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Maria Brenes is the Executive Director for InnerCity Struggle based in the Eastside of Los Angeles. Maria has been involved in youth and community organizing movements for nearly 30 years. At ICS, she has advanced policy victories in education, housing and civic engagement. She also led a successful capital campaign establishing the organization's headquarters and the Eastside's first youth and community organizing center. She is the proud mom of 2 LA public school students and practices yoga.

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Nancy Xiong (she/her) grew up in Merced, CA as the youngest of ten siblings and is the daughter of Hmong refugee parents from Southeast Asia. These experiences fueled her passion for health and education equity for underserved populations. In her previous capacity, she worked as an AmeriCorps VISTA for a local nonprofit helping to build advocacy and organizational capacity in the Southeast Asian community throughout California. Her background also includes youth development, program management, community engagement and outreach, and working closely with first-generation college students and young SEAA professionals.

As a first-generation college student herself, she graduated from UC Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in Public Health and a minor in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies. In her spare time, she enjoys thrift shopping, DIY home projects, and cooking.

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Juan Gomez is a member of the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, descendant of the Zacatecas Chichimeca lineage and Chicano. He is a formerly incarcerated, politicized circle keeper, movement builder and barrio “community” scholar. He is Co-Founder and Executive Director at MILPA. His work spans almost 20 years and includes integrating cultural healing into racial justice frameworks and practices that build next generation leadership, and infrastructure in support of formerly incarcerated and other survivors of state sanctioned violence.

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Felicia Jones is the Associate Director & Chief Strategist with Congregations Organized for Prophetic Engagement (COPE) in San Bernardino, CA.  In this role, she supports the organizations multi-issue racial and social justice organizing through campaign strategy, coalition building, policy advocacy, and grassroots leadership development.  She has spearheaded and facilitated multiple collective impact efforts bringing community and institutions together to advance racial equity through creation of new institutional policies, practices, and investments in racial equity. She has extensive experience in education reform and worked to expand the role of parents and community in education policy making, advocated for resource equity for black student achievement, and supports local and statewide efforts to transform school climate and decriminalize youth in schools.

She currently serves as a co-chair of the Inland Empire Black Equity Initiative, is a regional coalition of Black-led organizations developing a shared agenda for policy and systems change to uplift black people and communities across the Inland Empire. As a co-chair, she also helped to establish the Black Equity Fund, a pooled fund effort and partnership between the IE-BEI and the Inland Empire Funders Alliance to strengthen and scale Black-led and empowering organizations’ sustainability and capacity to lead systems change work.  She is also a founding member of Building Leaders and Cultivating Change (B.L.A.C.C.), a giving circle of grassroots donors who direct their gifts to support black led community organizations working on the frontlines of racial justice. Felicia holds a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts from Mount St. Mary’s University in Los Angeles, California.

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Terry Supahan, Executive Director, True North Organizing Network.

Terry has for over 25 years worked with tribes and rural governments on California’s North Coast and throughout the West to bring communities together around their priorities for water, land, improving public schools, immigration language, housing, and community economic development. For the past eight years he has specialized in infrastructure development including strategic thinking and planning for:

Rural transportation and roads with the mission of making roads safer and more liveable and walkable

Broadband deployment and Internet access

Water planning and outreach

Regional waste management systems

Community health and tribal wellness programs

Terry designed his major in American Studies at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon with the goal of returning to live and work on the Klamath River in the ancestral territory of his people of the Karuk Tribe. He worked for four years in the Planning Department of the Hoopa Tribe, before becoming the Tribal Manager and later Councilman for over six years at the Karuk Tribe.

Terry saw a need working on projects in Indian Country for a stronger emphasis on Financial Management as well as the need for Development Financing and Capitalization; and did graduate-level course work in a certificated program of the National Development Council to become an Economic Development Finance Professional (EDFP).

