[[TranslatedPages]] = Leadership Committee = The Leadership Committee is May First/People Link's body for deciding the organization's political direction. == Membership == All leadership committee members are members of May First/People Link. The current members are (organizations are for identification purposes only): === Maritza Arrastia === Maritza Arrastia is a political activist, teacher, educator and writer, active in the left-wing movement of this country for nearly a half-century. She was born in Cuba and living in the United States since the age of 13. Over the years, she has been active in the leadership of the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Cuba solidarity movement, the feminist movement, the movement against abuses such as forced sterilization, the struggle for quality adult education, quality public education and, most recently, the Occupy movement. She is an award-winning adult literacy educator, published journalist and novelist. === Carlos Pablo Correa Hernández === Pablo Correa was born in Mexico City and is a journalist by training. He has always worked in alternative media in Mexico as a reporter and photojournalist. He has been a broadcaster on social issues in independent radio projects and public radio in Mexico for five years. He won the National Youth Award in 2009 and National Journalism Award in 2011 in Mexico. In 2012, he founded La Coperacha specializing in social and solidarity economy, environment and other social issues. In 2013 he joined MFPL and was elected president of the Cooperative Primero de Mayo, the instance of MFPL in Mexico. === Manisha Desai === Manisha Desai is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research and teaching interests include Gender and Globalization/Development, Transnational Feminisms, and Contemporary Indian Society. Her forthcoming book from Routledge is titled: Subaltern Struggles in India: The Gendered Geography of Protest against Neoliberal Development. In addition she is the author of over 30 articles and book chapters and 4 books and is completing another book titled Women and Gender in a Globalizing World (2016). Her other books include: Gender, Family, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia (co-edited with Ken Cuno, 2010, Syracuse University Press); Gender and the Politics of Possibilities: Rethinking Globalization (2008, Rowman and Littlefield) and the highly regarded co-edited (with Nancy Naples) Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles to Transnational Politics (Routeldge 2002). She was awarded Sociologists for Women in Society’s 2015 Distinguished Lecturer Award in recognition of her contributions to scholarship on gender. Her scholarship is committed to decolonizing knowledge and actively engaging with knowledge producers outside the academy. She is active in various professional organizations including the ASA, SWS, AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development), Societies without Borders, and ISA. She has served in various elected and nominated capacities in all these professional organizations including as President of Sociologists for Women in Society (2007). Her commitment in all these offices has been to bring in voices from the Global South and marginalized communities in the Global North to engage in a critical public sociology that is committed to social justice and a critical human rights perspective. === Juan Gerardo Dominguez Carrasco === Juan Gerardo is trained in physics, engineering and economic planning. He worked in hardware development in Mexico, Germany and Cuba for the better part of his decades-long career. He is currently the Coordinator General of the Cooperative Society for the Advancement of Social Advisers (SCAAS) and has facilitated of over 200 workshops and training courses for collective organizations in Mexico and Central America. He is a member of the Advisory Council for the Promotion of Cooperatives GDF and is Secretary of the Union of Mexico City (DF) and Speaker of the National Coordinating Committee of Cooperative Unions and Federations. He was president of the Union of Cooperatives of Mexico City (DF), president of the Commission on the Solidarity Economy of the National Confederation of Cooperatives of Diverse Activities of Mexico. He has published many works on the cooperative and solidarity economy in North America. === Francia Gutierrez === Francia's political work involves food sovereignity, rural economy and the struggle against artificial engineered food. She is part of the May First Technology Cooperative in Mexico. === Louis Head === Louis works as Facilitator of the South by Southwest Experiment, a partnership between Southern Echo (Mississippi), Southwest Workers Union (Texas) and the SouthWest Organizing Project (New Mexico). From 1982-1998 he worked on the staff of SWOP, and is a former Board member. He later co-founded and directed the Cuba Research and Analysis Group, which engaged in a variety of exchange and applied research efforts related to Cuba and US-Cuba relations, including work with artists and arts presenters to re-open cultural pathways between the two countries. He has served on the National Planning Committee of the US Social Forum, within which he worked to increase global south participation at the 2010 USSF in Detroit. === Mallory Knodel === Since the beginning of 2012, Mallory has been the communications and network development manager for the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). And since 2008 has been a member of May First/People Link and on MFPL's leadership committee. Originally from the US but