About Us
Fur-Free Massachusetts is a nonprofit organization devoted to shaping a more just world for animals by banning the sale of new fur products across Massachusetts. Fur sale bans complement the many fur farming bans that are being implemented internationally to expedite the demise of this cruel industry, which results in the deaths of over 100,000,000 animals every year.
We work at both the state and local level, advocating fur-free policies with legislators while working with activists to introduce fur sale bans in their own communities. We take a bottom-up approach, believing that organized and sustained grassroots activism at the local government level is the most effective path to broader change statewide and nationally. To date, we have helped implement fur sale bans in six municipalities across Massachusetts: Wellesley, Weston, Brookline, Plymouth, Cambridge, Lexington, Attleboro, and Arlington.
Liza Oliver, Founder & President
Liza started Fur-Free Massachusetts in 2019 with a citizens petition to ban fur sales in Wellesley, making it the first municipality in the country outside of California to pass such a measure. She is a longtime social and environmental justice advocate, seeing animal rights as integral to both. For her day job, she is an associate professor of visual culture and South Asia studies at Wellesley College. She teaches and publishes on British and French colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in India. She lives in Cambridge with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (her cat), Penny and Maisie (her two dogs), and a few humans.
Lauren Nessralla, Board Member
Lauren has been involved with animal rights since she was sixteen years old - much of this work being fur-free campaigns. Inspired by previous fur ban ordinances in MA, she spearheaded a ban on fur products in her community of Plymouth, MA. A political science student at UMass Boston and a town meeting member for Plymouth, she focuses her energy on finding ways to influence policy to fight for social justice.
Nirva Patel, Board Member
Nirva is the Global Policy Fellow in the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School and a passionate advocate for animal welfare. She is also a registered patent attorney, biomedical engineer, and executive producer for several plant-based films, including “The Game Changers,” “The End of Medicine,” and “Meat Me Halfway.” For close to a decade, Nirva worked in animal advocacy in Mumbai, India. In the U.S., she has individually sparked many advocacy campaigns, including successfully pushing to ban the sale of fur in Weston, Massachusetts, and demanding Jain temples across the U.S. in 2018 remove ghee and dairy from their offerings. She has provided strategic fundraising efforts for numerous non-profit capital and development campaigns in Boston. Nirva holds a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University, a J.D. from The New England School of Law, and an M.S. in Animals and Public Policy from Tufts University. Her passion for animals was predicated by the Jain philosophy of ahimsa (non-violence), which advocates a vegan lifestyle. She lives in Boston with her husband, four children, and two rescued rabbits.