Terry’s academic research and training has supported the practical experience he has gained from working on community organizing in his local region, the West as well as throughout the United States. Terry has been a consultant to the tribal representatives serving on the President’s National Ocean Council. Additionally, under a broad community organizing umbrella, Terry has facilitated a wide range of community projects that include: downtown rural revitalization and transportation systems, and financial packaging of tribal water, sewer, and infrastructure projects; as well as numerous tribal, state and regional community development projects.

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Chrissie Castro, Diné and Chicana, is the Chairperson of the Los Angeles City and County Native American Indian Commission, and co-led the change to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day in the City and County of Los Angeles, as well as the removal of the Columbus Statue in Grand Park. She co-founded two organizations to build power within Native communities – in her local state, the California Native Vote Project and nationally, Advance Native Political Leadership. She is a leadership and coach curriculum developer and trainer for multiracial grassroots leaders in service to healing, justice and liberation.

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Timmy Lu is the founding Executive Director of AAPIs for Civic Empowerment (AAPI FORCE) and AAPI FORCE-EF, organizations dedicated to building the political power of Asian American and Pacific Islander grassroots communities for racial and economic justice. He brings over fifteen years of experience in community organizing, political campaigns, and voter data management. Past work includes Field Director at Asian Pacific Environmental Network Action, Integrated Voter Engagement Coach with the Groundswell Fund, and Data Director of the Asians for Ossoff and Warnock campaign. A second-generation ethnic Chinese Vietnamese refugee, he's also a new father and a long-time Dungeons and Dragons player. Timmy is based in Oakland, CA.

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Christina Livingston is the Executive Director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). She began her organizing career in 2004 when she was hired as a field organizer for Los Angeles ACORN. In 2010 Christina helped form ACCE where she worked for 2 years as Statewide Deputy Director before becoming Executive Director in 2012.

In her organizing career Christina has worked on campaigns that addressed equitable infrastructure investment, progressive revenue solutions, housing equity, access to high quality and well-funded public services, corporate accountability, good government, representative voter engagement, and criminal justice. She centers her work at the intersection of racial and economic impacts and is passionate about increasing the voices of people of color, poor folks, and women.

Christina currently serves as the Chair of Board for the Action Center on Race and the Economy as well as the Center of Popular Democracy Action Board of Directors.

Christina graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 with a B.A. in Sociology. In 2008 she received her M.A. in Sociology from California State University, Los Angeles.

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Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles and now living in Oakland, CA, Marc Philpart has been a leader in the racial justice movement for more than a decade. He currently serves as a Managing Director at PolicyLink where he advances racial justice initiatives that build power and facilitate policy and systems change.

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Sheheryar Kaoosji is the Executive Director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center.  He has spent 20 years developing research, policy and campaign  strategies to support deep and sustained organizing among the most marginalized and critical communities in California, including families facing displacement in San Francisco, farm workers in the state's agricultural valleys, misclassified truck drivers at the Port of Los Angeles and, for the past 10 years, workers and communities affected by the massive warehousing and logistics sector of Inland Southern California. He was behind the WWRC's innovative campaign model to organize workers in the supply chains of the largest companies in the world, and the WWRC's broader communities to demand a sustainable and just goods movement sector in Southern California.

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Elly Matsumura is California Director for PowerSwitch Action, a national network bringing together leaders organizing with their neighbors and coworkers in 20 major urban areas across the country, weaving local campaigns for good jobs, strong communities, and climate justice into a nationwide movement of millions fighting for a new economy and multiracial, feminist democracy that works for all of us. As the first person to hold this role, she has co-led the founding of the California Coalition for Worker Power to align this sector around a long-term agenda to dramatically scale worker organizing, and of the Safety Net for All campaign to win inclusion of undocumented workers in the unemployment safety net. She previously spent 13 years with Working Partnerships USA, most recently as Managing Director, leading policy, research, and civic engagement projects; leadership development for elected officials and coalition allies; and the fundraising, communications, and operations team. Elly spearheaded the coalition campaign to pass the nation’s most comprehensive living wage policy, created leadership and governance training programs replicated in over a dozen regions across the country, and provided strategic advising to sister organizations on campaigns for equity in jobs and income, transportation, health, education, and formerly incarcerated workers.

