Our Team – James Lawson Institute

Biographies

PRESENTERS

Saqib Bhatti is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the Director of the ReFund America Project (RAP). He works on campaigns to rebalance the relationship between Wall Street and local communities by exposing the role that financial deals play in contributing to public budget distress and advances solutions to fix inefficiencies in the municipal finance system, which cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year. He works closely with labor unions and community organizations across the country to develop campaigns that are based on a populist critique of the banking industry, as informed by his research. He also serves on the board of the Responsible Endowments Coalition. Bhatti was previously a fellow at the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Prior to that he spent several years working on corporate social responsibility campaigns with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Culinary Workers Union, Local 226 in Las Vegas. He was graduated from Yale University in 2004.

Henry Cervantes serves as Program Manager for The Peace Exchange, an organization that engages youth and filmmakers in leadership training and international travel to study global nonviolent movements. Cervantes is an artist, activist, educator, and organizer who focuses on peacemaking in Chicago. Cervantes has trained youth activist from Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America and is passionate about building multicultural coalitions and reducing youth gun violence. Cervantes has previously served on the Docent Council at the DuSable Museum of African-American History and as the Peace Works Program Director for the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking. Cervantes is a featured Upstander activist in the groundbreaking permanent exhibition Take A Stand Center at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. Cervantes currently serves on the board of directors of The Crossroads Fund, a foundation that furthers racial, social, and economic justice in Chicago. Cervantes holds a B.A in Youth Leadership Development for Community Violence Prevention from Northeastern Illinois University. He was born and raised in Chicago’s Little Village community and volunteers teaching nonviolence at Cook County Jail.

Dr. Cynthia Boaz is a scholar-practitioner and associate professor of political science at Sonoma State University where her areas of expertise include quality of democracy, strategic nonviolent action, gender and politics, and media. Her work on civil resistance, particularly on the role of women in nonviolent struggles around the world, has appeared in numerous academic journals, books, and media outlets. Cynthia is an affiliated scholar at the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy M.A. Program in Peace, Conflict and Development Studies in Castellon de la Plana, Spain. She is the former Rochester, New York area coordinator of CODEPINK: Women for Peace (2005-2008). She has also collaborated closely with leaders of Burma’s Saffron Revolution and activists from Iran’s Green Movement. She considers her interview of Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi to be a highlight of her work in this field. Since 2005, Cynthia has been an academic advisor to ICNC, and has presented on civil resistance in India, Australia, Chile, Spain, Canada, and across the United States during the past ten years. Cynthia was a presenter at the inaugural Lawson institute concerning the history of effective major historical campaigns led by women in the United States, from the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage.

Kevin Connor is Public Accountability Initiative’s director. He leads PAI’s research efforts and investigations from his home base of Buffalo, NY. Before co-founding LittleSis.org and PAI, Kevin worked as a researcher at SEIU 1199. He is a graduate of Harvard University.LittleSis is a project of Public Accountability Initiative, a 501(c)3 organization focused on corporate and government accountability, whose mission is to facilitate and produce investigative research that promotes transparent and accountable governance. PAI was founded in early 2008 by a group of activists, public interest lawyers, and academics associated with leading universities and major social change organizations.

Philippe Duhamel: With decades of experience as a master strategist, trainer, and campaign organizer in his home province of Québec, Canada, Philippe Duhamel has helped to lead successful efforts to stop hydraulic fracking in Québec and been critical to many other significant environmental campaigns. His experience pertaining to successful citizen action on environmental preservation and climate-change related matter is unexcelled. He is also a specialist in developing effective educational exercises for planning and preparation of effective nonviolent campaigns. Philippe is affiliated with Via Strategia.

Dr. Sekou Franklin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). He is the author of After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movement Activism, and the Post-Civil Rights Generation (NYU Press, 2014) and edited the State of Blacks in Middle Tennessee. He also has a forthcoming book (co-authored with Ray Block) called, Losing Power: African Americans and Racial Polarization in Tennessee Politics (University of Georga Press). Dr. Franklin has also worked closely with numerous groups including: Urban EpiCenter, Tennessee Citizen Action, Tennessee Alliance for Progress, Ad Hoc Committee for Equity, TennCare Saves Lives Coalition, Nashville Black Covenant Coalition, Justice for Jefferson Street Coalition, Green-Collar Jobs Task Force of Nashville-Davidson County, Nashville Peace and Justice Center’s Leadership Institute, Rev. James Lawson’s Nonviolent Resistance and Social Justice Committee/Saturday Morning Group, Operation W.A.V.E., the Tennessean newspaper’s Advisory Board, and Tennessee State Conference of NAACP. In November 2016, he co-coordinated the Tennessee Election Protection hotline in collaboration with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and has worked on voting rights cases. In addition, he was appointed to the Tennessee Advisory Committee for the US Commission on Civil Rights in 2016; and serves on the coordinating committee of Democracy Nashville-Democratic Communities. He is currently the President-Elect of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. He residents in North Nashville with his wife and two daughters.

