Cherika Carter (she/her) is the Political and Strategic Campaigns Director of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO where she is a proud member of OPEIU Local 8. She is a certified Pharmacy Technician by trade, and has carried a union card for over half of her life. As a graduate of THE Ohio State University, she is a forever Buckeye, but the evergreen state is home. She has found purpose helping to advance the freedoms of all working people through advocacy, empowerment, and collective action. When she isn’t growing political power or fighting for Washington’s working families, she’s creating epic music playlists while working on the perfect two-strand twist outs.

Judy Darcy is the former National President of Canada's largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and was the only woman to lead a national union in Canada at the time. She served as Secretary Business Manager of the B.C. Hospital Employees Union, and became a New Democratic Party Member of the British Columbia Legislature and Canada's first Minister of Mental Health and Addictions. She has been active in the women's movement since the late sixties including the historic fight for reproductive rights in Canada.

Tina Rouchelle Turner-Morfit was born and raised in California. She graduated from Willamette University Class ‘78 and is the mother of 3 adult females. She has served as: Public Employee Retiree Pensioners after a 38 year career with the Oregon Department of Corrections, Vice-President of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Retiree Chapter in Oregon, At Large member of the Executive Board of the Oregon AFL-CIO representing constituency groups, One of three host on 2 monthly Labor Radio shows (KBOO 1st Monday of each month 6:00 pm – 6:30 pm and Willamette Wake Up KMUZ Community Radio ‘HOLLA FOR LABOR’  last Thursday of each month 8:00 am), Current president of the Oregon Chapter Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Member of the Jobs with Justice Workers Rights Board and 2022 Recipient of the Addie Wyatt Award.

Moderator Bio: With more than 15 years as a Union Activist, Shaunie Wheeler-James currently works as the Political and Legislative Director for Teamsters Joint Council 28; representing the 12 locals across Washington State, Idaho and Alaska. Shaunie spends most of her efforts in the wonky world of politics, navigating the complex intersection between campaigns, messaging and public policy. In this role, she leads the union’s state and local legislative and electoral program.

Laurel Albina (she/her) is an equity-informed facilitator and interest-based mediator with an extensive background in labor relations and negotiations.  She resides in so-called Vancouver, B.C. Canada and works on both sides of the colonial border.

Ligaya Domingo is currently the Racial Justice and Education Director for SEIU Healthcare 1199NW where she has worked for over 16 years. She started as a union organizer in the AFL-CIO’s Union Summer Program in 1997, worked for SEIU International for a number of years, and after many years working as a field organizer she now leads the local’s Racial Justice program and helps to lead the union’s education, training, and development programs for members and staff. She is also Secretary and Trustee for the SEIU Healthcare 1199NW Multi-Employer Training Fund. She is also an officer of the SEIU Asian Pacific Islander Caucus. She has served two terms as the Seattle APALA chapter appointee to the National Executive Board member of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance and is currently the Second Vice President of National APALA. She has also been appointed to serve on a number of a of committees and boards where she represents Seattle APALA including: MLK Labor, Washington State Labor Council, the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies Advisory Committee, and Washington State Labor Education Research Center. She is also a member of the SEIU Racial Justice Committee, Washington State Labor Council’s Racial Justice Committee, MLK Labor’s Racial Justice Taskforce where she serves as the co-chair, Seattle King County Workforce Development Council Board Member and Chair of the Equity Committee. She has a Ph.D. and a M.A, from the Social and Cultural Studies Program in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley.

Amy Leong (she/her) is the community organizer on staff with the APALA Seattle Chapter. She joined the Seattle Chapter as staff to build the bridge between the labor movement and the broader community. She hopes to continue to develop more space for AANHPI workers in local and national labor movements and help leaders step into their power.

Kasi Perreira (she/her) is an organizer, artist, loving partner and mama of two. She serves as the Director of Racial and Gender Justice at the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

Cheryl Coney is a San Diego native and currently works for the California Teachers Association (CTA).  Cheryl has experience in community and worker organizing and has worked in the labor movement for over a decade.  Before joining CTA Cheryl worked for various private and public sector unions. She also served as the project director for the Union Women’s Leadership Education Project and as a labor educator at The Washington State Labor Education and Research Center (WA LERC). When Cheryl isn’t facilitating or working on a campaign she enjoys reading and baking with her family.

