Pamela Cooper-White

Pamela Cooper-White began her education as an art and music major at Boston University, graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree Magna cum Laude. She went on to earn both a PhD at Harvard University in historical musicology with a dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron, and a Master of Divinity with Honors at Harvard Divinity School. Music was a bridge to ministry—she discerned a call to ordained ministry while serving as a church music director. During her MDiv program, inspired by the Catholic Worker movement, she founded and directed a ministry for men and women living on the streets in Salem, MA, and first became involved in working with battered women and their children. While seeking her first call to ministry, she taught musicology from 1982-1983 at UCLA and served as a shelter and hotline volunteer at Sojourn Services for Battered Women in Santa Monica, CA. In 1994 she was ordained to the ministry in the United Church of Christ and was called as Director of San Francisco Partnership Ministry—a coalition of 6 urban churches—overseeing a multi-service agency for Southeast Asian refugees and leading a ministry of accompaniment for Salvadoran pastors who had received death threats.