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Aurea Montes-Rodriguez is the Executive Vice President at Community Coalition and has worked at the organization for more than 20 years. Born in Mexico and raised in South LA she developed a passion for creating change at the local level. Aurea has been a key leader responsible for building the organization’s youth programs to fight for educational equity, leading efforts to keep children in family care and out of the foster care system and helping to build organizing capacity in South LA. Aurea is currently leading the building of the Center for Community Organizing focused on building local power in majority people of color cities.

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Alex is the Executive Director of the Center For Empowered Politics, a new capacity building hub that supports leaders of color and grow movement infrastructure at the intersection of racial justice, organizing and power building. As the former Executive Director of the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) in San Francisco, California, Alex has nearly 20 years of experience organizing for racial and economic justice. Alex has led campaigns to organize low wage workers, winning millions of dollars in back wages and has helped to build regional and statewide c3/c4/pac civic engagement infrastructure including San Francisco Rising/Action Fund and Bay Rising/Action Fund and AAPI FORCE/Education Fund. He is a proud baba (father) of an awesome and autistic 6 year old boy and writes about parenting and politics at: www.diaryofababa.com

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Joseph Tomás Mckellar is Executive Director of PICO California, the largest faith-based organizing network in California, focused on racial equity and promoting a culture of belongingness.

Joseph founded and led Faith in New York and Faith in the Valley in California, which are members of the Faith in Action National Network dedicated to advancing racial, economic, and environmental justice.

Joseph previously worked as a Community Organizer in San Diego and Orange County, as an Assistant Teacher with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Boston, and as a Prison Minister in San Diego.

As a first-generation college graduate, Joseph earned a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Political Science, with a minor in Biology, from the University of San Diego. Joseph is also a Fellow of the inaugural class of the Civil Society Fellowship, a partnership of ADL and the Aspen Institute.

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Marinarde Soto was born in Guerrero, Mexico. Marinarde has does various work in the Central Valley. From Immigrants Rights, Youth and Community advocacy, and LGBTQ+ Youth support. Marinarde hopes someday the work she is collectively doing with others will flourish into thriving healthy communities.

Marinarde is a mother to a beautiful boy named Jordan and an older sister to five siblings. On her free time she likes to bake.

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Dawn Phillips is the Executive Director of the Right To The City Alliance (RTTC) and has been a grassroots organizer engaged in a range of social, economic, racial and environmental justice organizations and fights in the Bay Area and nationally for over 20 years. Prior to joining Right to the City Dawn was the Program Director at Causa Justa :: Just Cause (CJJC) a grassroots membership organization focused on community development, housing, and immigrant justice issues in the California Bay Area; and a founding member of the Right to the City Alliance.  Dawn has helped develop and lead local, regional, statewide and national campaigns, participated and led numerous coalitions and movement formations and authored several nationally recognized reports and articles on topics ranging from equitable development, land and housing justice, grassroots organizing, movement building and strategy. Dawn is an immigrant from Singapore and a male-identified transgender person based in occupied Ohlone territory, also known as Oakland, CA.

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Tyler Okeke, born in Los Angeles, CA, is a former Vote at 16 Youth Organizer at Power California and a third-year student at the University of Chicago. He has spent the last few years working to expand voting rights to young people in California to realize effective action on the issues young people care about -- from college affordability to housing for all. Tyler is passionate about building meaningful connections, living curiously, and using policy as a tool for social transformation.

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April Verrett serves as President of Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Local 2015 – California’s largest union, and the nation’s largest long term care union, representing over 400,000 home care and nursing home workers throughout California.

