SHOWING UP FOR RACIAL JUSTICE - Key Persons
Alex was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His professional background is in non-profit leadership and staff management. His organizing history includes issue-based grassroots campaigns across Arizona, and electoral politics from local races to presidential campaigns. Alex joined SURJ after his involvement with our field operation in the Georgia Senate runoff elections. After that, he joined a coalition in Alabama as SURJ's representative that was instrumental in blocking new prison construction in three rural areas across the state. Alex now serves as Lead Kentucky Organizer where he directs electoral, abolition, and economic justice campaigns across the Commonwealth.
Alex is a father of greyhound dogs and one human child. He enjoys hiking up mountains, playing soccer and chess, and reading science fiction novels.
We are a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial and economic justice.
Job Titles:
- Faith Organizing Coordinator
(she/her) Nurtured into faith-rooted organizing in the Central America solidarity movement in the 1980s, Anne is particularly grateful to the Central American, Black, immigrant, worker, and indigenous leaders who have challenged and taught her to think and act more deeply about what it means to be human, and what it means to be free. An ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, Anne also the founder of FierceRev Remedies, offering herbal consults, workshops, mentorship as well as consulting, teaching, and preaching, all towards the goal of racial justice and collective liberation that's rooted in practice with the land. Anne is the co-editor and a contributor to the 2023 book, "Building Up a New World: Congregational Organizing for Transformative Impact." Anne is proud to be from Arkansas; having lived in a lot of different places, she now lives in Western New York.
Job Titles:
- National Membership Organizer
Ash is a white, trans/non-binary, queer class straddler from a working class background, who currently lives in Rhode Island on Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pokanoket, and Wampanoag land. Ash has been been organizing with grassroots movements for justice for about 14 years now: originally getting politicized by learning about climate change and then expanding their work to international solidarity for land-based movements, racial justice, queer liberation, economic justice/new economies, police accountability, and most recently prison abolition. SURJ has been their primary organizing home since 2015 when they co-founded SURJ RI, and since then they've also organized as a member of SURJ Boston, coached SURJ chapters in New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island, and joined the staff in 2021. As a facilitator, trainer, and organizer it is their passion and purpose to create learning spaces that develop new leaders and build the base of white people joining BIPOC-led movements for justice and defecting from white supremacy. Outside of SURJ, Ash's other passions include reading sci-fi, studying herbalism, farming, gluten-free cooking, dancing, and going on long-distance bike rides (preferably with their twin).
Ava Bynum (they/them) is the Director of Impact at Showing Up for Racial Justice, where they organize the resources needed to build anti-racist multi-racial movements for justice. Ava has spent over a decade moving money to movements for racial, economic, and environmental justice, organizing philanthropy, and scaling organizations to have transformational impact.
Ava comes from a mixed class family and has been a class straddler throughout their life, which has reinforced their commitment to people of all class identities having a role to play in undermining the power of the Right and moving the hearts, minds, and votes of white communities towards justice.
Job Titles:
- Community Organizer and Strategist
- Ohio State Director
Avery Martens (they/them/theirs) is a community organizer and strategist who builds power with people and communities most vulnerable to structural violence, working toward collective liberation for all people and the planet. Born in Cleveland, Avery grew up poor/working class in rural southwestern Ohio and currently lives back in Cleveland, with time spent in the San Francisco Bay Area in between. Currently, they are the statewide director for SURJ Ohio and a member of chapter leadership in the Northeast Ohio SURJ Chapter. Avery also organizes with the Cuyahoga County Jail Coalition in Cleveland and supports movement work across the state. Avery has been working on social justice campaigns for 19 years.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Director of on Point Studios
B. Loewe is the director of On Point Studios, a virtual events and creative interventions shop that partners with social movement organizations to blend campaign strategy, story-telling, and digital mediums to make change. Most recently, B. served as the Deputy Director of Distributed Organizing for The Frontline, a campaign of the Working Families Party and the Movement for Black Lives. B. came into movement as a teen in the Maryland suburbs of DC when his older sister was politicized by meeting survivors of torture at the hands of the graduates of the US Government's School of Americas. Reading Howard Zinn at age 15 and learning "you can't be neutral on a moving train," hearing Archbishop Oscar Romero name "it is unjust to have more than you need when others have not enough," and resonating with Che's message that a revolutionary is motivated by love were world reshaping moments that reset the course of the past twenty+ years of his life.
