OCCUR Board of Directors
The movers and shakers of OCCUR
Sister Marie de Porres Taylor, Board Chair
Sister Marie de Porres Taylor is a Program Administrator and Educator with over 25 years of experience and service to communities in the East Bay region of Northern California. She is the former Director of Community Based Services of the Catholic Youth Organization, where she oversaw the agency’s diverse programs including its Foster Family Agency, Canal Family Services, Mission Day Care and CYO Athletics programs. She has lead aggressive and successful resource development campaigns for several community services agencies such as Oakland Housing Authority, Oakland Private Industry Council and the Office of the Mayor of Oakland. She has also served as the Department Chair of Home Economics at Holy Names High School, Oakland and as the Director of the Black Catholic Pastoral Center for the Diocese of the Oakland, CA.
Brian K. Woodson Sr., Secretary
Servant Brian K. Woodson, Sr. is the founding pastor of the Bay Area Christian Connection (BACC). BACC is an inner city church with a full service women’s treatment program called Covenant Sisters and a feeding program that this year has distributed over 453,000 lbs of food to the inner-city residents of Oakland Ca. Pastor Woodson’s educational training includes a Bachelor of Industrial Design Degree from Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York; Master of Divinity from United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio; and most recently continuing studies in Old Testament at the Graduate Theological Seminary, University of California at Berkeley. He has traveled in Europe, Scandinavia, Israel and most recently to Burkina Faso, Africa.
Paul Pryde, Board Member
Paul Pryde is a public policy and finance consultant specializing in solutions to the capital and credit problems of underserved businesses and communities. He was responsible for organizing one of the first securitized sales of small business loans financed with federal funds and subsequently advised states and localities on the valuation and/or sale of over $100 million in economic and community development loans. More recently, he was principal author of a feasibility report, for the U.S. Treasury’s CDFI Fund, on the securitization of community development loans and served as chief policy consultant for the U.S. Treasury Department’s $1.5 billion State Small Business Credit Initiative.
Mr. Pryde has been a consultant to, and board member of, a number of national policy development organizations, including Wall Street Without Walls, the Capital Access Task Force of the Minority Business Development Agency, the Northeast-Midwest Institute, the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, the Finance Projectland the Corporation for Enterprise Development where he served a four-year term as chairperson. He is also the author and co-author of several publications on markets, economic development and entrepreneurship, including Black Entrepreneurship in America, an examination of enterprise formation and economic progress in the African-American community. Mr. Pryde is a graduate of Howard University and has conducted graduate work in business and public administration at George Washington University.