About the Fellowship
The Emerging Leader fellowship is for people interested in social justice work, across a wide variety of movements and issue areas who are either looking to start working in social justice work or who have recently started their social justice careers. The program will provide special training, mentoring, and career services. The weekend programs will include in-person and virtual opportunities to learn from seasoned national leaders in movements for social change about everything from strategy and power to the history of social movements.
Emerging Leaders Fellows
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Allison Becha (she/they) - United Campus Workers of Tennessee
Allison Becha is the Lead Organizer for United Campus Workers of Tennessee. She started out as a rank-and-file graduate student member in Knoxville. She has fought with campus workers for raises, an end to mandatory graduate fees, and against discrimination.
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Anna Rojo Keene (she/her) - Primavera Foundation
Anna Rojo Keene is a Reproductive Justice activist, organizing since 2011 in Arizona and serves on the Planned Parenthood Arizona Board of Directors. In 2021, she directed the public health equity campaign "Take YOUR Shot!/Vacunate Ya!" in South Tucson and Pima County, which received the USAging Innovation Award for Advocacy in 2022. In her current role of Public Policy Advocate for the Primavera Foundation, she leads housing justice advocacy efforts at the local and state level.
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Benjamin Finegan (they/them) - Bozeman Tenants United
Benjamin is the director of Bozeman Tenants United, the city-wide union of poor and working-class tenants in Bozeman, MT & a founding union of the national Tenant Union Federation. Benjamin was born in Daegu, Korea & grew up in the mountains of Montana. They are a transracial international adoptee, an organizer obsessed with building multi-racial, working-class power, and an abolitionist dreaming and fighting for a world on the other side of racial capitalism.
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Christopher Covington (he/they) - Genders and Sexualities Alliance Network
Christopher Covington, is a multiracial, genderqueer person of color who challenges and deconstructs systems of oppression. They serve as Chair for the City of Long Beach Equity and Human Relations Commission, Vice President of the LGBTQ Center of Long Beach Board of Directors, and Campaigns and Advocacy Manager with the Genders and Sexualities Alliance Network.
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Curtis Pomilia (he/him) - United Campus Workers of Kentucky
Curtis Pomilia is a Labor Organizer with United Campus Workers who organizes wall-to-wall with students, staff and faculty throughout Kentucky's higher education system. He is passionate about developing pathways into the labor movement for workers currently barred from the traditional unionization process. He was born and raised in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.
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DeJuan Bland (he/him) - Metropolitan Organizing Strategies Enabling Strength
DeJuan, born and raised in Detroit, graduated from Ross Hill Academy in 2010 and majored in Communications and Media at Spring Arbor University. He studied Pastoral Ministry and serves as a minister for Faith Redemption Center. Post-graduation in 2015, he discovered his passion for organizing at the Race and Power Summit in Detroit. For the past eight years, he has led campaigns in Criminal Justice Reform, Water Equity, Transportation, and Voter Engagement. DeJuan is also a national trainer for the Gamaliel Network.
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Gabriela Fernandez (she/her) - Dolores Huerta Foundation
Gabriela Fernandez is a dedicated Community Organizer whose journey began with a passion for social justice and community empowerment.
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Kate Rubin (she/her) - Be:Seattle
Kate Rubin is the Organizing Director/Co-executive Director of Be:Seattle, a grassroots non-profit organization focused on housing justice.
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Katy Murdza (she/her) - Immigrant Legal Resource Center
Katy is an Abolitionist Immigration Organizer based in Houston, TX. In her role as Texas Regional Organizer at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, she works with coalitions in Houston and San Antonio to build local campaigns that decrease deportation, policing, and incarceration and invest in social services that address the root causes of community needs.
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Kenya Slaughter (she/her) - Step Up Louisiana
Kenya Slaughter is an Autism mom and grassroots organizer featured in NYT and CNN, awarded Essence Essential Hero Award 2020. Rank and file worker now organizing for better pay and safety in stores.