B. came of age in the anti-globalization movement of the early 2000's and the Cincinnati rebellion that took place after police there killed 19 year old Timothy Thomas in 2001. From 2003 to 2009, B organized with the Latino Union of Chicago. He first began supporting Puente in Arizona as the national organizer for the 2009 march against Arpaio and as a coordinator of the 2010 Summer of Human Rights after the passage of SB1070. He served as a national organizer for the US Social Forum in 2010. Then, as Communications Director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, he spearheaded online/offline and distributed strategies with the #Not1More Deportation campaign. In 2015, B was one of the co-founders of Mijente and served as its communications director until 2017, leading communications for the Bazta Arpaio campaign and helping seed the new political home. Since then he has helped launch a national network of asylum sponsors in collaboration with SURJ and NDWA in response to Trump's xenophobia, collaborated with New Florida Majority to support the Andrew Gillum 2018 governors race in Florida, supported the Working Families United coalition of unions to pass the Dream and Promise Act of 2019, and served as the campaign designer of #UUtheVote, the 2020 Unitarian Universalist voter engagement program. Follow B at @whatbstandsfor on twitter.
Job Titles:
- Campaign Communications Lead
Belle Townsend is a white, queer person from rural western Kentucky, where they grew up in a complicated, politically divisive community of folks who took care of one another no matter what. They left their small town to study Political Science and International Relations at Boston University, where they got involved in anti-imperialist research and organizing. Belle currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where they write for Queer Kentucky, the diverse LGBTQ+ run non-profit bolstering and enhancing queer culture and health through storytelling. They have worked on 8 election cycles, 7 in Kentucky and 1 in Massachusetts, in the departments of field, communications, strategy, and research. Belle was named in Teen Vogue as a queer organizer fighting for trans rights in the south, furthering Belle's commitment to reshaping narratives within and about southern and rural communities. Belle is an alumnus of the New Leaders Council of Kentucky, and they now serve as a Co-Recruitment Chair for the NLC-KY Board of Directors. Belle is also a multi-published and awarded slam poet and writer, with two books, "Push and Pull" and "The Observer Effect." They write about the relationship between the individual and the universal, capitalism and climate change, the pandemic and the scientific, and survival and girlhood. Belle loves to bake beautiful cakes and other treats, and they spend their free time cooking, being outside, eating, being and loving with friends, and getting through it all with their beloved feline co-schemers: Lovebug and Cowboy.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Appalachia Organizing Director
Beth Howard is the Appalachia People's Union Director for Showing Up for Racial Justice, the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice in the country. She lives in Lexington, KY, but grew up in a rural white working class community in Eastern Kentucky. She has been organizing in the American South for sixteen years, primarily in her beloved state of Kentucky. Beth has been a lead organizer on winning campaigns to raise the minimum wage, restore voting rights, and win treatment programs for incarcerated people. She has worked on winning electoral campaigns that engaged white working class Southerners, including defeating an abortion ban ballot initiative in the 2022 Kentucky midterms and running a rural field office for the 2020 runoff election in Georgia. She is the creator of the viral narrative campaign "Rednecks for Black Lives" and has been featured in Matter of Fact's Listening Tour with Soledad O'Brian, NPR's Here and Now, Now This News, the book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, and the New York Times, including publishing an Op-Ed in The Boston Globe.
Carla F Wallace (she/they) was born Louisville, Kentucky on Cherokee, Shawnee and Osage land. She grew up between a farm in Oldham County and in Amsterdam, Netherlands where her grandparents hid communists and others resisting the nazi occupation of Holland, under the floorboards. She grew up owning class with a fierce commit to class struggle from her mother's working class side of the family. Carla's activism includes anti imperialism and international solidarity work, including against the Occupation of Palestine, and organizing for affordable housing, against police violence and the KKK and electoral work as a way to build power for a people and earth first vision for change. Carla is a co founder of the Fairness Campaign (a struggle for queer liberation with a commit to centering racial justice, a co founder of SURJ and of Louisville SURJ. She finds family in her comrades and in beloved community.
