Our People

Dr. Alfredo Carlos is an Assistant Professor in the Labor Studies department at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He proudly grew up in the LA/LB Harbor area in an immigrant working class family and community, which has informed his education and given him purpose to struggle for economic and racial justice in solidarity with working people trying to live with dignity. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine where he specialized in the fields of Political Economy, and American Racial and Urban Politics. He earned his M.A. in Political Science from California State University, Long Beach with a focus in Comparative Politics and International Relations and has a B.A. is in History and Chicano Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

His Research Interests revolve around Political Economy; Labor and Inequality; Economic Democracy and Worker and Community Ownership; Mexican, Chicano and Latino Politics; Racial and Ethnic Politics; Immigration; Social Movements; Postcolonial and Critical Theory;

He is the co-author of The Latino Question (Pluto, 2018), which was named “Best Book in Latino Politics” in 2019 by the American Political Science Association and is working on several articles and books on the Latino Working Class.

April Taylor is a Black queer organizer from Lexington, KY. She has served as an Economics and Governance program manager at the Highlander Research and Education Center where she developed curriculum and provided accompaniment to grassroots groups in the South doing solidarity economy work. She has been involved in grassroots organizing for more than two decades working at the intersection of racial and economic justice. She is a co-founder of the Wild Fig Books & Coffee worker cooperative, Kentucky’s only Black owned bookstore. She also helped lead the push by Lexington citizens to make unprecedented changes to local police accountability and transparency and helped lay the groundwork for Lexington to elect more Black women to local offices during the 2022 election cycle than any other point in the city’s history. She serves on the Governance Council of the Southern Movement Assembly and has supported Movement for Black Lives work to catalyze solidarity economy organizing. April consistently holds space for impacted people to exchange knowledge and resources and to collectively dream and organize to use cooperative economics to meet each other’s basic needs and move beyond the exploitative white supremacist capitalist patriarchy towards liberation for all people. When she’s not building community and working towards liberation, she enjoys spending time at the Moonbow in Cumberland Falls and connecting with nature.

Dani comes from a mental health background, having worked for years as a practitioner in community clinic settings. Also pursuing a career in research, they are currently enrolled in the post-baccalaureate program in psychological science at the University of California, Irvine. They aspire to study cooperative behavior, the science of compassion, bureaucratic fallout and self-determination in the workplace. Dani has a BA in Political Science and Latin American Studies, as well as an MA in Clinical Psychology.

David Cobb is a “people’s lawyer” who has sued corporate polluters, lobbied elected officials, run for political office himself, and been arrested for non-violent civil disobedience. He believes we can– and must – provoke and win a peaceful revolution if we are to survive.

David serves as Advancement Manager for the Wiyot Tribe’s Dishgamu Community Land Trust and as Co-Coordinator of the US Solidarity Economy Network. He also serves on the Steering Committee of the Green Eco-Socialist Network, as an advisor to the California Progressive Alliance, and is a leader of the California Public Banking Alliance.

David ran for Attorney General of Texas in 2002, pledging to revoke the charters of corporations that routinely violate the law. In 2004 he was the Green Party nominee for President of the United States, and his demands for recounts in multiple states helped to launch the election integrity movement that ended the advance of electronic (black box) voting systems. In 2010 he helped to co-found Move To Amend and co-authored a proposed constitutional amendment to abolish the illegitimate court-created doctrines of corporate constitutional rights and money equals speech. In 2016 he served as campaign manager for the Jill Stein/Ajamu Baraka presidential campaign.

Portrait created by Eunice Adeyi

Yvonne 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 NYC, 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 racial and social justice organizations. Yvonne serves on the boards of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, Policy Advocates for Sustainable Economies, and the Institute for Social Ecology. 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.