Bineshi Albert

Trainer

Ozawa Bineshi Albert is Yuchi and Annishinaabe and serves as the Movement Building Coordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network. As coordinator she works with It Takes Roots and other movement spaces. She grew up in the native/indigenous rights movement and her work has primarily been in environmental justice and Native rights. She began her organizing work with the Native Lands Toxics Campaign of Greenpeace. She was founding board member of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and served on the Youth Task Force of the Southern Organizing Committee.  She helped create the Native American Voters Alliance and served as Lead Organizer and Operations Director. She is a recent graduate at the Institute of American Indian Art with a degree in Indigenous Liberal Studies with minors in Performing Arts and Creative Writing. When not organizing she has written and produces plays with a women’s theater collective called Hembras de Pluma where she wrote three plays in the subjects of domestic violence, missing and murdered indigenous women, and indigenous identity politics among others. She is the proud mother of three, a daughter and two sons. Bineshi lives in rural Oklahoma.

LJ Amsterdam

Trainer

LJ is a trainer, dancer, and youth organizer born and based in occupied Lenape territory/New York City. For a decade she has created making-spaces and mobilizing-spaces for young folks through music, movement, and political education. She developed Re-Up, a harm reduction organizing project for young drug users and sellers, and co-founded Social Justice Leadership Academy, a summer-long arts and action training for teens. In 2016, she was invited to Standing Rock to “come get the white people” which meant running daily come-correct trainings for non-Native visitors and helping build out national infrastructure to disseminate decolonization resources. She now works locally against militarism and mass incarceration. LJ is currently a direct action trainer and staff member with The Ruckus Society where she organizes opportunities for people to step off of the curb and into their power. She loves the ocean, outer space, and love.   

Lawrence Barriner II

Trainer

Lawrence is a communications strategist, connector, and systems nerd. He grew up in the US South and got out as soon as his black, queer body could figure out how. He loves quotes, baking bread, feeding his worms, and cooking food with friends. He has been shaped by Liberation Theology and (despite not being Catholic) hopes to live like a Catholic Worker again someday. He's obsessed with graphic design, self-mastery, podcasts, and helping people (including himself) expand their imagination capacity. He is inspired by Bayard Rustin, Marilyn Nelson, and James Baldwin. He writes daily (usually journal-style but sometimes sci-fi and sometimes poetry), is on the board of RESIST, and is building towards a world where all humans are in right relationship with change and each other.

Saa'un P. Bell

Trainer

Saa'un is the Statewide Communications Director for Californians for Justice- a statewide racial and education justice organization that organizes youth. Grounded in her southern roots of Greenville Alabama and Eastern Samar, Saa’un is the oldest of six, in a serious, but comical, working class Black and Filipino immigrant family. A Bolder of Black Organizing Leadership & Dignity (BOLD), Saa’un is a commitment to unseating the roots of racial and educational inequities through transformative organizing and narrative strategy. She has been organizing immigrant and youth of color in education for 8 years. Now, if you ever see Saa’un in the streets of Oakland she’s probably not smiling. For serious, you can catch her kicking it with her australian shepherds Fox & Sir Fyodor Dostoevsky, fishing the Pacific Coast for Halibut, reading, writing short fiction & philosophizing on everything from science fiction to Sailor Moon.

Gregory A. Cendana

Trainer

Dancer, Strategist and Entrepreneur Gregory Cendana is President of Can’t Stop! Won’t Stop! Consulting, Chief Creative Officer of Greg Dances and co-founder of The People’s Collective for Justice and Liberation. He was the first openly gay and youngest-ever Executive Director of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance and Institute for Asian Pacific American Leadership & Advancement. Gregory was also first openly gay Chair of the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, co-founder of the diversity initiative Inclusv, and serves on the board of directors for United We Dream as Treasurer and 18 Million Rising as Chair. Gregory was President of the United States Student Association (USSA), where he played an integral role in the passage of the Student Aid & Fiscal Responsibility Act and Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act.

