Meet the Team

Executive Team

  • Chris Torres has over 15 years’ experience as a community organizer, electoral campaigner, and movement strategist. He’s worked for a variety of progressive organizations and electoral campaigns including Community Change Action, The Industrial Areas Foundation, New Organizing Institute, The Working Families Party, National Immigration Forum, and United We Dream. He got his start organizing the political campaigns for U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and former President Barack Obama. Most recently, Chris served as MoveOn’s Political Director where he mobilized voters, small-dollar donations, and endorsements to elect progressive candidates and to advance public policy. Chris is dedicated to strengthening the progressive movement. In addition to his work, he serves on the board of the Alliance for Justice, is a trainer with the Leading Change Network, and is a master’s student at the CUNY School of Labor & Urban Studies (SLU).

  • Gara is Senior Fellow at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at CCNY. He is President of the Democracy Alliance, the largest network of donors dedicated to building the progressive movement in the United States. He was formerly President and CEO of Atlantic Philanthropies and Vice President and Director of U.S. Programs for the Open Society Foundations.

  • Morna Ha brings nearly two decades of leadership across nonprofit, government, and education sectors at both the local and national levels. She has worked to grow and strengthen organizations and strategies that build power, advance justice, and sustain the people who make it happen.

    Morna began her career as a community organizer with the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium, where she later served as Executive Director. She has also worked for the City of New York and the U.S. House of Representatives, and for the past decade has focused on the K-12 and higher education sectors—developing strategies that center the voices of students and educators of color.

    The daughter of Korean immigrants and born and raised in New York City, Morna holds a Master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, a Master’s in Educational Leadership from the Broad Center and a B.A. from Dartmouth College.

  • Noelia (she/her) joined Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice as Executive Assistant in September 2022. In her role, she supports the institute’s Co-Executive Directors and Co-Chairs. Previously, she worked in administrative and operational support, organizational culture and event planning at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. There and through various government and community-based internships and campaign work, she has developed a passion for public service, immigrant rights and accessible civic engagement. Noelia holds a BA in Anthropology from the New School. She was born in Bolivia and grew up in Queens, the borough she still calls home today.

  • Cristina is a Distinguished Lecturer at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. She is Co-Founder and former Executive Director of United We Dream (UWD), the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country. Under Cristina’s leadership, UWD grew into a powerful network of one million members that shifted the politics and narrative about immigrants and immigration, ultimately delivering policy changes at the local and national levels.

  • Mary Lassen serves as Senior Advisor to LDSJ.  As a leader and strategist, she has over 40 years’ experience building and improving state and national organizations. She has a track record of driving organizational growth, strengthening performance culture and raising funds in a variety of settings.  Mary coaches emerging women leaders from local and state level organizations and currently serves on several non-profit boards.

Fellowship Training Team

  • Kyky is a political, community, and labor movement practitioner with roots in the labor movement, where she organized with workers to build and grow direct join, member led organizations in right-to-work, non-bargaining states across the Southeastern US with the Communication Workers of America (CWA). She developed through an organizing pipeline with the union, working as a local, state and regional organizer, and eventually as a Campaign Lead. After transitioning from working with CWA, Kyky joined the Base-Building department at Popular Democracy, where she developed organizing curriculum, led and facilitated organizer-in-training programs, supported organizations with back-to-field organizing initiatives post-COVID, and trained and developed organizers at all levels of organization through coaching, mentorship, and side by side modeling as a senior organizing manager. Kyky later transitioned into her role as Deputy Director of Strategic organizing at Popular Democracy, where she supported organizations to do deep infrastructure and power assessments, and develop and grow strategic base-building programs, with deep integration of campaign work and deep organizing. Kyky joined LDSJ as Deputy Director of Fellowships in 2024, where she co-lead training and curriculum development, course instruction, retreat facilitation, and program coordination for LDSJ’s fellowship programs with her training team peers. Kyky was a former LDSJ Movement Leader Fellow, in the inaugural MLF cohort, served as a co-instructor for the first iteration of the LDSJ Regional Organizers for Community Change (ROCC) Fellowship, and served as a mentor with the institute’s Career Empowerment program. Kyky stepped into her new role as Director of Fellowships in July 2025.

    Kyky is a creative, and spends her free time making and consuming art across disciplines.