Molly Gott is a researcher at the Public Accountability Initiative (PAI), a watchdog research group focused on corporate and government accountability. PAI specializes in conducting and facilitating investigative, public interest research on power and corruption at the intersection of business and government. PAI got its start by launching LittleSis.org (named as the opposite of Big Brother), a database and research platform that tracks information on power holders and organizations in the United States. LittleSis is used by journalists, academicians, organizers, and activists who are researching and challenging networks of power and influence. At PAI, Molly works on a variety of power research projects in collaboration with social movements and civil society organizations. She also coordinates PAI’s “Map the Power” project, which aims to train and support activists and organizers to carry out power research that can strengthen their organizing and deepen their analysis of how corporate power shapes and influences our economy and society. Before working with PAI, Molly was a community organizer with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), where she worked on a variety of economic, racial, and climate justice campaigns. She was also part of the team that established jail and legal support during the Ferguson Uprising.

Dr. Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro (“AMHA”) is an activist scholar on the faculty of University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. She has worked with organizers in the areas of marriage equality, economic justice, immigrant rights, black equity, and women of color movements here in Los Angeles as both a trainer and ally. She is a globally recognized scholar on intersectionality – the study of the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality politics, and their impact on public policy. Her recent collaborative work includes service on the Community Funding Board of the Liberty Hill Foundation and work with both Hispanas Organized for Political Empowerment (HOPE) and the Los Angeles African American Women’s Public Policy Institute (LAAAWPPI). She wrote her second book as an accessible intergenerational handbook for understanding intersectionality. In 2015 she founded RISIST, the Research Institute for the Study of Intersectionality and Social Transformation, a new online certification and collaboration platform. RISIST consolidates fifteen years of work done by her across the country to consult with and train individuals, groups and organizations in intersectionality. AMHA’s commitment to gender equity has existed for decades. In 1993, under the mentorship of NBA Hall of Famer Tom “Satch” Sanders, Hancock conducted the original survey research and designed the business model for the Women’s National Basketball Association. The only women’s professional basketball league to succeed in the United States, the WNBA will play its twenty-first season in May 2017. She is the first African American female full professor in USC’s College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences and a popular commentator on KPCC-FM and KCAL/KCBS.

Dr. Tom Hastings: As full-time faculty on conflict resolution for Portland State University, and with a doctorate in education, Tom is a founding member of two Catholic Worker communities and an author or editor of six books on aspects of nonviolence. A veteran of Native American treaty rights struggles, he lives at Whitefeather Peace House. He was one of a small group of organizers who led the successful nonviolent struggle to close and dismantle a U.S. thermonuclear command facility, during which Tom offered two Plowshares acts of nonviolent resistance that earned him two peace felonies (one in Michigan, one in Wisconsin) and corresponding prison time. His family is mixed-race. He has 300-500 students in his Portland State University courses annually and coordinates the largest Peace and Conflict Studies undergraduate program in his region. His presentation on Native American nonviolent historical accomplishment at the 2014 Lawson institute was highly praised. He has been on the Academic Advisory Council of ICNC since 2004.

Dr. Mary Elizabeth King, Director Professor of peace and conflict studies at the UN-affiliated University for Peace (main campus Costa Rica), Mary is also Distinguished Rothermere American Institute Fellow at the University of Oxford, Britain. Political scientist and author of a number of recognized books on civil resistance, her latest is Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India: The 1924–25 Vykom Satyagraha and the Mechanisms of Change, Oxford University Press, 2015. Her academic specialty in the study of nonviolent civil resistance movements dates to her decision at age 22 to go to work for the U.S. civil rights movement, first in Atlanta and then Mississippi, on the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pron. snick) in the 1960s. At age 23, she spent Christmas in Atlanta’s city jail “Big Rock.” She is co-author of the historical document “Sex and Caste,” published by Liberation magazine in April 1966, which resulted from conversations among women SNCC organizers and is now considered a catalyst for the women’s liberation movement of what would become called second-wave feminism. She is Co-Chair (with Erica Chenoweth) of the Academic Advisory Council for the ICNC (2016–2017), in Washington, DC. She serves on the board of the Albert Einstein Institution, Boston. In 2011, she received the James M Lawson Award for Nonviolent Achievement.