Prior to his current role on the Board of Pharmacy, Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser also appointed him to serve on the Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs after he served a two year term on the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Advisory Committee under the leadership of Mayor Vince Gray. Gregory also co-founded the Washington Highlands Civic Association and served as its Vice President. He has been named one of Washington DC's most influential 40-and-under young leaders, one of the 30 Most Influential Asian Americans Under 30, 40 Influential Asian Americans in Washington, DC’s Inaugural Power 30 Under 30™ Award Recipients and the "Future of DC Politics". In his spare time, Gregory enjoys singing karaoke, choreographing dances and trying new recipes. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and Clubhouse: @GregoryCendana and TikTok: @GregDances

Christine Cordero

Trainer & Associate

Christine is an organizer, strategist, and public speaker. She has 20 years of experience in social justice sectors including environmental health and justice, youth organizing, and labor. She is former executive director at the Center for Story-based Strategy (CSS), where imagination builds power. CSS offers training and strategic support to social justice organizations and networks to use the power of narrative to change the story on the issues that matter most. She received a BA in Linguistics from Stanford University, with a concentration in language and power. She is also proud to serve on the Leadership Sangha (Board) of the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, CA.

Gopal Dayaneni

Gopal has been involved in fighting for social, economic, environmental and racial justice through organizing & campaigning, teaching, writing, speaking and direct action since the late 1980’s. He currently serves on the Staff Collective of Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project, which inspires and engages in transformative action towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture. MG is rooted in vibrant social movements led by low-income communities and communities of color committed to a Just Transition away from profit and pollution and towards healthy, resilient and life-affirming local economies. Gopal is an trainer with the The Ruckus Society and serves on the boards of The Center for Story-based Strategy, The Working World and The ETCgroup.org. He is on the advisory board of the Catalyst Project. Gopal works at the intersection of ecology, economy and empire. Gopal has been a campaigner for Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition on human rights and environmental justice in the high-tech industry and the Oil Campaigner for Project Underground, a human rights and environmental rights organization which supported communities resisting oil and mining exploitation around the world. Gopal has been active in many people powered direct action movements, including the Global Justice/Anti-Globalization Movement, Direct Action to Stop the War, the Climate Justice movement, Take Back the Land, Occupy and as an ally with Black Lives Matter. Gopal was an elementary and early childhood educator, working formerly as a teacher and as the co-director of the Tenderloin Childcare Center, a community based childcare center supporting children and families forced into homelessness. He has worked in teacher education and education organizing in the US and briefly in India. Most importantly, Gopal is the father of Ila Sophia and Kavi Samaka Orion. He lives in Oakland in an intentional, multi-generational community of nine adults, eight children and a bunch of chickens.

Dante Garcia

Trainer

Dante is a social entrepreneur, designer, and former climate organizer interested in social and interpersonal transformation. These days he splits his time between building Community Gearbox, a project aimed at disrupting individual consumption, and being a trainer-practitioner with the Center for Story-based Strategy. Previously, he co-founded the worker cooperative Story 2 Designs where he helped organizations like the Climate Justice Alliance, Resource Generation, Generative Somatics, and Asian Pacific Environmental Network tell their story through engaging websites and other digital media.

Reuben “Tihi” Hayslett

Trainer

Reuben “Tihi” Hayslett is a queer activist, writer and storyteller who has been a part of the CSS training network since his first Advanced Training in 2015. While working as an online campaigner for the Working Families Party, Tihi won consumer campaigns against Netflix, UPS, and worked with a coalition to remove David Koch from the Boards of the Smithsonian and PBS. He currently works at Demand Progress, leading online campaigns in the tech sector focusing on privacy and human rights. Tihi holds an MFA in Creative Writing and his debut short story collection, Dark Corners, is published by Running Wild Press. As one of the few fluent Dothraki speakers in the world, Tihi recently worked on the upcoming Netflix series Daybreak as a Dothraki Language Consultant.

Faith Harris

Trainer

Rev. Dr. Faith B. Harris is Assistant Professor, Theological Studies for The Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, Virginia Union University (STVU). She teaches courses in the study of systematic, eco-theology, and womanist/feminist theologies employing activism and community engagement in ministry.  She is the Director for Johnson A. Edosomwan Center for Faith, Leadership and Public Life for STVU which convenes workshops, panel discussions, town halls among other events to facilitate deeper and meaningful student and community engagement and dialogue related to theology and public and civic policy.  

