Peter Hainer is a long-term Board Member (since 2002) and current President of the Board of NSRWA. He lives in Norwell with his partner Pattie Hainer. He is an active board member who has been strongly committed to dam removal in our rivers and promoting healthy rivers and environmental education.
He is a retired Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts. During a 43-year career he taught undergraduates and graduate students and served as Chair in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice. He received an A.B. in Anthropology from Brown University in 1969 and worked as a VISTA Volunteer in Boston’s Grove Hall neighborhood as a community organizer working with welfare recipients. For 15 years he lived in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood with his family and was active in community affairs and a board member of the Neighborhood Housing Service. During this time, he pursued and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brandeis University, doing anthropology field work on family and household composition in Boston’s African-American community. For 15 years he consulted and engaged in research for the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Survey Methods Research in Washington, D.C., including work on under enumeration and the decennial count, household organization, and ethnicity. He continued anthropological field work intermittently but continuously for 30 years with over 7000 hours of observation with his informants in Roxbury and Dorchester. He has worked closely with police officers in the field in a number of communities since 1976 and has been a civilian member of two strategic planning groups for the Bureau of Professional Development with the Boston Police Department and an active member of the Regional Community Policing Institute for New England, serving on committees.