  • Tiffany is the Director of Admissions for the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice. She joins us from Braven, a national nonprofit focused on the education-to-employment gap among first generation college students, where Tiffany was the founding New York City Program Manager. In that role, she launched and operationalized a leadership and career accelerator at Lehman College, one of Braven’s partners, that served several hundred students. Before Braven, Tiffany worked with Sadie Nash Leadership Project. She has been a Young People For (YP4) Fellow and an ELLA Fellow, and currently provides healing justice workshops as part of a collective called Brown Girl Recovery. Originally from Jamaica, she grew up in the Bronx. She is a proud first generation graduate of Binghamton University.

  • Brad Brockman is an organizer and political educator. Originally from South Africa, Brad’s formative political involvement was as a researcher, organizer and leader of Equal Education, a grassroots movement of students, youth and parents campaigning against systemic inequality in the South African schooling system. He was trained and worked as a political educator at the Tshisimani Center for Activist Education in Cape Town, where he taught history and political theory to youth, community and worker activists, and built relationships between activists in South Africa and elsewhere, including in the United States. Brad was also previously an Activist Fellow of the Bertha Foundation and Social Change Initiative, completing an independent research project on student and youth activist movements globally. He holds a BA (Hons.) in History from the University of Cape Town and a MA in African Studies from Yale University.

  • Anjali Rodrigues (she/her) is a first-generation Indian-American, an eldest daughter, an educator, a leadership and community organizing trainer, and a fútbol enthusiast. While completing her undergraduate degree at UCLA, she worked as a writing counselor in the Community Programs Office, where she discovered the campus’s rich legacy of organizing, particularly the role of the Black Panthers. At the CPO, Anjali had her first experience with community organizing through the PLEDGE referendum, which students organized and passed successfully in 2009. 

    After graduating, Anjali began her teaching career in Richmond, California, and deepened her political development through the People’s Education Movement and Teachers for Social Justice. In 2015, she earned her master’s in Arts in Education from Harvard, where she also began teaching public narrative and community organizing alongside Dr. Marshall Ganz.

    From 2014 to 2022, Anjali taught in K–12 schools in Boston and Brownsville, New York, while simultaneously leading workshops on public narrative and organizing for organizations across the country. Her collaborators have included the Sunrise Movement, March For Our Lives, Vital Voices, re:power, Women Moving Millions, the El Hibri Foundation, the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity, and many more.

    She also founded the WARMTH Fellowship, a leadership program for young femmes of color (ages 15–29) that centers storytelling, peer coaching, and community care.

    Currently, Anjali serves as Deputy Director of Fellowships at Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice, where she leads the Social Change Fellowship—a year-long program for undergraduates in the City University of New York system who are interested in pursuing social movement work.

Admissions Team

  • Ricardo is currently working as an Admissions Manager for the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice. He is a graduate from The City College of New York (2020). Throughout his time in undergrad Ricardo organized with the CCNY Dream Team, the club on campus that was meant for undocumented students and their allies. In his senior year he served on the executive board as secretary. In the spring and the summer of 2020 he supported the New York State Youth Leadership Council (YLC), the first undocumented led organization in the state. Ricardo’s interests range from international affairs, immigration, labor, and civil rights. Ricardo was born in Venezuela, grew up in Wyoming, and is now a proud New Yorker.

  • Ashley is the Admissions Associate for the Fellowships for the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice. She joins us from the Center for Court Innovation, where she led youth diversion programs centered on building youth confidence, self-efficacy, and empowerment. In her role, she launched a summer internship program that matched youth’s passions within their respective careers. Youth worked with real estate agencies, multi-media consulting companies, non-profit organizations, and with beauty entrepreneurs. With over a decade of experience, she has dedicated her career to leveraging her lived experience in the child welfare system to drive policy change and transform service systems for youth. Ashley is passionate about positive youth development and peer support and wants to bring these services to incarcerated youth ages 18-24 and reshape the culture of rehabilitation within justice systems.

    Ashley is a NYC native, born in Brooklyn and now residing in Brooklyn; she is a proud first-generation college graduate from SUNY Plattsburgh. Ashley received her Master’s in Public Policy at Northeastern University.

Career and Leadership Development Team

  • Sasha is a social justice advocate and experiential learning and career development professional. Most recently, she served as a Program Officer at The New York Women’s Foundation overseeing a portfolio of grants to organizations working on a multitude of interconnected social issues, including, housing, gender, economic, racial, and healing justice. With nearly a decade of experience working in youth development and education, she has designed, facilitated, and implemented programming for hundreds of high school, college, and graduate students. During her time at John Jay College’s Institute for Justice and Opportunity, she directed four college fellowship programs for historically underrepresented students seeking careers in policy advocacy, youth justice, and philanthropy.

