Last updated on February 8, 2022

Gina Collins Cummings, a 1984 graduate of Livingston College at Rutgers University, has been a political activist since elementary school, when she wrote a letter to her own teacher, questioning that teacher’s insistence that people came only in black and white, not the many subtle shades and colors that Gina innocently recognized in her friends.

The Livingston Alumni Association honored Cummings as a Distinguished Alumna in 2004.

Cummings organized Livingston College students to form a chapter of the New Jersey Public Interest Group (NJPIRG), and she went on to become the NJPIRG Student Chapters Organizing Director and Summer Canvass Regional Director.

She also founded an organization called Green Corps, which trained aspiring young activists to become grassroots environmental organizers, where she worked for 10 years. While organizing Green Corps, she was also the USPIRG Field Director and ran environmental campaigns in all 50 states.

Cummings later served as Director of Constituency Outreach, then Director of Operations, for Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). In that capacity, she has developed and implemented the strategic plans for a number of PHR campaigns, including Health Action AIDS, the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines, the Campaign to Eliminate Conflict Diamonds. and the Campaign for Women’s Health in Afghanistan. At PHR she has also focused on an international effort to fight AIDS and an effort to abolish the death penalty for juveniles in the United States.

Cummings, a native of Long Island, New York, is married to Tom Cummings. They have two children.