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Kobi Naseck (he/they) - Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment
Originally from Texas, Kobi (he/they) now serves as the Coalition Director for VISIÓN, a group of environmental justice, public health, and frontline community-based organizations united to end neighborhood oil and gas extraction in California. Kobi enjoys reading, writing, and learning languages in their free time.
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Leo Seyij Allen (he/him) - Forward Together
Leo Seyij Allen is a Strategist and Faith-based Organizer working within progressive movements to advance gender, sexuality, and anti-carceral justice, particularly across the U.S. South. He currently works for the national reproductive justice organization Forward Together, serves as Board President at Transmission Ministry Collective, and is a founding member of the Faith Coalition to Stop Cop City. Leo Seyij is a proud alumnus of Howard University and Columbia Theological Seminary.
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Lexi Sasanow (they/them) - Jews For Racial & Economic Justice
Lexi is the Field Organizer at Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ), supporting fieldwork and public engagement across campaigns. Lexi has a long history in the service industry, and completed a MA in Labor Studies from the CUNY School of Labor & Urban Studies (SLU) in 2020, where they concentrated on organizing in the food sector. Lexi is a 4th-generation born-and-raised New Yorker, a reader, a writer, a bartender & cook, an urban cyclist, and a Knicks fan forever.
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Michael Mireles (he/him) - La Union Del Pueblo Entero
A son of immigrant farmworkers, Michael dedicates his time championing voting power for underserved communities in Texas. He is the Director of Civic Engagement at La Union Del Pueblo Entero, a Texas Master Naturalist, and in his free time, he likes to hike with his two pitbulls, Nube and Rye.
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Monse Montalvo Navarrete (she/her) - United We Dream
Monse serves as the TX Organizer for United We Dream. When not working she loves to read, travel or be in nature with her family and friends.
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Nick Gee (he/him) - Chinese for Affirmative Action & Stop AAPI Hate
Nick Gee (he/him) is a descendant of paper sons, native Texan, & theater enthusiast. Currently, he leads as an Advocacy Manager with Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), a civil rights-based organization in San Francisco’s Chinatown and founding partner of the Stop AAPI Hate coalition. As an advocate he addresses key policy issues to advance racial justice on language access, voting rights, and ending anti-Asian hate and discrimination. In addition, he has a background in faith rooted organizing.
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Nora Scott (he/they) - Virginia Organizing
Nora is a Black Queer Community Organizer born and rooting in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Through his work with Virginia Organizing, Nora is helping tenants build sustainable communities that can advocate for progressive housing policies at the local and state levels. Outside of housing justice, Nora is deeply passionate about organizing around prison abolition, LGBTQIA+ rights, strategy-based storytelling, and transformative anti-colonial community building and engagement.
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Olivia Buckley (she/they) - Washington Interfaith Network
Olivia is a Community Organizer at the Washington Interfaith Network (WIN) working with resident leaders in the District of Columbia around issues of public safety, the creation of affordable green housing, and tenant rights. They are dedicated to ensuring collective liberation from oppressive systems and building a world in which everyone has what they need.
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Salma Mohamed (she/her) - Arab-American Family Support Center
Salma Mohamed has years of experience developing, implementing, and maintaining complex political projects through issue analysis/ research, public awareness raising, grassroots organizing, coalition-building, policy analysis, and direct policymaker influence. She hopes to make New York a better place for Arab Americans.
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Sam Miller (she/they) - Conservation Voters for Idaho
Sam is an organizer with experience working on all things existential: nuclear weapons nonproliferation, combatting the climate crisis, and protecting human rights. They currently help run a leadership program that teaches underrepresented groups in Idaho how to serve on public boards and commissions so that the lowest level of government truly reflects the populations it serves. They strive to create spaces of belonging and work towards collective liberation.
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Tefa Galvis (she/they) - One Fair Wage, Democratic Socialist of America.
Estefania Galvis, goes by Tefa (she/her), born and raised in Colombia she was forced to migrate at age 15 to Florida . She has been in the grass-roots organizing movement since 2012 when she organized as a student in Tampa Florida and Jacksonville, across campaigns and issues from racial justice to electoral issues, she is also an IATSE and Campaign workers guild Union Card Holder and now National Worker Organizer Director at One Fair Wage.