Although now based in Los Angeles, April’s story begins proudly on the South Side of Chicago. Raised by her grandmother, who worked as a locker room attendant for the Chicago Park District, herself a union steward for SEIU Local 46, April learned early on the values of perseverance, collective action, and community.

April also leads nationally for SEIU International. She is an International Vice President, chairs the union’s National Home Care Council, co-chairs the National Organizing Committee and is a member of the Finance Committee.

She has been tapped twice by Governor Newsom to serve. First in 2019 to serve on the Alzheimer’s Prevention and Preparedness Task Force which is tasked with developing a plan to address and manage Alzheimer’s disease and other aging-related conditions throughout California. Again in 2020 he selected her for his Taskforce on Business and Jobs Recovery. April’s work on the Taskforce is helping to reopen the fifth largest economy in the world post COVID-19 and ensure that the needs of all working families are front and center in the process of rebuilding our economy equitably.

April is committed to dismantling structural racism by providing equity to individuals and communities of color. April has continued to demand equity through her work with several organizations who share this vision and by elevating the voices and first hand accounts of the impact that racial inequities have had during the pandemic on Local 2015 members. April is also a member of the Committee for Greater LA, a coalition of diverse leaders who came together to understand the impact of COVID-19 on different populations.

As a labor leader and activist, April has spent most of her career helping workers form unions to ensure that their voices are heard and respected. April is a tireless advocate for working people, driven by the belief that “unions give workers a platform to fight for more than wages, benefits and working conditions, but also around everything that matters in our members’ lives and their communities.”

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Olivia Araiza is the Program Director for the Institute's Network for Transformative Change where she supports a new paradigm-shifting platform comprised of individuals and institutions dedicated to aligning a new movement to transform and penetrate our most pressing societal issues.

Previously Olivia was the executive director at Justice Matters, a racial justice organization based in Oakland, CA. Olivia’s twelve years at Justice Matters brought together her background as a daughter/sister of immigrants, mother, community organizer and policy analyst. She dedicated herself to changing the conditions communities of color experience at public schools by combining critical public policy analysis with powerful community organizing for educational justice.   While at Justice Matters, Olivia developed organizing, research and policy methodologies that view communities of color as assets to schools.  As part of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, Olivia worked as the Campaign Coordinator for the Driving While Black and Brown Campaign. Before this, she organized for police accountability in Oakland, CA for People United for a Better Oakland (PUEBLO).

Olivia relocated to the Bay Area from her home in Santa Ana, CA to go to UC Berkeley where she completed her B.A. in Latin American Studies and Spanish and Latin American Literature. She is a first-generation college graduate that benefited from Head Start and Affirmative Action programs and policies. In 2002, she completed her M.P.A. with a focus on public policy at the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University.

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Anthony Thigpenn has worked as a community organizer and political strategist for over forty years, helping to build coalitions between issue movements striving for social justice.

Mr. Thigpenn’s areas of expertise include political strategy, community organizing, voter engagement strategy and field technology, public policy, staff management and organizational development, electoral and ballot measure campaigns.  He is credited with developing a “Power Analysis” tool used by hundreds of social justice organizations across the country to develop more effective power building strategies.

Mr. Thigpenn is currently president of California Calls an ongoing alliance of 31 organizations in 12 counties around the state of California committed to achieving systemic reform of California’s broken tax policies and state budget to ensure equity and economic justice for all Californians by educating and motivating new and infrequent voters who are traditionally not part of the political process. Over the past 10 years California Calls has help win major policy victories in the areas of tax policy, education, healthcare, criminal justice by engaging over half a million young people, people of color, low-income residents, and immigrants; significantly increasing their levels voting and civic participation.