  • Jake Levin (he/they) is a community and cultural organizer whose work has focused on distributed learning and building power for collective liberation. Jake organizes with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and with a SURJ-affiliated project mobilizing white men against white supremacy and patriarchy. Recent roles include COVID-19 response at Brooklyn College, developing small science museums for public spaces, and building physically immersive spaces to facilitate meaningful face-to-face dialogue between strangers across the globe. He has also conducted research for a book about civic power and was a co-producer of a historic Major Lazer concert in Havana, Cuba for an audience of over 450,000. Jake has studied with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, The School for Poetic Computation, Brooklyn College, and Macaulay Honors College.

  • Riki Robinson (she/her) has worked on leadership development, community building, and mentorship for communities of color for over five years. From 2021-2023, she was the inaugural Program Director of New York at the Jews of Color Initiative where she designed and launched a leadership fellowship, project incubator, and network for Jewish People of Color in New York City. She has worked in Asian American Pacific Islander organizations and immigration justice groups including Giant Robot and the Inland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective. Riki was a Fellow with Repair the World where she focused on food justice, particularly urban farming, food pantries, and SNAP benefits enrollment. She received a B.A. in Asian American Studies and Sociology from Pitzer College and is grateful for popular education. Riki was adopted from China, raised in Los Angeles, and has called Brooklyn home for over five years.

Organizational Infrastructure Team

  • Jesse is a veteran political organizer with experience from over 35 political campaigns across Canada and the US. His fundraising background spans both the non-profit sector and political space, with experience in mobilizing major gifts and hundreds of thousands of grassroots donations. Most recently, Jesse served as Finance Director for first-time candidate, now Congressman, Jamaal Bowman, from his initial primary challenge through his first re-election campaign.

    Born in Sydney, Australia, to Philadelphian parents, Jesse also lived in Ithaca, NY, and the Bay Area before moving to Toronto when he was nine. Jesse began his social justice activism in middle school and continued through high school, where he helped found a city-wide social justice student group. Jesse studied political science and history at McGill University. Jesse enjoys hip hop, cooking, baking and hiking with his dog Frida.

  • Rafael is a young professional with administrative and operations experience in the public sector. As the Operations Coordinator, Rafael provides logistical and administrative support to LDSJ’s growing team and programs. Like many immigrant New Yorkers, Rafael attended a CUNY school, double majoring in Political Science and Women & Gender Studies and minoring in Human Rights. There, Rafael was also involved with student groups and in immigrant youth organizing. Since then, Rafael has worked in various nonprofits settings and learned about their efforts to provide legal, health, educational, and other services to local communities. When not working, Rafael enjoys taking long walks, reading random Wikipedia articles, and spending time with their dog, Zoey.

  • Aravdeep Kaur is the Finance and Operations Coordinator for the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice and a City College of New York graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. She previously worked as a Finance College Assistant at the Colin Powell School and developed an interest in issues like the financial barriers to higher education, for first-generation students in particular. As a student, Aravdeep also participated in the Student Success Guide Peer Mentorship Program to support new students and help them achieve their academic goals at the Colin Powell School. In her free time, Aravdeep enjoys reading books and playing the guitar.

  • Kate serves as an Operations Coordinator at LDSJ, where she combines her passion for social justice with her expertise in administrative and logistical support to advance the work of the next generation of movement leaders. Kate's background as an administrative professional began in the entertainment industry, spanning Broadway, off-Broadway, and national touring productions, as well as experience as Executive Assistant at Artists & Representatives, a talent agency representing professionals in film, television, and theatre. Collaborating with a diverse community of storytellers in a mixed unionized industry strengthened Kate's dedication to social, economic, and labor rights. She holds a BFA in Theatre from Ithaca College, specializing in Stage Management. Outside of work, Kate is a proud former Jersey Girl, cat enthusiast, and Real Housewives aficionado.

  • Mickayla McCann (she/her) joined Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice as Digital Coordinator in April 2025. In her role, she leads LDSJ’s digital communications by managing social media, newsletters, and email campaigns, while creating dynamic visual and written content that amplifies the organization’s mission and values. Born and raised in North Carolina, Mickayla holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s in Public Administration with a focus on nonprofit management and policy from NYU. Outside of work, she is a dedicated foster dog parent, having fostered 26 dogs to date.

