Xochitl is a queer, Chicana/Latina organizer, lawyer, educator, and movement builder who comes to Social Justice Leadership with 15 years of experience in grassroots organizing and social justice work. Xochitl has experience organizing in California, New York, Louisiana, and Georgia. Her past experience includes co-directing Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) a statewide, membership-based organization building the power of the parents of incarcerated youth in Louisiana to fight for justice for their children and families; and co-founding and directing Safe Streets/Strong Communities, an organization born post-Katrina, dedicated to transforming the criminal justice system of New Orleans. Prior to this, Xochitl was a Soros Justice Fellow working with Grassroots Leadership to implement southern strategies for radical criminal justice reform by linking community organizing and the law. She has also worked as a juvenile defender and a media trainer and strategist. Xochitl considers herself an adopted Southerner. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her partner, Kung Li and Roxie-the-Wonder-Dog.
Margarita comes to SJL with more than ten years of experience in organizing, electoral politics, and coalition-building. She is also a trainer for Wellstone Action’s Movement Building Project. Previously, she was the Organizing Director and the Interim Executive Director for the Grassroots Institute of New Jersey and the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, where she developed and led the organizing and political campaigns, including their new candidate recruitment and leadership development pilot program, and co-launched the nonpartisan civic engagement table to increase voter participation of underrepresented voters. Before that she was at Planned Parenthood of NYC where she organized immigrant parents and coordinated coalition efforts in support of comprehensive sex education in NYC’s public schools. Margarita started her organizing career at the New York Working Families Party (WFP). At the WFP she helped elect progressive labor and community leaders, organized state minimum wage and local living wage campaigns and built and developed the NYC membership base. In 2007, she participated in SJL’s Leadership Semester I, where she honed her skills in strategic planning, sustainability practices, leadership and management. Margarita was born in San Salvador, El Salvador.
Raquel comes to Social Justice Leadership with 20 years of activism and organizing. She has been drawn to many social justice issues from reproductive rights to educational justice to work against the prison industry. As an organizer she focused on helping to build youth organizing as a discipline within a broader community organizing field. She helped to build some of the nation’s most influential youth organizations, some of which are reaching their 10 year anniversaries. During the last 7 years, she has focused on using her experience to help organizations develop efficient and healthy internal systems, grounded in social justice values, to better enable grassroots organizations to wage external campaigns. She served as the National Program Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, supervising 20 staff in 3 cities; the Executive Director of the Youth Empowerment Center, which housed 5 youth groups in Oakland, CA including SOUL, the School of Unity and Liberation; and as the Interim Executive Director of FIERCE!, a nationally recognized LGBT youth organization.
Ng’ethe began his career in the social justice field as a founding organizer at SCOPE, a grassroots community-based organization in Los Angeles, helping to develop it into a leading voice for poor people in struggles for social and economic justice. As a Senior Organizer, and eventually as Organizing Director, he helped lead successful economic justice campaigns to win jobs and training for poor people across the Los Angeles region, as well as set policy precedents for the use of public capital; he also helped pioneer cutting edge tools and technologies for social justice organizing. After more than 10 years at SCOPE, Ng’ethe moved to New York in 2003 to found and launch Social Justice Leadership. He brings to his position more than a decade of social justice organizing, and several years of transformative organizational change work. He has participated in extensive leadership trainings with the Rockwood Leadership Program and completed an executive coaching program with the Strozzi Institute.
Born in Chennai, South India, and brought up in the United Arab Emirates, Sumitra arrived in New York in the mid 90's and cut her movement-building teeth in the vibrant racial justice organizing against police brutality of that era. Sumitra has 12 years of New York based experience as a trainer in critical thinking, popular education, political analysis, leadership development, media literacy and documentary storytelling. She has worked with both youth and adults across the ideological, geographical, racial, class, gender and sexuality spectrums and on a broad array of social justice issues. Before her current role as Political Education Coordinator at SJL, she worked as Director of Training at Global Action Project, a youth media justice organization in New York. During that time, she helped start their Media in Action training program for adult and youth organizers. Sumitra acquired a B.A in Humanities from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A in Media and Cultural Studies from the New School for Social Research, and has done intensive study of global political economy ever since.
Clay has over 12 years of community and labor organizing experience. He worked for 10 years at the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, first as an organizer, then as its Staff Director. During this time he oversaw several major school reform campaigns, developed an oversaw training programs, coordinated strategic planning, supervised a large organizing staff, and played a key role in developing numerous city-wide coalitions and organizing support initiatives. He also worked as a housing organizer with the Stamford Organizing Project, an innovative project through which 4 labor unions coordinated workplace and non-workplace organizing campaigns. He spent a year conducting research on the role of ideology, identity, and movement building in community organizing in India. Clay has a Masters Degree in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.
Donna has been involved with community organizing since 2008 when she began as a youth member of CAAAV's Chinatown Justice Project. Her commitment and interest in strengthening pan-Asian organizing and coalition work motivates her to critically think about, practice and pursue social justice. Donna first became exposed to Transformative Organizing (TO) when she participated in SJL's Grassroots Leaders in Organizers (GLO) in 2009-2010. She comes to SJL with an open mind, and is eager to learn more about Transformative Organizing, somatics, intentional practice and herself as she continues to grow and participate in the movement. Donna is a proud New Yorker and conscientious knitter, and will gladly provide recommendations on where to visit in New York and knitting tips for fellow yarn enthusiasts.
Lorelei Williams is an artist, activist and social entrepreneur. For over a decade, she’s worked in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors of the US, Africa and Latin America in the fields of civic engagement, voting rights, racial justice, youth leadership, education and women’s economic development. As an independent consultant, Lorelei provided organizational design, strategic planning, program design, management and evaluation services for clients such as the Ford Foundation, Brazil Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, MIT Community Innovators Lab, and Brazilian Institute of Ethnic Media, among others. In 2010, Lorelei served as Civil Society Co-Chair for the U.S. State Department’s US-Brazil Joint Action Plan, promoting the exchange of resources, information and best practices amongst NGO’s in the US and Brazil to advance racial equality in both countries. In 2003, as a Fulbright fellow in Brazil, Lorelei founded Projeto Mentes e Portas Abertas (POMPA) to train Afro-Brazilian youth for public service careers. She holds a B.A. from Yale University in Political Science and African American Studies and a Masters Degree in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Lorelei is a proud native of Harlem, New York.