profit funded to place women in trade positions working with apprenticeship program, labor unions and developers/contractors. I worked for ten years with Honeywell in the Energy Management Division in sales, marketing and management. In 1989, I joined my husband’s company marketing plumbing products to designer/contractors/wholesalers.
In 2015, I retired and began working with political groups encouraging women to run for office and getting involved in the political system. I am a member of AAUW-Asheville and a member of the Advocacy ERA and Voting Rights sub-committees. I am a member of NOW and LWV-Asheville/Buncombe. In 2017, my 1970’s passion for the ratification of the ERA was reignited and in 2019, I was elected the ERA-NC Alliance Secretary.
Treasurer
* Audrey Muck is an audio and video producer, writer and editor. She produced news, features and documentaries for public radio and television in the Carolinas, arriving in Winston-Salem in 2007 to work with the local NPR affiliate. She also served as a public relations specialist at Wake Forest University, taught web design at Forsyth Tech, and runs a multimedia production company. An independent filmmaker, her latest project is a documentary series about South Carolina women’s rights activists. She’s been involved with the National Organization for Women since the 1980’s, serving in leadership on the local, state and national levels. Audrey joined the planning group to create the ERA-NC Alliance in 2015 and has served as Vice President of Public Relations (2016-2018), Treasurer (2018-2020) and webmaster.
Board of Directors
Leila Tvedt is a native of Buncombe County but seldom lived there, since her family moved almost every two years during her father’s career as an officer in the US Navy and in the USO. She graduated from high school in Saigon, Vietnam, attended college in Japan, and earned a BA and an MA from Stetson University in Florida. After 15 years as a TV news reporter/producer for WRAL-TV in Raleigh, she served as executive director of a state agency that produced call-in shows on cable. She retired after six years as an associate vice chancellor at Western Carolina University. Leila volunteers in the guardian ad litem program for abused and neglected children and is active in Democratic politics. She is married to attorney/innkeeper Luke D. Hyde.
* Ann Von Brock Growing up a feminist in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Ann attended UNC-Greensboro, and lived in Raleigh, NC from 1974 to 1978, where she worked for Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers Association. She moved to Asheville in 1979 where she helped start grassroots nonprofits serving the Western North Carolina community. Ann was the second executive director of the local domestic violence agency, Helpmate in its early days, volunteer director for Rape Crisis Center (later to become Our Voice), and served on task forces that created WNC Aids Project, MANNA Foodbank, Trinity Shelter, and the Mediation Center. She created a women’s resource center at the YWCA in 1986 and became a community resource coordinator for United Way in 1987. She retired from her position as Vice President of Planning and Community Initiatives at United Way in December, 2015. In 2016 she completed a project with Pack Library; facilitating an oral history of social activism and social agencies in Asheville in the 1980’s. Over the years she has served on numerous boards including the Buncombe County Women’s Commission, Asheville City School Board, Community Action Opportunities, NC 2-1-1, and the NC Center for Nonprofits. A long-time advocate for women, Ann has been on the ERA-NC Alliance board for several years and currently chairs the Congressional District Action Network.
*The ERA-NC Alliance Bylaws allow Officers and Directors to seek a third consecutive two-year term upon a special vote by the Full Membership Body at an annual meeting.