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Miya Yoshitani has been the Executive Director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network since 2013. Starting at APEN as a youth organizer in the 1990’s, Miya has an extensive background in community organizing, and a long history of working in the environmental justice movement. APEN has been fighting–and winning–environmental justice struggles for the past 28 years and remains one of the most unique organizations in the country explicitly developing the leadership and power of poor and working class Asian American immigrant and refugee communities at the intersection of racism, poverty and pollution. Miya has supported APEN’s growth and expansion from a powerful local organization in the Bay Area, to having a statewide impact through an integrated voter engagement strategy and winning transformational state policy for equitable climate solutions for all Californians.

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Ashley Uyeda, she/they, is a queer, mixed race, 4th generation Japanese American woman of color living on Tongva Territory/LA. She has over 15 years of experience in the field of youth organizing for racial, economic, and gender justice. She is currently the Capacity Building Director with Youth Organizing California, and has been committed to supporting and backing the leadership of young people of color - particularly low-income, immigrant/refugee, femme, & queer and trans youth. She has worked with SoCal for Youth in LA, a multi-racial network of youth organizations in Los Angeles, and  Khmer Girls in Action as an organizer with Cambodian American young women, where she eventually served as their Organizing Director. In her work she has developed the strategic vision and direction of local and regional campaigns, led GOTV efforts, and focused campaign work on School Based Wellness Centers, Anti-Deportation efforts, educational justice, young women’s health access and reproductive justice. In her spare time, Ashley enjoys hanging out with her niece, being a plant & fur parent, and playing Taiko drums with her troupe in Los Angeles.

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Jonathan Paik (JP) strives to transform Orange County by steering the collective power of local communities through organizing and civic engagement.

In 2015, JP organized Asian American and Latinx communities to challenge cities like Fullerton to transition from at-large to district elections, uplifting the voices of traditionally marginalized voters of color around issues like health care, housing, immigration, and education. In 2017, he helped organize young people to participate in national actions in Washington DC to demand passage of the DREAM Act from their local representatives. He was also involved in ballot measure campaigns in 2016, 2018 and 2020 that advanced critical economic and racial justice issues and congressional and county sheriff campaigns to promote bold new leadership in the region.

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Tomás Garduño is a Native New Mexican Chicano, born and raised in Albuquerque. He works as a freelance social justice movement strategist. Most recently, he worked as the National Field Director for Mijente, an independent political home for Latines in social justice. He has over 20 years experience in political strategy and campaign development. He has worked as a community organizer, campaign manager and strategic advisor for 22 grassroots social justice organizations, 4 candidate campaigns and 5 institutes/universities. His most formative experiences were his time as co-director of the SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP), managing the successful Albuquerque City Council campaign of his father Rey Garduño, and organizer of the People’s Climate March.

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Janetta Johnson (she/her) is the Executive Director at TGI Justice Project. She is a formerly incarcerated Black transgender woman and has been an activist and advocate in the transgender communities since 1997, when she moved to San Francisco from her hometown of Tampa, Florida. She survived three and a half years in federal prison, and while inside she fiercely and tirelessly advocated for her rights as an incarcerated transgender person. She became politicized through her kinship with Miss Major, her adopted trans mother, and after her release from prison returned to her work with nonprofits and social service agencies with a higher compassion for people on the inside of jails and prisons. In 2006, she put her skills as a community organizer, trainer and activist to work as Interim Director of TGI Justice Project, during which she coordinated vibrant grassroots fundraisers to support the organization. In 2014, she became the permanent Executive Director of TGIJP when Miss Major retired from the position.

She co-founded the Transgender Cultural District, the first transgender cultural district in the country, here in San Francisco in 2016 and TAJA's coalition, community accountability for Black trans safety in San Francisco. Janetta is committed to building strategies and interventions to reduce the recidivism rate of the transgender community by providing leadership development and job opportunities to those who are currently being released from custody. She is also a fierce advocate for transgender people who are currently incarcerated, working tirelessly to improve the lives of those currently on the inside through legislative campaigns like the Name and Dignity Act, which enables people in held in California prisons to change their legal name and gender, while also fighting for the abolition of prisons at large. She believes that currently and formerly incarcerated trans people without a voice will be people without hope. She will continue to struggle to instill hope and belief in a better future for every transgender person that she can reach.