Dr. Lester R. Kurtz is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict (Elsevier), co-editor of Nonviolent Social Movements (Blackwell), an editor of The Web of Violence(University of Illinois Press), as well as author of books including Gods in the Global Village (Pine Forge/Sage), The Politics of Heresy (University of California Press), and The Nuclear Cage (Prentice-Hall). He is a co-editor of the two-volume Women, War, and Violence (Praeger, 2014). Currently, Kurtz is working on a book called Gandhi’s Paradox, another on The Paradox of Repression, and a project called “Peaceful Warriors.” He has lectured in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America and served as chair of the Peace Studies Association and the Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section of the American Sociological Association, which recently awarded him its Robin Williams Distinguished Career Award.

Deborah Mathis, Director of Communications at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), develops, executes and coordinates ICNC’s communications, marketing, and media relations, working in collaboration with the organization’s staff and advisors. Her work in communications commenced at the end of a long career as a working journalist, including stints as a managing editor, nationally syndicated columnist, broadcast news producer and news anchor. Her journalism career culminated in an assignment as White House correspondent for Gannett News Service during the Clinton Administration. As part of the White House press pool, Deborah traveled with the president and covered the processes, politics and “ground effects” of the administration’s policies and actions. Upon leaving the White House beat, Deborah accepted a fellowship from the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, where she researched and authored a case study on the media’s response to the racial dynamics embedded in the controversial presidential election of 2000. Her study, “No Seat at the Table,” was published by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
As Communications Director for the Public Justice Foundation, Deborah managed media relations, editorial projects, website design, video production, and social media management, and was a member of the Foundation’s management team. Prior to her tenure at Public Justice, Deborah was vice president of media and communications for an African trade consulting firm and traveled frequently to the continent. Then, to cap off her journalism career, she became an associate professor at Northwestern University’s distinguished Medill School of Journalism, teaching political reporting to graduate-level students at Medill’s Washington, D.C. campus. Deborah was also managing editor of Medill’s Washington bureau. She has written five non-fiction books of her own, debuting with the acclaimed “Yet A Stranger: Why Black Americans Still Don’t Feel at Home” (Warner, 2002). Deborah is also a popular motivational speaker and socio-political commentator.

Hardy Merriman is President of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). He has worked in the field of civil resistance for nearly 15 years, presenting at workshops for activists and organizers around the world, while speaking widely about civil resistance movements with academicians, journalists, and members of international organizations. Merriman has developed resources on civil resistance for practitioners and scholars, and his writings have been translated into numerous languages. In 2016, he was appointed adjunct lecturer at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts University), in Boston. He has contributed to a number of books on civil resistance, including Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential (2005) by Gene Sharp. He has worked with ICNC since 2005, and prior to that with the Albert Einstein Institution from 2002. Merriman was Director for the James Lawson Institute assemblies in 2013 and 2014. He is a graduate of Oberlin College.

Jamila Raqib is Executive Director of the Albert Einstein Institution, Boston, which promotes the study and strategic use of nonviolent action worldwide. Since 2002, she has worked with scholar Gene Sharp to facilitate the worldwide spread of knowledge of the dynamics of nonviolent struggle and requirements for its effective application. In 2009, Sharp and Raqib developed a curriculum intended to provide in-depth guidance for planning a nonviolent struggle titled Self-Liberation: A Guide to Strategic Planning for Action to End a Dictatorship or Other Oppression. Raqib has since 2016 been a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and is being inducted in June 2017 as a Director’s Fellow at the lab, where her work involves exploring how innovations in technology and education can contribute to greater effectiveness in nonviolent struggle. See her TED talk here.

