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John Calkins

Executive Director, Direct Action Research Training (DART)

Miami, FL

John has done direct community organizing for the past twenty years. He was educated at Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin. In 1965 he spent three years in Niger, West Africa in the Peace Corps, organizing purchasing and credit cooperatives. From 1969 to 1974 John worked with the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and from 1969-1974 he was head organizer for Active Clevelanders Together. Moving to Florida in 1977, John was the head organizer for Concerned Seniors of Dade, Inc. and in 1981 became the head organizer for People United to Lead the Struggle for Equality (PULSE) in Miami. From 1985 to 1988 he was head organizer for Justice for All in Broward (JAB) in Ft. Lauderdale, Fl., and has been the Director of Direct Action and Training Center, Inc. (DART) in Miami from 1984 to the present. He is married and has three children.

Tho Thi Do

Secretary-Treasurer Local #2, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union

San Francisco, CA

Tho has worked for many years as a community organizer, activist and labor organizer. Since 1989 she has worked for Local #2, HERE, first as an organizer and now as Secretary-Treasurer. She was recently elected as a Vice-President on the HERE International Union Executive Board. About her work with HERE and labor, and in her own words:

Since 1989 I have worked for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union Local 2, first as an organizer and now as Secretary Treasurer. I consider myself an organizer because I believe in organizing to gain power and to change the imbalance of power. As the Secretary Treasurer of the Local, I help to change the union focus and resources to allocate more funding to organizing

Tho arrived in the United States from Vietnam in 1975 and graduated from High School in San Francisco in 1978. She soon began volunteering with the Vietnamese Youth Development Center, focusing on placement of youth in summer jobs where they earned a stipend. She attended college at San Francisco State University.

Tho continues to be very active in the Southeast Asian community in San Francisco. She is the Chair of the Southeast Asian Community Center in San Francisco which began as an advocacy and social services center and is evolving to encompass voter rights education, forums on political issues, and is in the early planning stage to develop their existing building into a community center. Tho is also on the Board of Directors of the Vietnamese Youth Development Center which is focusing on youth employment as well as educating and developing new youth leadership in the Southeast Asian community.

Tho is the mother of a 20-year old son currently attending art school in NYC.

Mary Gonzales

Associate Director, Gamaliel Foundation

& Regional Lead Organizer for Metropolitan Alliance of Congregations (MAC)

Chicago, IL

Mary Gonzales has been a professional organizer for twenty years. She is affiliated with the Gamaliel Foundation, an international training institute which develops faith-based organizations in urban metropolitan areas throughout the United States and in South Africa. She is currently the Regional Lead Organizer for the Metropolitan Alliance of Congregations (MAC), a Chicago metropolitan organization with 132 institutional members. MAC's mission is to build a citizens' organization powerful enough to change policies and practices in Illinois that result in the concentration of poverty and segregation by race and class. Mary is currently involved in a campaign to bring tax-base sharing, opportunity housing, and education funding reform to the Chicago region. She has trained organizers, leaders and clergy throughout the U.S., in South Africa and most recently, in Tanzania.

Ken Johnson

Southern Regional Director, AFL-CIO

Atlanta, GA

Ken has worked more than 30 years across the South on political, anti-poverty, race, labor, economic justice and worker rights issues. Born and raised in Louisiana, Ken was educated at Bard College and Yale University. From 1975 to 1980 Ken was the Regional Director of the National Rural Center and also worked at the Scholarship and Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality, providing technical assistance to newly emerging black elected officials across the South. From the early 80's to 1995 he was the Director for the South Regional Council and Director of the Southern Labor Institute, a special project of the South Regional Council. Working on workers' rights issues, Ken worked with the Tennessee Tom Bigby Waterway effort, a coalition of community and labor groups to insure union members a part in this large scale public works project. In 1995 Ken began working for the AFL-CIO and is currently Regional Director of the AFL-CIO's Southern Region.