CCNY/School of Labor Studies Associated Faculty

  • Stephanie Luce is Professor of Labor Studies at the School of Labor and Urban Studies, and Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She received her BA in economics at the University of California, Davis and both her PhD in sociology and her MA in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Best known for her research on living wage campaigns and movements, she is the author of Fighting for a Living Wage, and co-author of The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy, and The Measure of Fairness. She is also author of Labor Movements: Global Perspectives. Her latest book, co-authored with Deepak Bhargava, is Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World.

  • Lindsay Zafir is the co-founder and co-director of the ACORN Oral History Project, a large-scale oral history of staff, members, and leaders of the community organizing group ACORN. She is also the co-editor of Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement​, an anthology on organizing at the intersection of labor and climate justice that will be published by The New Press in the spring of 2024.

    Lindsay previously served as the editor of The Forge: Organizing Strategy and Practice​, an online publication and learning community for organizers across the progressive movement. She holds a PhD in History from Yale University, where she conducted research on the history of sexuality, science, and social movements. Her current book project, State of Denial, examines the rise of HIV/AIDS denialism in the U.S. and its contentious relationship with AIDS treatment activism. While completing her PhD, Lindsay worked as an organizer for UNITE HERE Local 33, the union of researchers and teachers at Yale.

  • Samantha Agarwal holds a doctorate in sociology from Johns Hopkins University (2023). Her writing and research focus on neoliberalism, farmers’ and workers’ movements in India and the rise of authoritarian ethnonationalism globally. She is currently working on a book project based on her PhD dissertation which examines the intersection of India’s longstanding caste inequalities and the Hindu supremacist movement. Her work has appeared in academic journals such as Politics & Society, Journal of Agrarian Change and Journal of Contemporary Asia and has won awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association. Her work has also been supported by fellowships and grants including the Mellon International Research Dissertation Fellowship, the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research Fellowship and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship. Prior to becoming an academic, Dr. Agarwal spent five years in Central India accompanying frontline communities in struggles against forcible land dispossession and for indigenous forests rights. In the US, she has been involved in campaigns focusing on abolition, immigration and housing justice. At JHU with TRU-UE she helped lead a successful unionization effort of graduate student workers. She is also a co-founder of The Cornerstone Project, a volunteer-run collective which provides training on the fundamentals of movement building and organizing. At SLU she will be teaching courses such as Social Justice and the City, Power & Strategy and more.

  • Shanelle Matthews collaborates with social justice activists, organizations, and campaigns to inspire action and build narrative power for justice and liberation. She is the former Movement for Black Lives communications director and a Distinguished Lecturer at City College of New York. Shanelle founded Radical Communicators Network (RadComms)—a global community of practice movement communications workers, and is the co-editor of Liberation Stories: Building Narrative Power for 21st Century Social Movements, an anthology detailing world-building narrative campaigns and strategies led by social movement communications workers in the 21st century.

  • Puya Gerami is Distinguished Lecturer at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. Born and raised in Connecticut, he started out in the labor movement as an organizer at SEIU 1199 New England and later served as education director for the local. Most recently, he served as founding director of a new statewide progressive coalition called Connecticut For All. He is receiving his PhD in the history department at Yale, with a dissertation entitled “How the State(s) Became the Battlefield: State Employee Unionism, Privatization, and the Struggle to Shape the Public Sector.”

  • Alethia Jones, PhD (Distinguished Lecturer, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies) is a practitioner-scholar of labor, immigrant and black feminist movements. She designs spaces for transformative and liberatory learning that strengthens organizers and drives strategic social change. She led leadership development at 1199SEIU UHE, the nation’s largest healthcare workers union, developing and executing strategic interventions to restructure the union and reinvigorate and re-align the internal education programs to center member-driven power building for delegates, organizers, and officers. She subsequently directed global fellowships at Open Society Foundations supporting activists, academics and executive directors committed to human rights internationally. She serves on the boards of Highlander Research and Education Center and Training for Change. In addition, she advises the Advancing Black Strategists Initiative (Jobs with Justice) and United Maroon Indigenous Peoples. She co-authored the award-winning book, A’int Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith (with Virginia Eubanks and Barbara Smith).  As faculty member in Labor Studies, she teaches classes on immigration, social movements, organizing and intersectionality as well as directs Civic Engagement and Leadership Development where she incubates the Movement Educators Lab. Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, she resides in Brooklyn’s Little Caribbean neighborhood.