In addition to her academic and administrative work, Dr. Harris is highly active in the Richmond community for more than ten years and has served a number of interfaith and grassroots organizations among them, Organizing for Action (OFA), is the current Vice-Chair for Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy (VICPP), and Chair for Virginia Interfaith Power & Light (VAIPL) and is a new member of the Standing Together steering committee of the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities. She is passionate about serving the faith community advocating for racial, gender and environmental justice and sustainability.  She is a member of the Governor’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council for both Governor Terry McAuliffe’s and Ralph Northam.

As a womanist and community activist, she demonstrates her passion and faith through the diverse activities of community organizing, teaching, public speaking, and serving the university, the community, and the church.

She has earned the Doctor of Ministry Degree and the Master of Divinity degree, from Virginia Union University and a Masters of Sacred Theology, with an emphasis in Practical Theology, Christian Social Ethics, and Ecclesiology from Boston University School of Theology.  

A member of First Unitarian Universalist Church in Richmond, Virginia where she serves as a Committee on Mission. She has a variety of interests including reading novels, gardening, cooking, canning, and camping.

PaKou Her

Associate

PaKou Her is Principal of Tseng Development Group, a consulting firm that provides lectures, workshops, organizational development, transformative leadership coaching, and grassroots strategy development designed to build racial equity and create systems change. She also spent three years  at 18MillionRising.org (18MR) in the roles of Campaign Director and Executive Director. There she leveraged civic technology and new media to build power and community among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, growing the 18MR member list from 5,000 to nearly 50,000 and elevating the cultural, political, and media power of AAPIs nationwide. Additionally, PaKou holds 20 years of anti-racism organizing experience, along with digital campaign experience as a Field Organizer with MoveOn.org and as Senior Campaign Director of Reproductive Rights and Culture at UltraViolet. Born and raised in the Midwest, she takes great pride representing AAPIs living in the nation’s midsection, and believes there are invaluable stories to be told by People of Color living in the most rural areas of the United States. Some of her favorite non-campaigning activities include entertaining two young daughters, squeezing in occasional adult-only evenings with her spouse, chasing culinary adventures, and dreaming about reviving a long-lost singing career. Swap musings about race, culture, and organizing on Twitter @pakouher.

Ian Madrigal

Trainer

Ian Madrigal is the creative activist and political strategist behind the viral Monopoly Man appearances in Congress, the shaming of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant over the child separation policy, and the literal "troll" of Mark Zuckerberg.  In addition to their creative activism, Ian is an attorney, organizer, writer, and filmmaker focused on racial and economic justice, trans/queer rights, and radical democratic reform. Their work has been profiled in the New York Times, Washington Post, HBO, the Today Show, Fox News, NPR, and many more. 

Angus Maguire

Trainer & Associate

Angus Maguire is a parent, designer, organizer, artist, facilitator, communications strategist— master of none — Angus believes deeply in our collective capacity to self-govern. He is also a true believer in story-based strategy, using it for everything from eldercare and parenting, to direct action planning and organizing for futures beyond whiteness. Angus was previously a Communications Organizer with SEIU. He’s spent the last two decades creating visual communications with movements for collective liberation across the country. You can find Angus re-imagining home and community in Astoria, Oregon.

Terry Marshall

Associate

Terry has been involved in youth and social justice struggles for over 15 yrs. In 2008 Terry became the Lead Youth Organizer of the Healthcare Education Project, an initiative of 1199 SEIU in New York City. While there he led the innovative “Young Voices For Healthcare” campaign to involve young people in the healthcare reform struggle. Terry is the Co-Founder and Co-editor of Occupy Comix, a bimonthly comic book that depicts the stories of the 99% and is working on a book presented by his Intelligent Mischief project depicting creative activists of color.

Kiara Nagel

Trainer & Associate

Kiara Nagel is a creative strategist based in Los Angeles with 20 years of experience building creative and collaborative initiatives and supporting social groups, leaders, and organizations to become more engaged and impactful. In addition to being a Lead Associate with Center for Story-based Strategy, Kiara is an Affiliate with Interaction Institute for Social Change and often delivers facilitation and consulting services to foster collaboration, grow healthy organizations, and support equitable community development. Kiara has contributed to many local, national and international initiatives focused on social justice and transformational change and trained and supported organizers, educators, and young people to be more creative in their work. Kiara currently serves as faculty at Antioch University in Los Angeles and holds a Masters in City Planning from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.