In June 2021, Kari Michaels was re-elected as Executive Vice President of the BCGEU for her second term. Kari joined the BCGEU as a member when she and her fellow workers at the Kwantlen Student Association formed a union at their worksite. She quickly became active, first as shop steward and subsequently stepping up as a bargaining committee member. Kari is a passionate advocate for social justice and believes in building workers’ capacity to take action to improve their working conditions through education and training. She is a firm believer in the old union adage: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common”. Whether she is facilitating workshops, joining workers on a picket line, or talking to fellow members about organizing strategies, she is always looking to further strengthen the working class and encourage direct action to fight for a better world.

Sarah Laslett is the Training Director for WeTrain Washington, a project of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 3000 in Seattle. She has worked at Labor Education and Research Centers in Washington and Oregon and has more than twenty years of experience in the labor movement. Sarah has worked as both an internal and external organizer and held staff positions in both public and private sector unions. Her educational philosophy is based in the belief that adults already have a lot of the skills and knowledge they need to organize successfully. The role of education is to draw out that knowledge, add more information and build confidence, and give working adults the opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills at work and in the community.

In all of my careers, (four going on five), I have been involved in training and education. I enjoy working with union members, non-profits and staff to bring them what they need, when they need it, and making it fun. Let our willingness to learn and grow never end!

Hello! My name is Kyra and I am looking forward to facilitating the Women in Leadership course this year at the SIUW. I am an Education and Human Rights Representative with the Hospital Employees Union (HEU). My community work includes the Women and Gender Rights Committee with the BC NDP, Vancouver and District Labour Council, and the BC Federation of Labour Young Workers Committee. I got involved in Union activism in 2015 after a workplace accident as a non-union member, which determined to be 100% employer fault by WorkSafe BC. This incident lead to an opportunity to learn about the labour movement and then I co-lead an organizing drive to join HEU’s membership.

Esperanza Fonseca is a union organizer, writer, filmmaker, and member of the transnational feminist organization AF3IRM. She is currently based in California and has nearly a decade of experience in organizing workers and community leaders. She got her start as a Fellow with the Ziegler Young Religious Leaders Organizing Fellowship, where she organized faith leaders to advance economic justice initiatives in the City of Los Angeles. Fonseca is a graduate of the Women's Policy Institute, where she spearheaded and won the "Access to Safe Food Choices and Food Security Act of 2019," which created a statewide Restaurant Meals Program that vastly increases access to hot and prepared food by CalFresh recipients who are homeless, elderly, or disabled. She recently appeared in and co-produced the docu-narrative Sell/Buy/Date, directed by Tony-award-winning filmmaker Sarah Jones.

Fonseca graduated from Whittier College with a degree in the Whittier Scholars Program: Feminist Studies and Liberation Theology and is currently completing a post-graduate program in geospatial technology. She maintains a blog at proletarianfeminist.medium.com and writes on gender oppression and imperialism. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Dutch, German and Polish and her story and words have been featured in Politico, VICE, Truthout, and the New York Times.

Joan Jones (she/they) is the current Executive Director of the SEIU Washington State Council.  Joan began her career as a labor organizer with SEIU 925. From there Joan went on to lead SEIU’s young worker engagement and strategy in the United States and Canada as their Millennial Coordinator. Prior to joining the Washington State Council Joan was the principal Founder and Acting Executive Director of the National LGBTQ Workers Center. Joan additionally is a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at the London School of Economics and a proud board member of The Washington State Budget and Policy Center as well as the 501c4 "Invest in Washington Now!"  In their free time they can be found wandering various dog parks with their wife and two poodles or at their Local hardware store dreaming up their next home renovation project.

Nina Vichayapai is an artist from the Pacific Northwest who explores physical spaces as expressions of the people who shape them. Through researching and sharing underrepresented histories she studies what it means to belong within the American landscape. Her work has been featured in museums and galleries across the West Coast.

Laureen is a writer, editor and content strategist who gives voice to working people and those struggling for social justice. She works for the Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership and was the first-ever communications director for United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals, an AFSCME affiliate. Laureen was a writer at the national AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C. and a journalist covering government, politics and social issues in Los Angeles and Sacramento before that. In her spare time, she enjoys creating mixed-media collages.

