The Elm Hill FSC pays tribute to Councilor Chuck Turner for 40 years of initiating change to better the lives of those in his community. 

Councilor Turner acknowledges that he is only as strong as those who have supported him.  But such an admission hardly does justice to his significant resume of activism that has resonated throughout Boston.   

Since 1999, Councilor Turner has represented parts of Roxbury, the South End, Dorchester and Fenway for the Boston City Council.  He is the chair of the Education and Human Rights Committees and the vice chair of the Youth Violent Crime Committee.  Among his many triumphs defending civil and human rights, Councilor Turner was instrumental in the effort to protect affirmative action in Massachusetts and has rallied against educational inequalities in Boston’s public schools.

ouncilor Turner has served as director of a local Community Development Corporation, a counselor at a batterers' treatment organization and as an education director at a non-profit consulting firm.  He battled job discrimination as leader of the United Community Construction Workers and chair of the Boston Jobs Coalition, and worked with families losing their homes to gentrification.  He formed a community action group to pressure the city to provide trash clean-up in black neighborhoods and led demonstrations to highlight inadequacies in enforcement of building codes in public housing.  He played a leading role in the campaign to prevent construction of a highway through predominantly black neighborhoods and chaired the Southwest Corridor Land Development Corporation.

Councilor Turner has a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard, was a Community Fellow at MIT and was awarded an honorary degree from Roxbury Community College.