We Bring Our Full Selves to Our Work

Our People

Alfredo Carlos

Alfredo Carlos

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

April Taylor

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.

Andrew Curley

Andrew Curley

Board Member

Andrew Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studies coal and development in the Navajo Nation. His latest publications highlight the consequence of colonial water laws on indigenous nations and the political economy of green transition within reservation economies. His current work is on extraction, energy, and notions of resource curse among tribal governments.

Dani Knoll

Dani Knoll

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

David Cobb

Board Member

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.

Diana Benitez

Diana Benitez

Diana is an urban planner and critical cartographer based in Berkeley, California working to create health, affordable and safe communities by addressing disparities. She previously worked at Advancement Project California, Ralph andGoldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and T.R.U.S.T. South Los Angeles Community Land Trust. Diana has a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) from UCLA and a BA in Urban and Regional Planning with a Geographic Information Sciences Minor from California State University Northridge.
Eleanor Finley

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.
Emily Kawano

Emily Kawano

Board Member

Emily is Co-Director of the Wellspring Cooperative Corporation, which is seeking to create an engine for new, community-based job creation in Springfield, Massachusetts. Wellspring’s goal is to use anchor institution purchases to create a network of worker-owned businesses located in the inner city that will provide job training and entry-level jobs to unemployed and underemployed residents through worker-owned cooperatives. She also serves as Coordinator of the United States Solidarity Economy Network. An economist by training, Emily served as the Director of the Center for Popular Economics from 2004 to 2013. Prior to that, Emily taught economics at Smith College, worked as the National Economic Justice Representative for the American Friends Service Committee and, in Northern Ireland, founded a popular economics program with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
Haley Roeser

Haley Roeser

Haley Roeser (she/they) is a researcher, social practice artist, DJ, and culinary artist based in Los Angeles. Their work centers around infrastructures of care and draws upon creative and structural interventions as means of disruption. She recently graduated from UCLA with a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning and a Certificate in Gender Studies.
Leslie Ezeh

Leslie Ezeh

Leslie is the founder and President of Legends Animated, a 501c3 worker self-directed nonprofit animation company. Through partnerships with both the nonprofit and animation communities, Legends Animated provides collaborative opportunities to create independent animation that is both engaging and impactful.

Portrait created by Eunice Adeyi

Linda Quiquivix

Linda Quiquivix

Linda Quiquivix PhD, is a geographer and popular educator based in Chumash lands. She places her university training at the service of under-resourced communities who seek clean water, land, and tools to build and strengthen their collective autonomies.
Marshall Trammell

Marshall Trammell

Marshall Trammell is a percussionist from the post-Max Roach continuum. He conducts his arts practice as a service to community interests beyond the stage. A mid-career, multidisciplinary, visionary artist keenly focused on investigating social practices, sense-making, and aesthetic technologies embedded in indigenous design principles and weaponizing culture, Trammell is an Improvisor & Music Research Strategist. Born in the early 1970’s, Trammell grew up marveling at the deep ridges the Ko’olau Mountain Range in Kaneohe, on Oahu, Hawai’i, experiencing the many narratives embedded in folkloric arts, crafts and complimentary tales. Today he performs research and political education internationally from a platform for embodied social justice vernacular, organizational strategy, & alternative infrastructure development.
Mason Herson-Hord

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.
Matthew Slaats

Matthew Slaats

Matthew Slaats has a 20 year history working at the intersection of participatory democracy, creativity, community development, and alternative economics to support grassroots, community lead decision-making, resilience, and liberation. At present, he is a Ph.D candidate in the University of Virginia School of Architecture working with public housing residents to tell the history of grassroots Black led social transformation in Charlottesville. He teaches courses that explore how social movements impact the future of urban and rural spaces. Matthew also is a co-founding member of the Virginia Solidarity Economy Network, serves on the US Solidarity Economy Network Board, and a North American Representative for RIPESS.
Mike Strode

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.
Parag Rajendra Khandhar, Esq.

Parag Rajendra Khandhar, Esq.

Parag Rajendra Khandhar, Esq. is a founding principal of Gilmore Khandhar, LLC, a law firm focused on using legal, policy and advocacy tools to advance economic justice, racial equity and social transformation. He teaches in the Small Business and Community Economic Development Clinic at George Washington University Law School.
Parag has represented and organized with tenants in DC Chinatown, Asian seniors in Maryland, and many other groups. Prior to law school, he worked for 10 years in NYC with Asian and immigrant communities in direct and emergency relief services after September 11th, data advocacy, technical assistance, and managing a community arts space.
Parag is a co-founder of Baltimore Activating Solidarity Economies (BASE) and the Asian American Solidarity Economies Network (AASE). He is also a facilitator-participant in the Law and Social Change Jam, building beloved community with individuals working for transformative societal change in law and justice contexts. He serves on the advisory boards for Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED) and Impact Hub Baltimore. He write short poems and tries to keep up with his dynamic seven year old.
Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou

Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou

Board Member

Rev. Sekou is an author, documentary filmmaker, public intellectual, organizer, pastor and theologian. A graduate of St. Louis Soldan High School, Rev. Sekou has deep ties to the region. He began his ministry at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church, where Michael Brown’s funeral was held. He has been on the ground in Ferguson for months on behalf of the Fellowship of Reconciliation — the country’s oldest interfaith peace organization. Rev. Sekou was a 2014 Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Education and Research Institute at the time of Michael Brown Jr’s killing. He published a collection of writings, Gods, Gays, and Guns: Essays on Religion and the Future of Democracy (Campbell & Cannon Press, 2012). Based on his in-depth reporting on the London Riots in 2012, Rev. Sekou has a forthcoming book entitled Riot Music: British Hip Hop, Race, and the Politics of Meaning (Hamilton Books, 2015).
Steve McFarland

Steve McFarland

Steve McFarland is Associate Professor and Chair of Labor Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He studied Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he earned his PhD, and holds a Masters in Regional Planning from Cornell. He is an active member of the California Faculty Association. His scholarly research engages with labor history, cartography, social movements, and urban space.
Yvonne Yen Liu

Yvonne Yen Liu

Research Director

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.