Michael Kieschnick

President and CEO, Working Assets Funding Service

San Francisco, CA

Michael is President, CEO and co-founder of Working Assets, a long distance, credit card, Internet and broadcasting company that donates a portion of its revenues to progressive nonprofit groups. Michael has played a key role in all aspects of the company's products, and he leads the company's political efforts by selecting the Citizen Actions that are featured in the monthly phone bill. Michael grew up in Texas, was educated at Stanford (biology and economics) and Harvard (Ph.D., Public Policy), and began working as an economist for the E.P.A. prior to serving former Governor Jerry Brown as an economic advisor. He has started numerous investment funds, has written books on capital markets and development (e.g. Credit Where It's Due with Julia Parzen), and has been a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley, teaching a graduate seminar on financial innovation. He currently serves as board member for several nonprofits, including the American Environmental Safety Institute, Dads & Daughters, and is actively involved in coaching children's athletic teams. He lives in the Bay area with his wife and their two children.

Drummond Pike

President, Tides Foundation

San Francisco, CA

Drummond founded Tides Foundation in 1976, and serves as President of Tides Foundation, Tides Center and eGrants.org, a nonprofit focused on Internet fundraising. He is also President of Highwater, Inc., a real estate venture and historic preservation effort in San Francisco's Presidio National Park that serves as a General Partner in the Thoreau Center Partners. Drummond was a founder and Associate Director of the Youth Project in Washington, DC and served as Executive Director of the Shalan Foundation in San Francisco from 1976 to 1981. He was also one of the original founders of Working Assets in 1983.

Wade Rathke

Chief Organizer, ACORN, HOTROC, & SEIU 100

New Orleans, LA

Wade is the Board Chair and founder of the Organizers’ Forum and has been the Chief Organizer of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) since he founded the organization in 1970. ACORN is a national membership organization of 150,000 low and moderate income families organized in communities in 60 major cities. He also serves as Chief Organizer of Local 100, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which he founded in New Orleans in 1980 and which now has 7000 members in Texas, LA, and Arkansas. Currently, Wade also spearheads a multi-union effort through HOTROC - the Hospitality, Hotels, and Restaurants Organizing Council, AFL-CIO, to unionize this New Orleans industry. Wade is President of SEIU's Southern Conference and a member of the national executive board of the union, Secretary-Treasurer of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO, and a member of the boards of the Tides Foundation, Tides Center, and Paradox Fund. In the late 60's, Wade organized draft resistance for SDS and welfare recipients in Springfield and Boston, Massachusetts for the National Welfare Rights Organization.

Kirk Adams

Kirk Adams is currently director of health care organizing for SEIU. Previously he has occupied many jobs for SEIU including acting as Chief of Staff and an assistant to the President for many years. He was Organizing Director for the AFL-CIO under John Sweeney for 16 months and prior to that was Southern Regional Director for the AFL-CIO in the late 1990's. He had been an aide to Governor Anne Richards in Texas during her time in office and prior to that had been an organizer for SEIU on the Beverly Campaign in Texas and before that for the United Labor Unions in New Orleans and Boston. Kirk is originally from the Springfield, Massachusetts area and now lives in New York City.

Scott Reed

Scott Reed, on the PICO staff since 1977 and recently the director of organizing, was named the new executive director as of January 2009

Mary Rowles

Director of Research, Campaigns, & Communication for the British Columbia Government Employees’ Union (BCGEU)

Sarita Gupta

Sarita Gupta was appointed the Executive Director of Jobs with Justice (JwJ) in 2007. Sarita had served for five years as the national field director, overseeing the national field program and leading on strategic programs such as health care justice, organizing and collective bargaining rights campaigns, and immigrant workers’ rights. Prior to joining the national JwJ staff in 2002, Sarita served as the Executive Director of Chicago Jobs with Justice (JwJ) for four years, where she helped build the coalition to over 70 member organizations and unions. Sarita began organizing as a student on campus. She was elected President of the U.S. Student Association (USSA), the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots legislative student organization, in 1996. While working at USSA, she was instrumental in the development of the Student Labor Action Project, a project of JwJ and USSA.

Joshua Hoyt

Joshua Hoyt has been the director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights since May of 2002. During that time the Coalition has fought vigorously for citizenship for the undocumented, to protect civil liberties in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and for a full integration of immigrants into community life in the U.S. The Coalition has helped to make Illinois one of the most immigrant friendly states in the U.S.

During this time the Coalition has grown from a $1.8 million dollar a year budget to a $5.6 million budget, and increased from 9 to 25 employees.