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Ramla is a Mother, a Believer, an Activist committed to transformative justice and the promotion of human dignity everywhere.

She is the executive director of the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans (or PANA for short).

Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, Ramla and her family fled the civil war-torn country when she was 5 years old.  After spending a year in a Kenyan refugee camp, she and her family eventually resettled in City Heights, San Diego in 1993, where she grew up.

Witnessing as a young person the systemic and structural barriers faced by refugee women and their families, Ramla started Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, an organization that aims to bring local refugees into the political, cultural and economic mainstream of their communities. Led by the communities it serves, PANA reaches below the clay line to those who have experienced political repression and exclusion and supports community leaders to be-and-act in their power, access and assert their rights, lead on their issues, and win big for their families.

As Executive Director of PANA, Ramla Sahid has overseen the organization’s growth and prominence as it has skyrocketed in a few short years to become one of San Diego’s most important civic engagement and advocacy organizations.

She regularly speaks at conferences on the power of building and leveraging community voices to achieve equitable outcomes for families.

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Malkia Devich Cyril is a writer, public speaker and award winning activist on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation and collective grief; and is the founding and former executive director of MediaJustice — a national hub boldly advancing racial justice, rights and dignity in a digital age. In 2002, Malkia Devich Cyril helped coin the term “Media Justice”, and in 2019 declared that one significant goal of the Media Justice movement was to “fight for a future where we are all connected, represented and free.”

After more than 20 years of media justice leadership, Devich-Cyril now serves as a Senior Fellow at both Media Justice and at Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, while spearheading new projects to transform public narratives on race, power and collective grief in a digital age. Devich Cyril’s writing has been published in The Atlantic, Wired Magazine, CNN.com, The Washington Post, The Guardian, In These Times, the Nation, McSweeney’s, TechCrunch, the Progressive, Truthout and We Will Not Cancel Us — a book by Adrienne Maree Brown, among many others. Additional appearances include documentaries Outfoxed (2004), Miss Representation (2011), 13TH, the acclaimed documentary by director Ava Duvernay (2016), and Free For All: Inside the Public Library (2020).

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Jessica Lehman serves as Executive Director of Senior and Disability Action, an organization committed to mobilizing seniors and people with disabilities in the San Francisco Bay Area to fight for justice on health care, housing, transportation and other issues. She led coalition efforts to win Free Muni for seniors and people with disabilities and to create Support at Home, a new San Francisco home care program for upper-poor seniors and people with disabilities. Jessica identifies as a queer, Jewish, white disabled woman and works to honor intersectionality in her work and amplify the voices of the most marginalized people in our society. As a person with a disability who employs home attendants, Jessica supports domestic worker rights as a founding member of Hand in Hand: the Domestic Employers Network. She leads monthly Organizer’s Forum calls, as part of the National Disability Leadership Alliance, to expand organizing in the disability community and to explore collaboration with other communities.

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Laila Aziz is the Director of Operations for Pillars of the Community, a grassroots organization which works to decriminalize the residents of Southeast San Diego. She is an abolitionist who strongly believes in the power of deep organizing and the power of the people. She was the Media Spokesperson for the Million for Prisoners Human Rights March, a prisoner led movement demanding the abolition of slavery in the United States. She has worked closely with prisoners who led the hunger strike in California, and supports their efforts at parole reform and amending the 13th Amendment. Laila implemented the paid organizer fellowship, which trained incarcerated organizers in county jail who registered fellow detainees to vote. She is implementing Pillar’s Police Accountability program in San Diego which trains gang members in knowing their rights and works with them to organize around police accountability and community improvements. She works with a team of volunteers as a Participatory Defense Hub where mothers who have been impacted by incarceration organize families currently in the system to fight against over sentencing and wrongful convictions.