Adjunct Trainers

  • Donna Coletrane Battle is a spiritual practitioner, soul coach, and educator focused on justice as it relates specifically to the intersection of race, gender, and spirituality.  Donna is a mother, wife, sister, and friend who also works to strengthen the soul of justice and movement spaces, coaches leaders, pastors those without a pastor, partners to cultivate healing in relationships, and commits every day to a life of being present, though not always successful! She holds a BA in Public Relations from NC A&T State University, an MDiv from Duke University, and a Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy from Eastern University.

  • Jonathan Hogstad (he/him) is Director of the Strategic Campaigns Project where he's leading a collaborative process to refine a powerful campaigning methodology, write a textbook, develop and disseminate curricula on the subject, and facilitate a movement-wide conversation to shift our campaigning culture in the direction of rigor, discipline, and a greater ability to grapple with hard things together in good faith. He was previously Strategic Campaigns & Research Director at Community Change where his team built strategic campaigning capacity in the grassroots movement through training and joint campaigning. Prior to that he was Deputy Research Director at SEIU Local 32BJ and a capital strategies organizer at SEIU. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner, is known as part of the entourage of his neighborhood-famous five-year old twins, and makes music with the psychedelic electro-funk-R&B band The Hogstad Brothers.

  • Kortni Malone has trained thousands of folks—from movement leaders in the organizing world to volunteers and community members—cultivating leadership and building power to fight for change.

    Kortni was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan and she has spent the past 15 years fighting for justice for young people and communities in Michigan and across the country. A teacher by trade, Kortni left the school system in Detroit to seek new ways to build power with Black and Brown people. She has worked in non-profits as well as at the intersection of issue advocacy and electoral strategy with organizations like Coworker.org, Color of Change, NextGen America, and Elizabeth Warren for President.

    She actively consults as a curriculum designer, trainer, strategist, and leadership coach for partners like the Leading Change Network, Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice, The Wild Project, The Arc of Change, Re:Power, Practicing Democracy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, and ActionAid International.

  • N. José Acevedo is president of New World Consulting and an expert in facilitating the development of leadership skills and the creation of high-performing teams and organizations. José has spent the last 35 years helping different groups throughout the world deal with the implications of the reality that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and that we can’t do our best work without breathing space.
    José was a lead trainer for The Rockwood Leadership Institute for 20 years. He has also designed and taught special programs on team alignment, communicating for action and organizational change, both in English and Spanish, for organizations throughout the world, such as The Center for Popular Democracy, Drug Policy Alliance, Community Change, Make the Road NY, SEIU, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and The Ford Foundation.
    José spent three years as an attorney for a large union (DC37) in New York City. He received his BA from The City College of New York, and his law degree from New York University.

LDSJ Founders

  • Deepak Bhargava is a longtime social justice leader, organizer, strategist, policy expert, and mentor to activists. He has previously served as a distinguished lecturer at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and until 2018 was executive director of Community Change. He is the coauthor of Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World and coeditor of Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future. He coauthored this report during his tenure as senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, prior to becoming president of the JPB Foundation in February 2024. He holds a BA in social studies from Harvard University.

  • Gara is Senior Fellow at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at CCNY. He is President of the Democracy Alliance, the largest network of donors dedicated to building the progressive movement in the United States. He was formerly President and CEO of Atlantic Philanthropies and Vice President and Director of U.S. Programs for the Open Society Foundations.

  • Dr. Andrew Rich was the Dean of the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at The City College of New York from February 2019 - June 2025. The Colin Powell School is home to the social science departments at CCNY as well as the core leadership development and public service programs of City College. With 4,000 students, the Colin Powell School’s mission is to transform one of the nation’s most diverse student bodies into tomorrow’s global leaders.
    From 2011-2019, Dr. Rich was Executive Secretary & CEO of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, a federal agency that supports young people pursuing public service leadership across the United States. Before that, from 2009-2011, Rich was President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank and leadership development organization based in New York City.
    Dr. Rich is Chair of the Board of Friends of the Truman Foundation. He is the author of Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise and has written about the role of think tanks and foundations in American politics and policymaking. He previously taught political science at CCNY and Wake Forest University. He received his BA from the University of Richmond and his PhD in political science from Yale University.