Caroline Picker (she/her) comes from Ashkenazi Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust and western European settlers who arrived in what is now the United States in the 1600s. As a white person with class privilege, she's clear that none of us can truly live with safety and dignity unless all of us can, and our collective liberation requires building strong cross-class, multiracial movements led by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and poor and working class people. She's been active in racial justice, migrant justice, abolition, and queer liberation movements for many years and learned what organizing to win looks like from working alongside and learning from criminalized undocumented peoples' movements in Arizona. She's worked with SURJ chapters in Phoenix and Rhode Island and currently lives on Narragansett land (Providence, RI). When she's not organizing, she can be found looking at bugs, building extensive domino runs, and imagining she's on Jupiter with her four year old.
Casey Llewellyn is the Impact Team Organizer for Showing Up for Racial Justice where she organizes a team of SURJ ambassadors to raise the resources needed to organize increasing numbers of white people into the multiracial movements for justice. She is a queer white femme from a mixed owning- and middle- class background and was organized into social justice movements as a young person with wealth by Resource Generation. She has spent over ten years organizing donors, fundraising, and redistributing wealth to movements for liberation with The Hummingbird Collective, Circle for Justice Innovations (CJI), The Better Place Foundation, and Solidaire Network. In this work, she follows in the path of her mother and the queer and Southern community living in the unceded lands of the Massachusett people (Boston, MA) who raised her to create spaces of belonging and community in movement work for everyone, including white people and people with wealth and class privilege.
Casey is also a playwright and dramaturg working in theater and dance and works with individuals as a coach to align their lives with their values. With all her work, she seeks to create spaces of transformation and healing. Casey lives with her partner and cat in the unceded land of the Lenni Lenape peoples in Brooklyn, NY.
Job Titles:
- Eastern Kentucky Field Organizer
Celina joined the SURJ team in April of 2022 as the Eastern KY organizer. Before SURJ, she learned how to organize as a staff organizer with her movement fam at Voice of Westmoreland and Pennsylvania United, a multi-racial, grassroots member-led organization building power throughout Western PA.
Celina is currently in the process of becoming more outdoorsy - so these days catch her on a kayak, swimming in a lake, or on top of a mountain in beautiful Appalachia.
Chanelle Gallant has been active in grassroots movements for sex workers rights and racial justice for 20 years as an organizer, movement strategist, trainer, fundraiser, writer and speaker. She is on the Leadership Team for Showing Up For Racial Justice in the US, co-founded the Migrant Sex Workers Project, is on the Advisory Board of Resource Movement (Toronto) and has worked with sex work organizations locally and nationally. Chanelle grew up poor in a single mom family and now has access to middle class resources. She is working on her first book. You can find her work at www.chanellegallant.com
Corita Brown (she/her) is the fourth generation in her family organizing for racial and economic justice. She is deeply grateful for her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who have taught her so much about resilience, courage, and the importance of showing up. Corita has been involved in movement building work for over two decades and currently works as a facilitator, coach and consultant with organizations and leaders working for racial, economic and gender justice.
Corri Frohlich (she/her) has engaged in social justice organizing for over fifteen years in areas related to prison abolition and decarceration efforts, anti-racism and fat and queer liberation. As a cisgender white queer woman, who does not come from a systems-impacted community, she believes her role is to amplify and listen to people of color and folks from systems-impacted communities leading this work, and call in other white people to racial justice. Corri grew up working class and identifies as working class. She is active in SURJ in the Bay Area. She enjoys watching/reading fairly cheesy sci-fi and fantasy movies and books and cuddling with my pitbull.
Dahlia Ferlito (they/them) is a white, queer, non-binary anti-racist organizer and co-founder of White People for Black Lives. They believe that white people are responsible for ending the white supremacist system. To do so, white people must: remain organized, challenge white silence about racism, work in solidarity with - and take the lead from - people of color-led movements, and acquire the skills needed to interrupt racism on all levels. They're committed to continuous self-education and showing up in healthy ways without reproducing the harm of white supremacy in activist spaces. They grew up in a working class city outside of Boston, MA and currently live in Los Angeles. They have a mixed class background, grew up working class into adulthood, and now in middle class. Their writing can be found on Medium, KNOCK-LA and LA Progressive.
