Businesswomen's Fall Luncheon 2014

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Our Annual Women's Fall luncheon is coming up!  Join the Chamber and area business women for a luncheon at the beautiful Gloucester House Restaurant, where we will celebrate this years Carolyn O'Connor Scholarship award winner. This Scholarship is awarded each year to an area woman who is trying to better her situation by going back to school in order to finish her education or to start a new career. 

The Business Woman's comittee holds events through out the year with the goal of raising money to fund this scholarship. 

This year, we are honored to have Dr. Angela Sanfilippo, the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Fishermen's Partnership, be the keynote speaker of our event.

In all things, from the time of her birth in 1950 in the tiny Sicilian town of Porticello, near Palermo, through her family's emigration to the United States in 1963 when she was 13, to her rise to the pinnacle of advocacy for fishermen and fishing families in Gloucester and beyond, Angela Orlando Sanfilippo has been a loyal daughter of the sea, of fishermen and fishing families.

Working tirelessly within the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association, which she has led since 1977 and more recently with the Fishing Partnership Support Services and other service non-profits, Sanfilippo has provided extraordinary influence over every corner of the commercial fishing industry.

They know her name on the docks of Gloucester, New Bedford and up and down the coast of Massachusetts, just as they know of this little dynamo in the ornate halls of Beacon Hill and the congressional hearing rooms of Washington D.C.

Most importantly to Angela, they know her name in the rooms where the fishing families of Gloucester gather.

It is within these rooms that she has done her most ardent work, where she has spent incalculable hours lending assistance to the families employed by the industry that, by any objective measurement, merely invented Gloucester.

Sometimes the task was to get a fishing family signed up for health insurance. Other times its was to find emergency financial assistance to help pay bills or maybe the task was to provide a name or two to help a laid-off fisherman find work.

These are the rooms in which Angela's shadow stretched to its fullest, as if through pure determination and unceasing will she could hold back the perfect storm of regulatory, economic, political and environmental forces that have conspired to set the fishing community _ her fishing community _ in such peril.

She became a respected national figure, giving face and voice to the industry's dilemma while establishing herself as an honest caretaker of the sea

Angela has led the Fishermen's Wives Association for 37 years and scored a huge victory in 1979 when, working alongside environmentalists, she led opposition to plans to drill for oil on the rich fishing grounds of Georges Bank.

She helped block ocean dumping and the mining of sand and gravel on Stellwagen Bank, as well as the placement of two LNG deep water port pumping stations on fishing grounds.

She spent 12 years as the project manager of the Commonwealth Corporation Gloucester Fishermen and Families Assistance Center, helping retain fishermen and their families for work outside the fishing industry.

She has worked closely with the U.S. Coast Guard on safety training, helped establish the Fishing Partnership Health Plan as the only health insurance plan for fishermen in the U.S. and worked to designate Stellwagen Bank as a marine sanctuary.

Today she is the director of support service for the Fishing Partnership's Gloucester office, where she also has been certified as a community healthcare navigator.

Her efforts also include trying to create new consumer markets for under-utilized species of seafood, such as whiting, to offset the decline in the availability in historically rich species such as cod and haddock.

Angela serves as a board member of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, Massachusetts Fishermen's Partnership, Fishing Partnership Support Services, Commercial Fishermen of America, the Gloucester Fishing Community Preservation Fund, the Gloucester Fisheries Commission, the Boston Fisheries Foundation and the Governor's Commission for Massachusetts Seafood Marketing Program.

She has been honored for her work by everyone from the Coast Guard to the Italian Navy.

In May 2009, Salem State University bestowed an honorary doctorate of letters degree on Angela for her environmental and community leadership.

Two years later, Bridgewater State University gave her its 2011 Public Service Award in recognition of her dedicated public service.

Last year, she received the prestigious Friend of the Fishing Industry Award from the Offshore Mariners' Wives Association.

According to a wonderful story in Mark Kulansky's "The Last Fish Tale," in 1963, Angela, then a child in Porticello met a teenage fisherman by the name of John Sanfilippo on the day of a fierce storm. She remembered him returning from sea with news that his brothers had drowned in the storm.

Almost miraculously, the brothers survived and returned and few years later the Sanfilippo brothers moved to Gloucester.

Angela's family was already in Gloucester and the Sanfilippo’s brother coming she met John Sanfilippo again. They now have been married for 44 years and have raised three children: Dominic, 44; Mary Anne, 39; and Giovanna, 34. Also Angela has helped raise her brother Vincent, who has special needs and lives with Angela since their mother passed away in 2013.

They have three grandchildren, with Julia the most recent addition on Sept. 29, 2014