ABOUT

Matthew Armstead is a community builder, facilitator, and organizer in Philadelphia, PA, and he is a trainer with Training for Change. He has worked with diverse groups of people from Occupy Wall Street activists to Ivy League university students, and led sessions on a variety of topics, such as anti-oppression, strategic planning, community outreach, peer counseling, nonviolent direct action, training of trainers, and organizational development. He has designed workshops on raising class awareness among students, building toward racial justice with college administrators, utilizing conflict with LGBTQ community leaders, and fostering an inter-generational movement with Occupy activists.

Dedicated to social change, Matthew develops curricula based on the framework of interlocking oppression with the goal of increasing people power. He is passionate about using music, theater, and dance to learn from groups and create dynamic change. Matthew has spent time fostering community among LGBTQA people as well as being an ally to student movements. He has been an organizer for large social justice convergences, most recently as core organizer during the Occupy National Gathering. He is currently working as a part of the grassroots, nonviolent direct action campaign, Earth Quaker Action Team.

Katey Lauer is an organizer, facilitator and trainer in Central Appalachia, with a deep love of place. She has worked with grassroots groups in and outside of the mountains for ten years, as lead organizer in student/worker campaigns to take on Sodexo, as Coordinator of The Alliance for Appalachia, as Coordinator of Appalachia Rising and The March on Blair Mountain, and as organizer with Advocates for a Safe Water System. She has provided mentorship to young people throughout the country including members of the Highlander Center’s Appalachian Fellowship and students with the national Divestment Student Network. She is currently the Director of The West Virginia Trainers Project, as well as a part-time Administrator with The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, and an Honorary Member of UMWA Local 1440.

Erika Thorne has been a progressive activist, writer, facilitator and cultural worker since 1974. She focuses on cross-race coalition-building, anti-racism work with other whites, and diversity work. Erika has worked with environmental and media justice groups, undocumented immigrants, Hmong organizations, domestic violence activists, housing projects residents, the national education department of a large US union, and a full range of non-profits, organizers and rabble-rousers. In 2012, she collaborated with local training organizations to co-facilitate four workshops for 98 Burmese nonviolent activists in northern Thailand. She trains multi-racial groups of trainers in the UK through Campaign Bootcamp, and in northern Europe with Vredesactie.  Erika is on the core organizing team of SURJ-MN (a white co-conspirator group.) She also loves to facilitate training of trainers, hate-crimes response, conflict waging, ethical grassroots fundraising, and meetings – especially real sticky ones! Erika was the Managing Director of MN Friends for a Nonviolent World for nearly three years, and coordinated the Alternatives to Violence Project-MN, offering intensive workshops in prisons and jails, for five years.  As a former dancer for social change, she brings joyful physicality to her facilitation.

Contact Erika.

Andrew Willis Garcés works with groups that want to transform their practices to become more powerful and to develop an organizational culture of learning.

Originally from Memphis and now based in North Carolina after years in Texas and the District of Columbia, he especially enjoys working with Southern organizations, and with roots in Colombia, has worked with Spanish-speaking immigrant groups around the country, in addition to organizations in Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico.

For organizing groups, he’s helped develop basebuilding practices that lead to greater participation by grassroots members, and outside-the-box campaigns that use creative direct action to expand what’s possible. Here are some articles about campaigns he has helped healthcare workers, undocumented immigrants and taxi drivers to win. He’s also worked on successful campaigns with janitors’ unions, public housing tenant associations and immigrant voters, and two short campaigns to impact US foreign policy towards Colombia, Obama Remember Us and No More Broken Hearts. He also helped plan a campaign that resulted in a new income tax increase on the top 2% of taxpayers in the District of Columbia to pay for safety net services. He has also taught undergraduate courses for Georgetown University’s Program on Justice and Peace.

Naomi has almost two decades experience as a community organizer, youth mentor, and teacher. She began as a faith-based community organizer with the Gamaliel Foundation and organized successful statewide grassroots campaigns around the DREAM Act, education funding policy, and prison reform. From there, her passion for intersectional organizing brought her to D.C. as the Metro Director for the Drug Policy Alliance, where she helped lead a winning drug policy reform campaign. She served as Senior Principal at Wellstone Action for six years, where she built a national network of youth organizers and trained hundreds of progressive organizers and candidates. As the proud owner of her family’s nine-acre farm in Texas Hill Country, Naomi hopes to continue the legacy of black-owned farms and community-based entrepreneurship. Naomi lives in Houston and on most days can be found finding balance between being tough minded and tender hearted.