David Steely (he/him) is the Senior Donor Organizer at Showing Up for Racial Justice. In that capacity, David works with funders both individually and collectively to give boldly and in alignment with their values. At the core of his work is a belief that cross-class, multi-racial spaces lead to the most profound impact when giving.
With a background in business and philanthropy, David feels called to build bridges both to strengthen and widen movement community. He believes that moving money to resource movement work is crucial to our collective liberation.
Erin Heaney is the Executive Director of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), organizing in majority-white communities to undermine the power of the Right and bring millions of white people into multi-racial movement. In her time at SURJ, Erin has shepherded significant growth and strategic shifts including the growth of the SURJ Chapter Network to over 150 local groups, the launch and growth of SURJ's electoral organizing programs and the robust centering of and expansion of SURJ's organizing in poor and working class, rural and Southern communities.
Erin is currently a Fellow in the Atlantic Fellowship Racial Equity and a board member of the Action Center on Race and the Economy and a board member of the National Committee of the Working Families Party
Prior to her work at SURJ, Erin was the founding director at the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York, a multiracial, grassroots, member-led organization that supported front-line communities to win victories over corporations that harmed their communities including shutting down notorious polluter Tonawanda Coke and winning millions of dollars for the community, winning green infrastructure investments at major port, and winning a just transition at the Huntley coal plant.
Erin is a queer woman from a white Irish-Italian union family from Buffalo, NY where she lives with her wife Emma.
Job Titles:
- Deputy Development Director
Erin Scott is the Deputy Development Director at Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). Before joining SURJ, she co-founded the Ohio Women's Alliance with Rhiannon Carnes after searching for a community to support and invest in women and femme leaders in grassroots spaces. The formation of this coalition came after successfully launching a networking group for young women in central Ohio, the Bad Bish Network, which was created to connect women to leadership opportunities, mentors, and each other.
Previously, Erin has worked to build a more just and vibrant Ohio through consulting and working with the Ohio Progressive Collaborative, LEAD Ohio, the Ohio Democratic Party, and The Columbus Foundation in the community research and grants management department. Erin teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs for the nonprofit studies program at her alma mater, The Ohio State University's John Glenn School of Public Affairs, where she earned her Master of Public Administration degree. Erin is a volunteer, donor, and advocate for organizations championing women and girls across the world.
Job Titles:
- Faith Organizing Coordinator
(she/her) Nurtured into faith-rooted organizing in the Central America solidarity movement in the 1980s, Anne is particularly grateful to the Central American, Black, immigrant, worker, and indigenous leaders who have challenged and taught her to think and act more deeply about what it means to be human, and what it means to be free. An ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, Anne also the founder of FierceRev Remedies, offering herbal consults, workshops, mentorship as well as consulting, teaching, and preaching, all towards the goal of racial justice and collective liberation that's rooted in practice with the land. Anne is the co-editor and a contributor to the 2023 book, "Building Up a New World: Congregational Organizing for Transformative Impact." Anne is proud to be from Arkansas; having lived in a lot of different places, she now lives in Western New York.
Job Titles:
- Deputy Director of Communications at SURJ
Grover is the Deputy Director of Communications at SURJ. (Pronouns: they/she) Before joining SURJ, Grover was Communications Manager with East Bay Housing Organizations, a founding member of Transform Alameda, a member of Western Mass SURJ, and worked with SURJ National's Poor & Working-Class Caucus from 2017-2019. Grover was raised in a rural, working-class community in Northwest Ohio. After experiencing homelessness, they earned a PhD in Communications from the University of North Carolina based on research about how homelessness is able to continue in the United States. For more two decades, Grover has been part of formations organizing for queer and trans liberation and racial justice in North Carolina, New York City, the Bay Area of California, and Western Massachusetts. When not working, she writes, grows food, and joyfully attends band concerts at their kids' local public school.
