Abel Liu

Abel Liu builds alternative institutions, always with an eye towards economic and racial justice. He is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia, where he co-founded the UVA Mutual Aid project, served as student body president, and organized with Asians Revolutionizing Together and the Virginia Student Power Network. Abel’s BA in Economics and Sociology has allowed him to support community-driven research, mapping so-called Charlottesville’s racial covenants, visualizing just pandemic employment policies, and telling the stories of solidarity economy leaders in urban Latin America. He joins SRC as a Fellow while also working in restaurants and for a Virginia-based CSA.

Diego Pons

Diego Pons is a contracting interpreter for the Community Language Cooperative (CLC) who lives in Monte Vista, CO and who has founded his own co-op in the San Luis Valley Language Justice Co-op (SLVLJC) where he also provides translation services to clients seeking language justice services.

Eleanor Finley

Eleanor Finley is an anthropologist, a popular educator, and a PhD. Candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her essays on social movements and direct democracy, the Kurdish Freedom Movement, and energy and climate justice have appeared in media outlets such as ROAR Magazine, The Ecologist, and In These Times. She is currently an associate editor at Uneven Earth and an organizer of the Municipalist Learning Series and her first book, “Practicing Social Ecology: Democratic Experiments from Burlington to Rojava and Beyond” is forthcoming through Pluto Press.

Gilda Haas

Gilda has led numerous economic projects and organizations, is a co-founder of the L.A. Co-op Lab, and has taught community economic development at UCLA for over 30 years. She was a founding director of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, of Communities for Accountable Reinvestment, and of the Economic Development Unit of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. She is a co-founder of the national Right to the City Alliance and presently represents the L.A. Co-op Lab on the Board of the Seed Commons Financial cooperative.

James Tracy

James Tracy is a Bay Area native and community organizer. He has 30 years of experience in the politics of housing, economic justice, and social movements. James co-founded the Eviction Defense Network in 1992 which used direct action to stop evictions. He’s been a member of other coalitions, including the Coalition on Homelessness, Mission Agenda, and Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. In 2004, James co-founded the San Francisco Community Land Trust. He now serves as Vice-President on the Board for the Bay Area Community Land Trust. James is the co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing (Melville House, 2012) and No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements (City Lights, 2020). He is the author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco’s Housing Wars (AK Press, 2014). His articles have appeared in Shelterforce, Race Poverty and the Environment, the Italian-American Review, Contemporary Justice Review, and Punk Planet. He is the Chair of Labor and Community Studies Department at City College of San Francisco.

Jordan Packer

Jordan Packer is an educator, urban designer, and data analyst based in Brooklyn, NY. She recently received her M.S. in design and urban ecologies from Parsons School of Design, where she studied land use activism. Previously, Jordan received her B.A. in sociology and urban studies and planning from the University of California, San Diego. Jordan now teaches Information Visualization at Parsons, volunteers at Interference Archive, and conducts counter-mapping pop-up events across Brooklyn.

Kazembe Balagun

Kazembe Balagun is a native New Yorker who has worked for over two decades in public engagement for social, racial, and ecological justice. His work is centered in building spaces for dialogue and education for community development across multiple disciplines. He worked as the Education Director for the Brecht Forum, a progressive arts and cultural center (2008-2013) organizing over 250 forums per year. Recently, he served as the project manager for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office, where he focused on racial justice and the right to the city. He appeared and organized programs at Metrograph, Goethe Institute, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Weeksville Heritage Center, and the Black Archives (Amsterdam).

Marina Sitrin

Marina Sitrin is a professor of sociology at Binghamton University. She holds a PhD in Global Sociology from SUNY Stony Brook and a JD in International Women’s Human Rights from CUNY Law School.

Marina’s scholarly work is part of a continuum, reflecting over 20 years of study and direct engagement in social movements and diverse forms of resistance. Specifically looking at new forms of social organization, such as autogestión, horizontalidad, prefigurative politics, abolitionism and affective social relationship, she challenges us in the social sciences to rethink our understandings of social movements, inviting us to think in terms of societies in movement. Marina’s forthcoming book with the University of California Press argues that there is a new phenomenon occurring around the globe that is both revolutionary in the day-to-day sense of the word and without precedent with regard to consistency of form, politics, scope, and scale. The book covers over 20 regions in 12 countries and three autonomous zones, reflecting two decades of research and engagement.

Currently, Marina is working on a book project reflecting over a decade of experiences in alternative conceptions of justice using alternative adjudication frameworks, reflecting processes of addressing harm outside formal state and punishment structures. Regions covered include, Argentina; Cherán, Chiapas and Guerrero, Mexico; Rojava and the United States.

Mason Herson-Hord

Mason Herson-Hord is the program director of the Institute for Social Ecology and an organizer and writer in Detroit, MI. He is a co-founder of the Symbiosis federation and was previously lead organizer of the Motor City Freedom Riders. His work, focusing primarily on movement-building and ecological philosophy, has been published by The Next System Project, In These Times, The Ecologist, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Socialist Forum, ROAR Magazine, and The Journal of World-Systems Research.

Michelle Sayles

Michelle Sayles is a socially-engaged artist and advocate with a passion for nonfiction comics and political cartooning. She is based in Lancaster, PA with roots across New England. For over a decade she’s been organizing with movements for social and environmental justice. She was a participating artist in the graphic medicine anthology El Viaje Más Caro/ The Most Costly Journey: Stories of Migrant Farmworkers in Vermont. She holds a BA in Geography from Kutztown University and an MA in Globalization Studies from McMaster University.

Mike Strode

Mike Strode is a writer, urban cyclist, facilitator, and solidarity economy organizer with the Kola Nut Collaborative residing in southeast Chicago. The Kola Nut Collaborative is Chicago’s only time-based service and skills exchange (otherwise known as a timebank) providing an open platform for mutual aid, community organizing, and network weaving. The Collaborative develops programming to support Chicago-based organizers in facilitating non-monetary exchange networks through practices like the Offers and Needs Market. He is a Program Manager at Open Collective Foundation and serves on the boards of the US Solidarity Economy Network, New Economy Coalition, South Deering Manor Community Association, and Dill Pickle Food Co-op.

Pablo Benson

Pablo Benson is a tested organizer, organizational consultant, campaign strategist, field manager, project manager, public policy advocate, facilitator, and teacher with over ten years of experience. He has developed, launched, managed, and participated in dozens of campaigns, social movement organizations, and social justice projects for multiple causes and in various arenas. Currently, he runs a consultancy firm La Base in San Juan, Puerto Rico and was the field director for a municipalist mayoral campaign in 2020-21. Previously, Pablo was the co-director of the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives, a leader in Occupy Sandy, co-founder of the Movement Netlab, and coordinator of the Fearless Cities conference in NYC in 2018.

Yvonne Yen Liu

Yvonne Yen Liu is the Co-Founder and Research Director of Solidarity Research Center. She is based in Los Angeles, California, where the sun smiles on her every day. Although a native of New York City, she and the city have broken up and went their separate ways. She is a practitioner of research justice with over 20 years of being a nerd for social movements. Yvonne serves on the boards of the US Solidarity Economy Network, Policy Advocates for Sustainable Economies (a 501(c)(4) organization affiliated with the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives), Institute for Social Ecology, and New Economy Coalition. She teaches in the gender studies department at California State University, Los Angeles. Yvonne has a BA in cultural anthropology from Columbia University and a MA in sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she pursued a PhD.