Katrina L. Rogers is the Founder + Principal of Kalaro Media, LLC, a communications firm specializing in political communications, digital media development, public relations and branding. Starting her career as a journalist, Katrina has a history of working to center those historically and systemically marginalized with a special dedication to social justice and electoral politics. The Spelman College graduate has worked on a number of campaigns including: President Obama’s re-election, Congressional races and healthcare reform. While still in college, the Shreveport, Louisiana, native was featured in “USA Today” as one of “America’s most valuable young minds.” Katrina’s passion is using language to normalize Black liberation as she uses her experience as a communicator to help shift the narrative around Blackness across the diaspora.

Rivera Sun is a change-maker, a cultural creative, a protest novelist, and an advocate for nonviolence and social justice. She is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, The Way Between and other novels. Her study guide to making change with nonviolent action is used by activist groups across the country. Her essays and writings are syndicated by Peace Voice, and have appeared in journals nationwide. Rivera Sun attended the James Lawson Institute in 2014 and facilitates workshops in strategy for nonviolent change across the country and internationally. Between 2012-2017, she co-hosted nationally two syndicated radio programs on civil resistance strategies and campaigns. Rivera was the social media director and programs coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. In all of her work, she connects the dots between the issues, shares solutionary ideas, and inspires people to step up to the challenge of being a part of the story of change in our times. www.riverasun.com

Dr. Molly Wallace teaches in the Conflict Resolution Program at Portland State University and serves as contributing editor of the Peace Science Digest. Her recent book, Security without Weapons: Rethinking Violence, Nonviolent Action, and Civilian Protection (Routledge 2017), explores nonviolent alternatives for civilian protection in war zones—and particularly the unarmed civilian peacekeeping work of Nonviolent Peaceforce in Sri Lanka. She is passionate about the transformative potential and efficacy of nonviolent resistance and is especially interested in critically examining deeply held assumptions about the protective effects of weapons and violence. After several years serving as a volunteer mediator in Rhode Island, she now volunteers as a facilitator for Multnomah County’s restorative dialogue program. Raised in Oregon, Molly headed to the East Coast to earn her B.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies from Mount Holyoke College and then—after some time in Washington, DC, working for conflict resolution/international affairs NGOs and engaging in antiwar activism in the early years of the “war on terror”—to earn her M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University. Before returning to the Pacific Northwest, she taught in the International Affairs and Political Science Programs at the University of New Hampshire and Brown University.

Dr. Stephen Zunes is professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His research interests range from U.S. Middle East policy to strategic nonviolent action. He is the author of several books and hundreds of articles, and serves as a contributor to The Progressive, Huffington Post, Open Democracy, Common Dreams, Truthout, Foreign Policy in Focus, In These Times, and the National Catholic Reporter. He has spoken at more than 150 colleges and universities and scores of community groups in the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and is a frequent guest on National Public Radio, Pacifica Radio, PBS, BBC, MSNBC, CNN, Voice of America, Al-Jazeera, China Radio International, and other media outlets for analysis on world events. He serves as a consultant and board member for a number of peace and human rights organizations in both the United States and overseas. He has been a trainer and workshop leader in strategic nonviolent action for progressive activists in the United States, as well as pro-democracy activists and community organizers, in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. During his twenties, Zunes worked with Movement for a New Society and other groups advocating nonviolent direct action in opposition to nuclear power, the nuclear arms race, U.S. intervention in Central America, and foreign investment in apartheid South Africa. He served as chair of the academic advisory committee for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict between 2006 and 2015 and was a resource person at the previous James Lawson Institutes.

FACILITATORS

Dr. Alison Allen-Hall is a social scientist interested in exploring and realising the potential of the liminal spaces between scholarship and practice. She has several years’ experience serving as associate faculty in Social Sciences at various colleges and universities in the United States; she has most recently expanded her praxes portfolio to include Interpersonal Neurobiology. In addition to her current teaching responsibilities at Portland Community College, OR she is Managing Director of LynxSE, an organisational equity coaching consultancy based in Portland, OR. She works to create practical application models for systemic equity and authentic inclusivity outcomes. This includes the development of the DEEP (Diagnostic, Enduring, Evolutionary, Proactive) Coaching model for organisational leaders, cross-cultural dialogue facilitation, bystander intervention and de-escalation training, strategic planning, interorganisational collaboration, as well as designing bespoke interventions to fit specific organisational needs.