Job Titles:
- Director of Political Education
Hilary (she/her) grew up working-poor in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. She is an anti-racist political educator, teacher, and writer. Hilary works to undermine the international ties of white supremacy and connect anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles across nation borders. She wrote Burning Earth, Changing Europe: How the Racist Right Exploits the Climate Crisis-And What We Can Do About It (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2020) and co-authored No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today's Movements (City Lights, 2020).
Job Titles:
- Administrative Assistant to the Development Team
Hillary has a master's degree in American History, emphasizing race and gender in Colonial America, and a concentration in Historic Preservation, from George Washington University. After working at a museum in Washington DC for several years, Hillary moved into fundraising and development and then violence intervention. A dedicated and passionate non-profit administrative professional, Hillary loves making spreadsheets a little too much and she gets a tad too excited when she can find a new way to color code or organize files. A southern California native, she now lives in the Philly Suburbs. On the weekends she can be found adventuring with her boyfriend and his 3 kids, crafting, or in her garden.
Job Titles:
- Chief Financial and HR Officer
Jeff (he/him) comes from a family of public-school educators and was raised in very small farm towns across central Illinois. He has spent most of his career working as a theatre producer, arts administrator and theatre-maker. He currently serves as a co-chair of the League of Resident Theatre's Equity Diversity and Inclusion Mentorship program. He is a co-founder of the Fairness Campaign, Louisville's LGBTQ civil rights organization that believes dismantling racism is central to its work. He and his husband live in Louisville, Kentucky. He will always say "yes" to kayaking, hiking, volleyball, biking, and traveling.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Programming Director at Resource Generation
Jes Kelley (she/her) is currently the programming director at Resource Generation. Jes has been shaped by many movements and experiences including getting to be a trainer with Dismantling Racism Works for eight years. She is a white Southerner with a crooked smile, a propensity for bad jokes, and a deep yearning for collective healing. Jes is proud to be part of a long legacy of working-class feisty femmes committed to liberation. She is parent to an elder dog and a (human) baby.
Julia Daniel (she/her) comes to anti-racist organizing seeing it as key to our collective liberation and the right thing to do. Most of her organizing experience is with young people fighting the schoolhouse to jailhouse pipeline in Miami, and she helped found the Boulder, CO SURJ chapter. She's currently completing a dissertation in education policy. Julia identifies as upper working/lower middle class.
Kari Points (she) is a white dyke who grew up working class in rural Southern Indiana as a ward of the state and adoptee. She is an anti-racist facilitator and political educator based in Durham, North Carolina. For 30 years, Kari has organized and advocated globally and domestically for collective liberation grounded in mutual interest. She took her organizing baby steps in Indiana around rural barriers to library access, state violence against families, and Christian supremacy. For five years at Ipas, a global repro rights organization, she advocated for women's and girls' access to safe abortion care with in-country coalitions in Malawi, Nigeria and Sierra Leone to change colonial-era abortion laws. Since 2017, she has co-led the organizing project Finding Freedom, an experiential, somatics-based project in which white women and genderqueers work through our collective shit so we can stop colluding with white supremacy and patriarchy and show up better in multiractial movements.
Job Titles:
- Managing Director
- Organizational Strategist
Katy Medley is an organizational strategist and nonprofit leader who helps to build powerful and sustainable social-change organizations. For over fifteen years, she's helped a wide variety of nonprofits and collectives across the country to get organized, secure funding, build capacity, center strategy, assess impact, and design internal structures that scaffold their critical work. Katy holds a Masters in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon, and balances her formal management skills with a dedication to dismantle the capitalist and white supremacist aspects of traditional nonprofit culture and to weave in more justice, flexibility, boldness, and care.
A community activist since coming of age as a gay southerner in the nineties, Katy co-founded a local SURJ chapter in 2016. Since then, doing anti-racist and Indigenous solidarity work, becoming a parent in the age of pandemic and climate collapse, and completing the Catalyst Project's Anne Braden Program have furthered her understanding of the stakes of this political moment and the fight for an abolitionist future. Katy was thrilled to join SURJ staff in 2022 as our first Managing Director, contributing her significant professional skillset to help shape and strengthen the organization from the inside out.