Josh has worked a total of 28 years as an organizer for social justice in Chicago, Baltimore, and in the countries of Spain, Peru, and Panama. This includes eight years of work in the poorest Latino communities of Chicago; four years as the executive director of the Organization of the NorthEast (O.N.E.), a community organization in the diverse Uptown and Edgewater communities of Chicago; the organizing of low wage workers in Baltimore, Maryland in a campaign that resulted in the first "Living Wage" ordinance in the nation; and organizing as a lay volunteer for the Catholic Church in the highlands of Peru and in the Diocese of Colon, Panama.

Josh served as president of the Citizens Utility Board of Illinois, the state's largest consumer organization from 1986-89, winning hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds for utility consumers. More recently he served as the associate director of United Power for Action and Justice, an ambitious metropolitan wide citizen organizing effort that was part of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) network. Josh was the lead organizer of United Power's Gilead Campaign for the Uninsured, which resulted in the creation of FamilyCare in Illinois, expanding health insurance coverage to 170,000 uninsured adults.

Josh was educated at the University of Illinois and the Universidad Central de Barcelona, Spain, and received his Master's Degree from the University of Chicago. He has testified before Congress; spoken to such national media as the Leher News Hour, the O'Reilly Factor, the Lou Dobbs Show, and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal; written numerous articles; and directed political campaigns. He speaks fluent Spanish and limited Portuguese.

Josh has been married for 24 years, and has two children, ages 21 and 17.

Gustavo Torres

Executive Director, CASA de Maryland

Pat Sweeney

Executive Director, Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC)

Billings, MT

The Regional Director of Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC) is Patrick Sweeney, former staff director of the Northern Plains Resource Council (NPRC), a third generation Montanan, and a graduate of the University of Montana in history. Pat has also been the Executive Director of High Plains News Service, WORC's weekly news and public information radio program, since its inception in 1989. He has been a community organizer on natural resource and agricultural/family farm issues in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain Region since 1972. He currently serves as Chair of the Biodiversity Project Strategy Team, is a Board Member of the Environmental Support Center of Washington, D.C. and Montana Conservation Voters, is a member of the Steering Committee for the Western Mining Activist Network, and the Advisory Committee to One Northwest.