Lisa is an activist with the Hospital Employees’ Union. She is currently the chairperson of HEU’s founding local, she sits on the HEU facilities bargaining committee, and on HEU’s two-spirit, nonbinary and women’s equity committee. She also brings years of experiential knowledge of sex work, and has worked as a grassroots community organizer and within the nonprofit sector in Vancouver’s downtown eastside.

Maxine Doogan is an American prostitute, social justice and politics expert and advocate, documentarian, artist, author, and media personality. For 33 years, Maxine has regularly traveled across the U.S. and abroad, providing erotic services and advocating for the expanded rights and protected working conditions of sex workers.

As an organizer that believes in collective worker power, Prachi Goyal has been engaging in rank and file movements through understanding the inherent trauma of exploitation within work. Due to her own experiences as a child of immigrants, her start within the movement was through immigrant and farmworker justice in Western Michigan. She then attended the Labor Center at UMass Amherst where she worked with Community Labor United to help increase accessibility to childcare. Additionally, she engaged in rank and file organizing through organizing with UFCW 1459 and then ultimately voted in to be Co-Chair for GEO-UAW 2322. She helped to create campaigns to bring racial justice, immigrant rights, disability rights and gender equality issues to the table.  Afterwards, she worked as an organizer with Unite Here-New England Joint Board where she focused on new organizing for workers in the hospitality industry. 

She is an educator and facilitator of labor organizing training for emergency workers through EWOC (Emergency Worker Organizing Committee), a national project with DSA and UE. She is also a healing justice organizer within the labor movement through being part of a collective called Healing Not Harming. 

Currently, she is a Labor Educator for WFSE- AFSCME C28.

Nickeia Hunter works with individuals and organizations to amplify everyone’s part in changing the culture across the trades. With diversity and inclusion. Building safe harassment free workspaces so we can all succeed in the world we work in. Nickeia’s honors include being recognized as one of the Commissioner’s on the Criminal Justice Training Center appointed by Governor Jay Inslee, Winning an Internship with the Washington State Labor Council this 2022 session, being appointed the Chair of the Legal Redress Committee NAACP Vancouver Branch1139.

Denise Nicole Franklin is currently ANEW’s Director of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion as well as the Director of RISE Up (Respect, Inclusion, Safety, and Equity in the Construction Trades) a Respectful Workplace Program. Formerly working in workforce development as the Career & Education Navigator for Port Jobs’ Airport Jobs and Airport University Programs. Helping incumbent workers many of whom were immigrants and refugees define their career pathways to go back to school or obtain family-wage careers. She currently serves on the board of directors of the Regional Pre-apprenticeship Collaboration as the Vice President.

Van Nguyen (she/her) is currently the Communications Director at UC Berkley’s Labor Center. She comes to this position with nearly 15 years of experience in social justice movement work. She is a passionate advocate for social, economic, and racial justice, rooted in her lived experiences as a daughter of Vietnamese refugees. Bringing together the art and science of communications, Van enjoys building relationships with people and organizations to support them in saying what they want to say to reach the people who matter to them.

Rachel finished her Masters of Public Policy at Oregon State In 2013 and began working at SEIU Healthcare 1199NW as a Union Organizer. She transitioned into research in 2016, and was the research team lead for over three years, developing new team members and providing research support for the union and not-yet-union members across Washington State and Montana. In May 2022, Rachel became the Research Coordinator of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington to support community and union members, students, and faculty working towards equitable conditions for workers in Washington State and beyond.

Sabrina graduated from Gonzaga University in 2004 and became a Union Organizer with SEIU Healthcare 1199NW (1199NW) in 2008, supporting union membership in eastern Washington. In 2012 Sabrina became a lead organizer and in 2016 she became the Director of Central and Eastern Washington. Sabrina supports staff development and a growing membership. In 2020, Sabrina began to also oversee Montana membership as she served as the Lead Negotiator of a successful first contract campaign in Kalispell.

Eden began working as a Union Organizer at SEIU Healthcare 1199NW in 2010 after finishing her degree at Washington State University. Eden became a Lead Organizer in 2013 and has since led teams to successfully organize thousands of healthcare workers in Washington State. In 2020, Eden became the Co-Organizing Director at 1199NW, and she continues to develop and support teams organizing not-yet-union healthcare workers and improving the standards for all healthcare workers across Washington State and Montana.