When she's not working, Katy can be found playing with her wild little daughter in their home out west, doing word puzzles, dreaming of the Appalachian Mountains, and listening to alt rock from at least 20 years ago.
Job Titles:
- Southern Crossroads Director
Kelly Sue Waller grew up in trailer parks across Tennessee and Georgia. When she was working low-wage jobs in Nashville, she found Worker's Dignity, an organization that brings together workers to fight for workplace justice issues like unions and wage theft. With Worker's Dignity and other groups in Nashville, she organized as a member for four years and then joined Southern Crossroads staff in 2018. Along with other folks in Shelbyville, Tennessee, she founded SCOPE's first base building project: the Bedford County Listening Project (BCLP) that brings together renters across the community to fight for renter protections. She now serves as the Director of Southern Crossroads.When not organizing, Kelly Sue can often be found with her nose buried in fiction books featuring folks fighting the system with an eye towards building better worlds. She believes that those most affected by injustice have the experience and wisdom to come up with solutions. And that building power with our neighbors across lines of difference- race, class, ability, sexual orientation- is how we all get free.
Kelsey was born and raised in a working-class family in rural Kentucky. She has an educational background in clinical psychology and has worked in the mental health field as well as several roles in human resources. After working in the corporate world, Kelsey was first introduced to non-profit work with CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) training volunteers to advocate for abused and neglected children caught up in the Family Court System through no fault of their own. Kelsey is passionate about working in fields that she can feel passionate about and have a sense of contribution to the greater good.
Job Titles:
- Strategic Campaigns Distributed Coordinator
As an organizer Kristina (she/her) works on issues ranging from a people-led county ballot measure increasing oversight of the Sheriff's department and aimed at reducing the scope of the carceral system in Los Angeles to flipping Georgia in the 2020 general and 2021 Senate runoffs. Kristina thrives on relational organizing and leadership development in strategic movement aimed at shifting power dynamics to build up all human development. SURJ has been her political home since 2016. She grew up in Vermont, comes from theater and storytelling, is a proud union member, and loves to swim almost anywhere.
Leah Jo Carnine (she/her) is a community organizer and family medicine healthcare provider who recently moved to her hometown of Eugene after being part of migrant and racial justice organizing in the Southwest for over a decade. As a white, class privileged femme, she is deeply committed to SURJ because she believes that white people have a stake in the fight against racism, and we must be organized into powerful multi-racial, cross-class movements for justice to get everyone free. She's passionate about the intersections of transformative health care and collective liberation, and enjoys making art, playing banjo, hiking, and hanging with her little dog and beloved community.
Job Titles:
- Chapter Network Organizer
Linnea (she/her) has been coaching SURJ chapters since 2017, and was an active leader in building the SURJ Buffalo chapter, which she called home for six years. She now lives in Minneapolis, MN. She grew up the youngest of six daughters in a working class family in Niagara Falls, NY. She has a BA in Public Policy and a Master of Urban Planning, both from the University at Buffalo. She loves the rush and intensity of direct action and the new connections forged through door to door canvassing, finds data entry soothing, and feels best when she's creating brave, loving spaces for folks to vision, strategize, struggle, and take risks together. She formerly organized with the Clean Air Coalition of WNY, running campaigns for environmental, racial, and economic justice. Outside of organizing, she likes trying new recipes and hanging out with her partner Clarissa, their cats Waffles and Rafael, and their dog Joni.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Project Manager
Mae loves brainstorming sessions, project plans, returning emails quickly and supporting individuals and teams to be themselves at work. Most recently, Mae was the Director of Operations at Caring Across Generations where she built systems from the ground up for the growing campaign that works to expand the care infrastructure. Mae was raised in Miami Beach, Florida and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She enjoys, in no particular order (and all together if dreams can come true) bubble tea, romantic comedies, "hot takes" from twitter, salty beach air, mangos and when her kids are entertaining themselves.
Job Titles:
- National Chapter Network Organizer
Job Titles:
- National Training Director
Job Titles:
- National Organizing Co - Director