Home Page Dialogues Articles People Board of Directors History Contact Us Links Mailing List	Board of Directors John Calkins Executive Director, Direct Action Research Training (DART) Miami, FL John has done direct community organizing for the past twenty years. He was educated at Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin. In 1965 he spent three years in Niger, West Africa in the Peace Corps, organizing purchasing and credit cooperatives. From 1969 to 1974 John worked with the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and from 1969-1974 he was head organizer for Active Clevelanders Together. Moving to Florida in 1977, John was the head organizer for Concerned Seniors of Dade, Inc. and in 1981 became the head organizer for People United to Lead the Struggle for Equality (PULSE) in Miami. From 1985 to 1988 he was head organizer for Justice for All in Broward (JAB) in Ft. Lauderdale, Fl., and has been the Director of Direct Action and Training Center, Inc. (DART) in Miami from 1984 to the present. He is married and has three children. Tho Thi Do Secretary-Treasurer Local #2, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union San Francisco, CA Tho has worked for many years as a community organizer, activist and labor organizer. Since 1989 she has worked for Local #2, HERE, first as an organizer and now as Secretary-Treasurer. She was recently elected as a Vice-President on the HERE International Union Executive Board. About her work with HERE and labor, and in her own words: Since 1989 I have worked for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union Local 2, first as an organizer and now as Secretary Treasurer. I consider myself an organizer because I believe in organizing to gain power and to change the imbalance of power. As the Secretary Treasurer of the Local, I help to change the union focus and resources to allocate more funding to organizing Tho arrived in the United States from Vietnam in 1975 and graduated from High School in San Francisco in 1978. She soon began volunteering with the Vietnamese Youth Development Center, focusing on placement of youth in summer jobs where they earned a stipend. She attended college at San Francisco State University. Tho continues to be very active in the Southeast Asian community in San Francisco. She is the Chair of the Southeast Asian Community Center in San Francisco which began as an advocacy and social services center and is evolving to encompass voter rights education, forums on political issues, and is in the early planning stage to develop their existing building into a community center. Tho is also on the Board of Directors of the Vietnamese Youth Development Center which is focusing on youth employment as well as educating and developing new youth leadership in the Southeast Asian community. Tho is the mother of a 20-year old son currently attending art school in NYC. Mary Gonzales Associate Director, Gamaliel Foundation & Regional Lead Organizer for Metropolitan Alliance of Congregations (MAC) Chicago, IL Mary Gonzales has been a professional organizer for twenty years. She is affiliated with the Gamaliel Foundation, an international training institute which develops faith-based organizations in urban metropolitan areas throughout the United States and in South Africa. She is currently the Regional Lead Organizer for the Metropolitan Alliance of Congregations (MAC), a Chicago metropolitan organization with 132 institutional members. MAC's mission is to build a citizens' organization powerful enough to change policies and practices in Illinois that result in the concentration of poverty and segregation by race and class. Mary is currently involved in a campaign to bring tax-base sharing, opportunity housing, and education funding reform to the Chicago region. She has trained organizers, leaders and clergy throughout the U.S., in South Africa and most recently, in Tanzania. Ken Johnson Southern Regional Director, AFL-CIO Atlanta, GA Ken has worked more than 30 years across the South on political, anti-poverty, race, labor, economic justice and worker rights issues. Born and raised in Louisiana, Ken was educated at Bard College and Yale University. From 1975 to 1980 Ken was the Regional Director of the National Rural Center and also worked at the Scholarship and Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality, providing technical assistance to newly emerging black elected officials across the South. From the early 80's to 1995 he was the Director for the South Regional Council and Director of the Southern Labor Institute, a special project of the South Regional Council. Working on workers' rights issues, Ken worked with the Tennessee Tom Bigby Waterway effort, a coalition of community and labor groups to insure union members a part in this large scale public works project. In 1995 Ken began working for the AFL-CIO and is currently Regional Director of the AFL-CIO's Southern Region. Michael Kieschnick President and CEO, Working Assets Funding Service San Francisco, CA Michael is President, CEO and co-founder of Working Assets, a long distance, credit card, Internet and broadcasting company that donates a portion of its revenues to progressive nonprofit groups. Michael has played a key role in all aspects of the company's products, and he leads the company's political efforts by selecting the Citizen Actions that are featured in the monthly phone bill. Michael grew up in Texas, was educated at Stanford (biology and economics) and Harvard (Ph.D., Public Policy), and began working as an economist for the E.P.A. prior to serving former Governor Jerry Brown as an economic advisor. He has started numerous investment funds, has written books on capital markets and development (e.g. Credit Where It's Due with Julia Parzen), and has been a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley, teaching a graduate seminar on financial innovation. He currently serves as board member for several nonprofits, including the American Environmental Safety Institute, Dads & Daughters, and is actively involved in coaching children's athletic teams. He lives in the Bay area with his wife and their two children. Drummond Pike President, Tides Foundation San Francisco, CA Drummond founded Tides Foundation in 1976, and serves as President of Tides Foundation, Tides Center and eGrants.org, a nonprofit focused on Internet fundraising. He is also President of Highwater, Inc., a real estate venture and historic preservation effort in San Francisco's Presidio National Park that serves as a General Partner in the Thoreau Center Partners. Drummond was a founder and Associate Director of the Youth Project in Washington, DC and served as Executive