Austin Belali is Director of the Youth Engagement Fund at the Democracy Alliance. Belali believes youth development and engagement is the key to a more generative economy. Before coming to the YEF, Belali led a major organizational change process at the 2.1-million-member Service Employees International Union to put youth and emerging leaders in the drivers’ seat of progressive social change. In 2013, his thought leadership and fundraising ability helped create a leadership network for minority youth and students promoting racial equity and inclusion on college campuses. Belali is currently a member of Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy and co-chairs the Development Committee on the board of a low-wage immigrant organization known as CASA. His philanthropic endeavors gained him recognition in the September 2016 issue of Washington Life Magazine, and his writing about young people and social change have been published in the Non-Profit Quarterly, Huffington Post, the Hill and MSNBC among other outlets. Belali is a music composer and recently produced original music for the New York-based think tank Demos. Belali has a B.A. in Political Science from Howard University in Washington D.C. As an undergraduate he interned at a cheese micro-enterprise in the Andes mountains of Ecuador and studied abroad in New Delhi, India. After graduation, Belali spent a year teaching high school students in Dakar, Senegal, and established the school’s first Advanced Placement course in Comparative Government.

Dr. Cynthia Fowler is committed to organizing for racial and social justice. Her 15+ years of work as a psychiatrist have prepared her well to work effectively with diverse groups of people to affect change within our systems. The first decade of her professional career was spent working in community mental health where she provided psychiatric care to diverse populations of people with severe mental illness and developmental disabilities, and in student health. Her work has shifted over the past few years to a part-time private practice to make room for social justice work and organizing. Dr Fowler is currently working as an organizer with People’s Institute Northwest (PINW), serving on the Board of Directors of the Oregon Peace Institute, and volunteering with the SMART program as a reader. Dr. Fowler earned a B.A. in Psychology from University of Southern California, and an M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. If you happen to see her, ask if she’s wearing anything “me-made”. She’s a lover of sewing apparel and endeavors to make her entire wardrobe so she can avoid clothes shopping.

James Hayes is an organizer from Columbus, OH. James started organizing after taking part in mass mobilizations with the Occupy movement and to protest the murder of Trayvon Martin. In 2012 he helped to found the Ohio Student Association and spent four years leading campaigns to end the criminalization of young people of color. These campaigns helped stop Stand Your Ground law (which provided legal cover for George Zimmerman to murder Trayvon Martin) from entering Ohio, stop the corporate school takeover of the Columbus City Schools, and generate resistance to police brutality. James is now the Training Director for the Ayni Institute. Ayni serves the ecosystem of social change through research, training, and supporting communities of practice that bring more balance to the world.

Betty Hung is a longtime social justice advocate with a focus on law and organizing and alliance and coalition building. For over 20 years, Betty has worked on campaigns and initiatives in the areas of workers rights, racial justice, immigrant rights, education equity, and gender justice. Betty has played an integral role in campaigns that have achieved victories including: winning $22 million dollars in additional annual income for Los Angeles taxi workers; enacting landmark state legislation allocating $240 million to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the K-to-University of California graduation pipeline; establishing protections for undocumented immigrant students in K-12 schools throughout California; defeating proposed legislation that would have required the equivalent of English-only business signs in a predominantly immigrant municipality; and passing state legislation to address racial profiling by law enforcement. Betty also served on the legal team that litigated the El Monte Thai and Latino garment worker case and the legal team supporting the leadership of Dream Team LA in the successful campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Betty is the board co-chair of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), which was co-founded by Rev. James Lawson, Jr., and also serves on the boards of the CLEAN Car Wash Worker Center, Economic Roundtable, and National Lawyers Guild-LA Chapter.

Cristina Jiménez is Executive Director and Co-founder of United We Dream (UWD). The largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country. Originally from Ecuador, Cristina came to the U.S. with her family at the age of 13, attending high school and college as an undocumented student. She has been organizing in immigrant communities for over a decade and was part of UWD’s campaign team that led to the historic victory of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012 that protects over one million young immigrants from deportation. Under Cristina’s leadership UWD has grown to a powerful network of 57 affiliates in 25 states and over 300,000 members. Under Cristina’s leadership, UWD has grown to a powerful network of 57 affiliates in 25 states and over 300,000 members. Cristina is one of Forbes’s 2014 “30 under 30 in Law and Policy;” was named one of “40 under 40 Young Leaders Who are Solving Problems of Today and Tomorrow” by the Chronicle of Philanthropy; and one of “50 Fearless Women” by Cosmopolitan. She co-founded the New York State Youth Leadership Council, the Dream Mentorship Program at Queens College, was an immigration policy analyst for the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy and an immigrant rights organizer at Make the Road New York. Cristina holds a Masters degree in Public Administration & Public Policy from the School of Public of Affairs at Baruch College, CUNY and graduated Cum Laude with a B.A. in Political Science and Business from Queens College, CUNY.