Kim Huynh is an organizer, facilitator, and community weaver based in Philly. Over the last decade, Kim has strategized, struggled, and been sharpened alongside immigrant black and brown women to win the best municipal Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in the country; multiracial faith groups for living wage jobs and energy democracy in Philly; community organizations fighting against environmental racism and gentrification in Houston’s Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian working class neighborhoods; and creative direct action and mass mobilization projects across the country.

A 2014 recipient of the Judith C. Jones Fellowship for Trainers of Color with Training for Change, Kim brings her rebel heart and an unwavering belief that transformation is possible and constant to her liberation work. As the first-born daughter of first-generation Vietnamese refugee immigrants, she bridges continents, cultures, languages, issues, and identities and carries that literal and metaphorical translation into her work with groups waging grassroots campaigns, building leadership, navigating conflict, and trying on new shapes to increase their power through facilitation and curriculum building.

Contact Kim.

Director & Core Trainer

Zein is a trainer, media maker, and organizer based in Philadelphia. He’s organized for environmental justice through fossil fuel divestment campaigns and as a co-founder of Philly Thrive, a community organization fighting environmental racism and fossil fuel expansion. He’s made community and movement media with Scribe Video Center, Media Mobilizing Project, and independently. His latest film, Grounded While Walls Fall explores practices and rituals of resilience among organizers in Greater Philadelphia. He’s also a compa member of LeftRoots.

Zein has been in relationship with Training for Change since 2009 and joined staff in 2017; he's now Director and a Core Trainer.

Director & Core Trainer

Zein is a trainer, media maker, and organizer based in Philadelphia. He’s organized for environmental justice through fossil fuel divestment campaigns and as a co-founder of Philly Thrive, a community organization fighting environmental racism and fossil fuel expansion. He’s made community and movement media with Scribe Video Center, Media Mobilizing Project, and independently. His latest film, Grounded While Walls Fall explores practices and rituals of resilience among organizers in Greater Philadelphia. He’s also a compa member of LeftRoots.

Zein has been in relationship with Training for Change since 2009 and joined staff in 2017; he's now Director and a Core Trainer.

Operations Coordinator

Ali’s background is in community organizing and activist storytelling, connecting present-day movements to historical legacies of resistance. Ali was first politicized through the fossil fuel divestment movement and queer community education as a student. In more recent years, Ali’s work has included archival and oral history research with activist elders, most recently with Black Liberation 1969 and the Philadelphia AIDS Oral History Project. Ali’s writing on organizing and social movement history has appeared in Waging Nonviolence, Hidden City Philadelphia, and other sources. Ali first attended a Training for Change workshop in 2011, and joined staff in 2017.

Allison Chin (she/her, they/them) is originally from New York City, grew up in Southern California and has lived in Leesburg, VA for the past 11 years. They are a retired biologist and, since 2008, have been immersed in non-profit governance, and organizational and leadership development. Allison is particularly excited about working with organizers, activists and change makers to facilitate the deep individual and group work that is transformational and long-lasting. They are nourished by being outdoors, gardening, and carving wooden spoons.

Vega Subramaniam is a leadership coach, trainer, and long-time activist promoting gender, racial, LGBTQ, and economic justice. She’s facilitated leadership workshops, given keynote addresses, and presented leadership trainings for college students as well as for local and national organizations. One of her favorite activities is facilitating daylong Intentional Life Planning workshops with her wife, Mala Nagarajan. She has also taught sociology and worked in student services at Penn State University, Western Washington University, and the University of Washington.

Kelley Lou is the Training and Capacity Building Manager at National CAPACD. Her work for the past decade has been committed to empowerment and community building for Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. She has facilitated and trained individuals and community-based organizations across the country to build their advocacy and leadership skills. She is also passionate about working closely with faith communities on social justice issues.

Janée is the Director of Organizational Culture for the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Foundation, whose mission is to achieve equity in education by working with those affected and inspiring all to end racism and poverty. She also has several years of experience as a facilitator and trainer of grassroots organizers and community coalitions seeking to create change by addressing racism, economic injustice, early childhood education, and food security. She writes about social justice issues on her blog What Matters.

Hilary North (they/them/theirs) is Director of Diversity and Equity Initiatives at The Calhoun School in NYC. Their work in supporting anti-oppression change in independent schools spans twenty years and flows directly out of personal experience as a queer, black, multiracial transracial adoptee and parent. Hilary is particularly excited about opportunities that allow teachers and young people to explore the intersections between education and anti-oppression activism, and TFC workshops have been instrumental in resourcing their professional toolbox.