The Family Quest Society membership virtual meeting is being held this Saturday, January 27 from 11am-1pm. Our speaker is Pennsylvania State Representative Christoper M. Rabb. Rep. Rabb was the Opening Plenary Speaker at the 2023 Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society meeting.
A native of Chicago, Chris Rabb has lived in East Mt. Airy for 20 years and is the proud father of two sons. He is a long-time genealogist and family historian who for over 30 years has traced the footprints of his ancestors, most notably his great-great-great grandfather, Rev. Amos Noë Freeman, who was a radical Presbyterian minister, educator and abolitionist who worked with the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee in the fight against slavery.
Rep. Rabb is a graduate of Yale College and earned an M.S. in Organizational Dynamics from the University of Pennyslvania. He is one of the most prolific legislators in the state legislature, he has helped secure over $4 million for community stakeholders across the district including churches, schools, colleges, museums and other entities. Most recently, he led the campaign to rededicate Allens Lane, originally named after enslaver William Allen Jr., to honor a more befitting namesake: Bishop Richard Allen. .
Chris Rabb is a father, educator, author, consultant, and member of the Pennsylvania House of Representative representing roughly 64,000 people in upper northwest Philadelphia.
He served as a U.S. Senate legislative aide and writer, researcher and trainer at the White House Conference on Small Business during the Clinton administration.
While a visiting researcher at Princeton University, Rabb wrote the ground-breaking book, Invisible Capital: How Unseen Forces Shape Entrepreneurial Opportunity (2010) which addresses modern U.S. entrepreneurship through the lens of structural inequality.
In 2011, Rabb was recruited to teach at Temple University Fox School of Business where he was the Social Impact Fellow at the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute and taught social entrepreneurship and organizational innovation.
In his fourth year of teaching at Temple, Rep. Rabb helped to successfully unionize 1,500 fellow adjunct professors in a landslide victory for worker rights.
He was a long-time board member of the national racial justice think tank, Race Forward, and the oldest Black, family-owned newspaper in the U.S., the Baltimore Afro-American Newspaper Company, founded by his great-great grandfather in 1892.
In 2018, Rep. Rabb successfully created the first of its kind Equity Committee within the Pennsylvania House Democratic Caucus and is its founding chair which evaluates and makes recommendations regarding social equity issues related to policy, membership, personnel, legal, procurement, communications and appropriations. Rep. Rabb currently serves on the following committees: Judiciary, Commerce, Finance and Agriculture and Rural Affairs and has enacted 4 bills into law in his first four years.
Rep. Rabb presently serves on the boards of the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators (NCEL), the executive committee of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators (NBCSL) and a member of the National Conference of State Legislators’ Energy Supply Task Force.
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To request an invitation to this online meeting and the Zoom link, send an email to Family Quest Society Chapter Secretary Avis McMillan at afjmavis@verizon.net.