The American Senior's Center was founded by William and the late Joanna Shaker (8/1942 –11/2007) in 2000. The Center is affiliated with the Rule of Law Committee and the American Council for Health Care Reform, also founded by the Shakers.
Jo, an RN, was previously president of Total Patient Care, a 600 employee home health care and hospital-staffing agency she founded in 1979, which worked closely with Hospice during its founding in Northern Virginia, providing staffing and training. Active in Republican politics, she was an At-Large Delegate to the 1976 Kansas City Convention for Ronald Reagan. In 1982 with the encouragement of President Reagan she founded Heart to Heart Foundation and the American Council for Health Care Reform. Heart to Heart raised money to provide free home nursing care to the needy, and helped provide funding for cancer vaccine research at George Washington University. The American Council for Health Care Reform worked to repeal stifling regulations that affected seniors at the state level, and fought against legislation introduced by Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1984 that would have provided for the federal takeover of the American healthcare system. The Council led the fight to defeat HillaryCare, including a successful law suite against the First Lady leading to release of undisclosed information from her Health Care Task Force.
Bill serves the Center as volunteer president. He is also CEO of the Washington Marketing Group, and has been working to improve the lives of seniors, and fighting to preserve Social Security and Medicare benefits. Earlier assignments have included serving as executive vice president of the National Tax Limitation Committee, vice president of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, and an executive with the Dow Chemical Company. A registered professional engineer, he is a graduate of the University of Southern California, and holds an MS from the University of Michigan. He authored the Tax Limitation Constitutional Amendment, passed by referendum in Michigan, and sponsored by a grassroots organization, which he founded. He edited Electric Power Reform (University of Michigan), the pioneering reference book that laid groundwork for deregulation of electric power, published the Millennium edition of The Man of Galilee and is author with his son Dr. Marcus Shaker, of At the Crossroads of Change to be published in 2011.