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Michaelann Bewsee, Anti-poverty Activist, Dies

     A noted activist in western Massachusetts has died.

    Michaelann Bewsee spent more than 30 years as a community organizer advocating against poverty and war and for environmental policies to combat climate change.

       She was 71.

       Bewsee helped found Arise for Social Justice in Springfield in 1985 during a state budget battle over welfare benefits.

    As she prepared to retire as director of the organization last October, Bewsee spoke with WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief Paul Tuthill.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.
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