Dr. Daniel Lee, MSW, Project Manager, alumnus of the 2014 James Lawson Institute (JLI), now serves as Project Manager for the new JLI. Daniel earned his Doctorate from USC in 2021, his MSW from UCLA in 2015 and his B. A. in Cinema from USC in 2001. He is a veteran of the United States Air Force and Air National Guard. Daniel has served on the board of directors for Move to Amend, the Backbone Campaign, Mockingbird Incubator and the Clean Power Alliance. He has worked as the Southern California organizer for Americans for Democratic Action, earth day to may day organizer for the Liberty Tree Foundation, and campaign lead for Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. He completed an Environmental Justice fellowship with the Liberty Hill Foundation in 2014, regularly volunteers with the Sierra Club, and has worked with organizations such as Community Coalition, Common Cause and Youth Justice Coalition in the Los Angeles area. He currently serves as Vice Mayor in Culver City,CA.

Carinne Luck is an organizer and strategist working with groups to build healthy and leaderful organizations. Her current work includes a project to map and define the emergent field of healing justice, in partnership with the Faith Matters Network and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and supporting new resistance organizing with the Momentum community. Carinne has worked closely with Hand in Hand, a partner of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, to unite care consumers and employers of domestic workers in the movement for quality care and quality care work, including the design, development and launch of the Sanctuary Homes campaign.

Carinne is an adviser to The Wildfire Project and If Not Now, and a board member of The Watershed Center and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). In 2016, she was part of a design team at the Colombe Foundation tackling the question of how to build a peace movement for the 21st century. Carinne was a founding staff member and Vice President for Field and Campaigns at J Street. She has also worked for MoveOn.org and Amnesty International.

Angela Mooney D’Arcy (Juaneno Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation) is from the Native Nation whose traditional territories include the area now known as Orange County. She has been working with Native Nations, Indigenous people, and grassroots organizations on environmental and cultural justice issues for nearly twenty years. An experienced and professional facilitator, she is the Executive Director and Founder of Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples (SPI), a Los Angeles-based, Indigenous-led community organization and Affiliate of the Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples. SPI is dedicated to building the capacity of Native Nations and Indigenous Peoples to protect sacred lands, waters, and cultures. Angela co-founded the United Coalition to Protect Panhe, a grassroots alliance of Acjachemen people dedicated to the protection of the sacred site Panhe and serves as Board Secretary for the Blas Aguilar Adobe Museum and Acjachemen Cultural Center in San Juan Capistrano. She also authored the Environmental Justice chapter of the report Native Voices Rising: A Case for Funding Native-led Change. She is a recipient of the New Voices Fellowship, a national Ford Foundation-funded program dedicated to cultivating the next generation of social justice leaders and the Earthjustice Sutherland Fellowship, awarded each year to a law school graduate to continue their work in environmental public-interest law. She received her B.A. from Brown University and her J.D. with a concentration in Critical Race Studies and focus on federal Indian law from University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.

Jeff Ordower comes to us from St Louis with 25 years of experience in community organizing for economic and environmental justice. Prior to joining the Global Exchange team, Jeff held multiple leadership positions for ACORN, then the largest community organization in the country. He eventually rose to the position of Midwest Director, working to raise the minimum wage and take on predatory lenders on Wall Street. Until ACORN ceased operations in 2009, Jeff worked tirelessly to push for social justice, as well as helping to spark the ACORN International department. In 2010, Jeff helped found Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, a group that works at the intersection of economic, climate and racial justice. Under Jeff’s leadership, MORE ran a 6 year campaign against Peabody Coal, at one time the largest coal company in the world. MORE also provided movement support, both to Occupy St. Louis and the Ferguson Uprising. As a member of the #NODAPL Solidarity Network and Rising Tide, Jeff is keeping Global Exchange in the loop on ways GX can be in solidarity with Sioux at Standing Rock against the pipeline. Jeff is excited about combining his community organizer’s mentality with the sophistication and history of Global Exchange, and hopes to attract new participants from the organized labor community into their Reality Tours.