Michael Guerrero

Michael Guerrero – MAAP class 1987

 

Michael Leon Guerrero has been the Coordinator of the national Grassroots Global Justice Alliance since April 2004. Before that, he worked for 17 years at the SouthWest Organizing Project where he grew from a community organizer to lead organizer and then Executive Director.. In addition to his work at Grassroots Global Justice Network, Guerrero also serves on various boards, including Jobs with Justice, the New World Foundation and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. He also serves on the National Planning Committee of the United States Social Forum and the International Council of the World Social Forum

 

Phil Ting

Phil Ting- MAAP class 1989

Phil Ting is the Assesor- Recorder for the City and County of San Francisco. Prior to serving as Assessor-Recorder, Ting had a long history of civil rights advocacy. He was the Executive Director of the Asian Law Caucus. He is a member of the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority and the Governing Board of the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority, was President of the Bay Area Assessors Association, was president of the Organization of Chinese Americans SF Bay Chapter and served on the boards of the Equality California Institute and the California Alumni Association, and served on CTWO’s Board of Directors, and is currently a leading candidate for the California State Assembly.

Ting is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Weiling Huber

Weiling is currently President of UNITE HERE Local 2850, the union of hotel, gaming and food service workers.

Weiling was initially interested in CTWO for the wrong reasons.  I thought MAAP was going to be like a retreat during which people would come together to discuss racism – for 8 weeks. Even though it was not what she expected she feels that her experience with CTWO was life changing, it saved her from Academia.

In fact, through CTWO she learned the nuts and bolts of grassroots organizing and came to love it – then she learned someone could actually get paid to do it. MAAP put me on the path I’ve been on for 20 years now, where I’m deeply committed to organizing as the core around which everything else is built.

Her words of wisdom for the new class of Organizers:

Organizing is the only way I know of to build capacity in our movement.  We can get very creative about direct action, coalition building, research and other tactics, but some of those methods are simply recycling of current capacity. We must organize to BUILD power.

Jeff Chang

Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music.

He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts + Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University.

He has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and a winner of the North Star News Prize. He was named by The Utne Reader as one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World”.

He is a MAAP class of 1987 Graduate where he worked in Washington D.C with Justice for Janitors. He was initially interested in CTWO because he wanted to learn more about being an organizer and wanted to activate his politics in a deeper way.  He believes that participating in MAAP shaped his world view. He considers his days with CTWO and ARC the foundation of his political training. Although he is now deeply in the arts and culture he is deeply devoted to continuing to use lessons he learned at CTWO in all of his work.

Elsa Barboza

Elsa Barboza is the Campaign Director for Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (S.C.O.P.E).  She was initially interested in CTWO because she wanted to be exposed to different strategies to Community and Labor Organizing.

She feels that MAAP exposed her to the movements going on around the country. She was exposed to Workers and communities fighting for change.

Olivia Araiza

Olivia Araiza is the Executive Director of Justice Matters, a racial justice education organization.

She was initially interested in CTWO because it was a political space for young people of color. She was unaware of what organizing was but she saw CTWO as a place for change for young people of color. She feels that CTWO set the grounding for political consciousness raising. For herself, It helped set the framework to understand the world and what we have gone through. It allowed her to understand what she can do to contribute to moving forward and shaping our lives as communities of color.  She believes that MAAP provides a fertile grounding for young people of color to enter political, racial just consciousness . MAAP was a life changing experience for her and she believes that it provides that same experience year after year. She sees MAAP as building a large movement as a whole.

Her words of wisdom for the new class are

 “ Have fun, Work Hard and stay grounded in who you are and where you are from. No matter what, organizing will always be relevant and necessary”.

Ng’ethe Maina

Ng’ethe is the founder and Exeutive Director of Social Justice Leadership.He worked for AGENDA, a grassroots community-based organization in Los Angeles, from its inception in early 1993, helping to develop it into a leading voice for poor people in struggles for social and economic justice.

As a Senior Organizer with AGENDA he helped lead successful economic justice campaigns to win jobs and training for poor people; he also helped pioneer cutting edge organizing tools and technologies that AGENDA has used in its efforts.  In 2000, he became the Organizing Director for AGENDA’s work in South Los Angeles, and the work of AGENDA’s county-wide formation, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Alliance.  In the fall of 2003, Ng’ethe moved to New York City, where he became the Training Director for New York Jobs with Justice, and launched the Social Justice Leadership Collaborative with Simon Greer.  He is currently the Executive Director of SJL.  Ng’ethe brings to this position more than a decade of social justice organizing, and several years of transformative organizational change work.  He is has participated in extensive leadership trainings with the Rockwood Leadership Program, and completed an executive coaching program with the Strozzi Institute. Ng’ethe’s relationship with CTWO dates back to 1992 as a MAAP intern