Director of the Shalan Foundation in San Francisco from 1976 to 1981. He was also one of the original founders of Working Assets in 1983. Wade Rathke Chief Organizer, ACORN, HOTROC, & SEIU 100 New Orleans, LA Wade is the Board Chair and founder of the Organizers’ Forum and has been the Chief Organizer of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) since he founded the organization in 1970. ACORN is a national membership organization of 150,000 low and moderate income families organized in communities in 60 major cities. He also serves as Chief Organizer of Local 100, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which he founded in New Orleans in 1980 and which now has 7000 members in Texas, LA, and Arkansas. Currently, Wade also spearheads a multi-union effort through HOTROC - the Hospitality, Hotels, and Restaurants Organizing Council, AFL-CIO, to unionize this New Orleans industry. Wade is President of SEIU's Southern Conference and a member of the national executive board of the union, Secretary-Treasurer of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO, and a member of the boards of the Tides Foundation, Tides Center, and Paradox Fund. In the late 60's, Wade organized draft resistance for SDS and welfare recipients in Springfield and Boston, Massachusetts for the National Welfare Rights Organization. Kirk Adams Kirk Adams is currently director of health care organizing for SEIU. Previously he has occupied many jobs for SEIU including acting as Chief of Staff and an assistant to the President for many years. He was Organizing Director for the AFL-CIO under John Sweeney for 16 months and prior to that was Southern Regional Director for the AFL-CIO in the late 1990's. He had been an aide to Governor Anne Richards in Texas during her time in office and prior to that had been an organizer for SEIU on the Beverly Campaign in Texas and before that for the United Labor Unions in New Orleans and Boston. Kirk is originally from the Springfield, Massachusetts area and now lives in New York City. Scott Reed Scott Reed, on the PICO staff since 1977 and recently the director of organizing, was named the new executive director as of January 2009 Mary Rowles Director of Research, Campaigns, & Communication for the British Columbia Government Employees’ Union (BCGEU) Sarita Gupta Sarita Gupta was appointed the Executive Director of Jobs with Justice (JwJ) in 2007. Sarita had served for five years as the national field director, overseeing the national field program and leading on strategic programs such as health care justice, organizing and collective bargaining rights campaigns, and immigrant workers’ rights. Prior to joining the national JwJ staff in 2002, Sarita served as the Executive Director of Chicago Jobs with Justice (JwJ) for four years, where she helped build the coalition to over 70 member organizations and unions. Sarita began organizing as a student on campus. She was elected President of the U.S. Student Association (USSA), the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots legislative student organization, in 1996. While working at USSA, she was instrumental in the development of the Student Labor Action Project, a project of JwJ and USSA. Joshua Hoyt Joshua Hoyt has been the director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights since May of 2002. During that time the Coalition has fought vigorously for citizenship for the undocumented, to protect civil liberties in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and for a full integration of immigrants into community life in the U.S. The Coalition has helped to make Illinois one of the most immigrant friendly states in the U.S. During this time the Coalition has grown from a $1.8 million dollar a year budget to a $5.6 million budget, and increased from 9 to 25 employees. Josh has worked a total of 28 years as an organizer for social justice in Chicago, Baltimore, and in the countries of Spain, Peru, and Panama. This includes eight years of work in the poorest Latino communities of Chicago; four years as the executive director of the Organization of the NorthEast (O.N.E.), a community organization in the diverse Uptown and Edgewater communities of Chicago; the organizing of low wage workers in Baltimore, Maryland in a campaign that resulted in the first "Living Wage" ordinance in the nation; and organizing as a lay volunteer for the Catholic Church in the highlands of Peru and in the Diocese of Colon, Panama. Josh served as president of the Citizens Utility Board of Illinois, the state's largest consumer organization from 1986-89, winning hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds for utility consumers. More recently he served as the associate director of United Power for Action and Justice, an ambitious metropolitan wide citizen organizing effort that was part of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) network. Josh was the lead organizer of United Power's Gilead Campaign for the Uninsured, which resulted in the creation of FamilyCare in Illinois, expanding health insurance coverage to 170,000 uninsured adults. Josh was educated at the University of Illinois and the Universidad Central de Barcelona, Spain, and received his Master's Degree from the University of Chicago. He has testified before Congress; spoken to such national media as the Leher News Hour, the O'Reilly Factor, the Lou Dobbs Show, and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal; written numerous articles; and directed political campaigns. He speaks fluent Spanish and limited Portuguese. Josh has been married for 24 years, and has two children, ages 21 and 17. Gustavo Torres Executive Director, CASA de Maryland Pat Sweeney Executive Director, Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC) Billings, MT The Regional Director of Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC) is Patrick Sweeney, former staff director of the Northern Plains Resource Council (NPRC), a third generation Montanan, and a graduate of the University of Montana in history. Pat has also been the Executive Director of High Plains News Service, WORC's weekly news and public information radio program, since its inception in 1989. He has been a community organizer on natural resource and agricultural/family farm issues in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain Region since 1972. He currently serves as Chair of the Biodiversity Project Strategy Team, is a Board Member of the Environmental Support Center of Washington, D.C. and Montana Conservation Voters, is a member of the Steering Committee for the Western Mining Activist Network, and the Advisory Committee to One Northwest.

©2004 Organizer's Forum