Angela Peoples

Trainer

Angela is an organizer, strategist, and trainer who specializes in creating moments that allow people to demonstrate what justice, fairness and equity mean to them and their communities. With experience working in movements for Black and LGBTQ liberation, immigrant rights, college access and affordability and corporate accountability, Angela sees direct action as a platform for art and creative expression that engages uncomfortable truths and challenges anti-blackness and white supremacy in all forms.

Ruby Pinto

Trainer

Ruby Pinto is a queer organizer and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA. She had the honor of spending a decade in Chicago where she learned to organize within movements for racial, economic, gender and LGBTQIA+ liberation with a focus on prison and police abolition, working on campaigns like #NoCopAcademy, #FreeBresha and the fight to end cash bail. She is a core member of For the People Artists Collective, a radical squad of Black artists and artists of color which emphasizes the critical role cultural workers play in social movements. In 2017, Ruby co-curated the "Do Not Resist?" Exhibition, a city-wide project highlighting the past 100 years of police violence in Chicago, and uplifting the resistance waged by communities historically and currently. She has also helped to train community groups in creative direct action and blockades with the Lifted Voices collective. Ruby is enthusiastic about building a world where basic needs are decommodified and every person has the opportunity to pursue and engage with creative expression, regardless of access to wealth. She believes that creative collaboration holds vast potential in building strong communities and a safer, more peaceful world.

Kedar Reddy

Trainer & Associate

Kedar is an anti-caste activist, and a game nerd. He has created GIFs and games for various movement organizations including CSS. He was previously Co-Founder at PlayLoops, and is currently Co-Founder at Organiz.org, where he continually obsesses over the best ways to improve on the reach and conversions for grassroots movement organizations on social media. Kedar is a coach for our fellowship program and an active participant in the network.

Keenan Rhodes

Trainer

Keenan Rhodes is a photographer, videographer, and writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. He has a history of community activism, organizational development, mentorship and leadership through his involvement with community empowerment organization Kheprw Institute, where he serves as Lead Videographer and Storyteller. He is a 2018 graduate of IU Bloomington with a Bachelors in Journalism and Portuguese. He uses photography and videography as platforms to build community and create narratives centered on freedom, equity and empowerment. He is currently a Frontline Solutions Storytelling Fellow with the Climate Justice Alliance and Kheprw Institute, and he is also a principal member and Marketing Strategist of ZEAL, a black arts cooperative based in Inglewood, CA.

Jess St. Louis

Jess St. Louis is a lesbian femme-identified white trans woman & communications strategist who lives and loves in Greensboro, NC. She comes out of LGBTQ liberation, racial justice, and prison industrial complex abolitionist movements in the US South, and most recently served as the Director of Communications, Research, and Evaluation at the US Human Rights Network. As a CSS Network Associate, she is working on integrating story-based strategy tools for spokesperson training and a new CSS tool to address self-care, burnout, and sustainability in movement-building work. You can find her sitting on her porch, dreaming of a world where we live free from interpersonal, systemic, and state violence—and of movements that are powerful and expansive enough to bring that world into being.

D. Farai Williams

Trainer

D. Farai Williams, Founder & Facilitator with, Dynamizing Equity (dEq) & Idjeli Theater Works (ITW), is an artist, embodied equity facilitator, anti-racist, cultural organizer and racial equity strategist. “I use theater, culture-based tools, and somatic practice as a method for personal and social inquiry; to synergies the head, heart & body for radical healing. By acting and dramatizing personal stories, our reflective minds begin to shape stronger ideas against racial oppression and inequity [particularly the racial oppression we have internalized]”. The result-invigoration to rebuild healthy, equitable communities. Farai holds a master’s of fine arts degree from the Institute for Advanced Theater Training at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University and Moscow Theater Arts Farai currently serves as a, Consensus Organizer for New Repertory Theater and Trainer with the Center for Story-Based Strategy. She is also a Resource Trainer with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond and a faculty member with Southern Jamaica Plains’, Racial Reconciliation and Healing Project.