living in Quebec, she has worked with grassroots organisations around the world in Bolivia, France, Palestine, UK. She's used free software professionally for over 10 years and considers herself a "radical technologist," specializing in cybersecurity. Her background in community organizing with social justice groups also extends beyond a decade. === Alfredo Lopez === Alfredo Lopez led the Puerto Rican Student movement in the United States and was involved in the struggles for Open Admissions and other reforms in the New York City University system in the 1970s. He also led the Carlos Feliciano Defense Committee, joined the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and became the editor of the U.S. Edition of its newspaper Claridad. Alfredo has written five published books, produced and directed over a dozen documentary films, and produced two radio series and a television documentary series. He's written articles for a wide variety of publications, has spoken and lectured to audiences in virtually every state of this country and has been a faculty member at nine colleges in New York City. In 1994, Alfredo founded People Link and has directed the organization until it merged into the May First/People Link organization. === Jamie McClelland === Jamie is a founder of May First/People Link. He is also the Technology Systems Director for the Progressive Technology Project. In 1999, he co-founded Media Jumpstart, a worker-run technology collective that supported nonprofit organizations in New York City, that merged with People Link to become May First/People Link in 2005. He played an instrumental role in the technology committees for the 2007 and 2010 US Social Forums. Jamie worked at Libraries for the Future network administrator, national Youth ACCESS coordinator, and Information and Technology Policy Specialist. Jamie was formerly on the Board of Directors of Paper Tiger TV. === Sandra Contreras Martinez === Born and currently residing in Mexico's Federal District, Sandra studied dentistry, rural development and ecology. She is experienced in administration for NGOs, cooperatives and rural organizations and has worked in the development of coops, the "incubation" of new cooperatives and the ecological education with young people in rural schools. She worked for several years on organizing self-susstaining projects and groups in remote regions in Southeast Mexico, developing their international resource development including people from other countries who had come to do voluntary work, especially in the indigenous communities. She is currently in charge of membership and finances for the Technology Cooperative of May First/People Link in Mexico. === Aarón Moysén === I am currently part of the MEDIOSCOMUNEWS cooperative which, for the last five years, has done design and visual communications work mainly for cooperatives, alternative projects, civil society organizations and social movements. Although I'm part of various collectives, I stress my involvement in the "Autogestival" which began in 2013. In 2013, I was part of the Leadership Committee and since its inception I've collaborated in the construction of the "May First/People Link Cooperative" here in Mexico. === Jacobo Nájera === Jacobo is interested and research in the field of science, crafts and human rigths, as well as the development of online networks, predominantly for websites and infrastructure related to free software and independent media. He has contributed research and technology design to the Free Sofware Foundation and Wikimedia. He participated actively against Mexico’s Ley Telecom, a bill allowing authorities to track user locations without warrants amongst other rights-abusing provisions. === Rob Robinson === Rob Robinson is a member of the Leadership Committee of the Take Back the Land Movement and a staff volunteer at the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI). After losing his job in 2001, he spent two years homeless on the streets of Miami and ten months in a New York City shelter. He eventually overcame homelessness and has been in the housing movement based in New York City since 2007. In the fall of 2009, Rob was chosen to be the New York City chairperson for the first ever official mission of a UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing visit to the US. He was a member of an advance team coordinated by the US Human Rights Network in early 2010; traveling to Geneva Switzerland several times to prepare for the United States initial appearance in the Universal Periodic Review. Rob has worked with homeless populations in Budapest Hungary and Berlin Germany and is connected with housing and land movements in South Africa and Brazil. He works with the European Squatters Collective, International Alliance of Inhabitants; Landless People’s Movement (MST) and the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB) and is a member of the Steering Committee of the USA Canada Alliance of Inhabitants. In December 2008, he completed a course with People’s Production House and the Community News Production Institute and has been a member of a social justice media collective which produces and airs a monthly radio show over WBAI in New York City called Global Movements Urban Struggles. === Jerome Scott === Jerome Scott is a labor organizer and founding member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the auto plants of Detroit in the 1960s-70s, a community organizer, popular educator and author in the South since the 1970s, was a founding member and former director of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide in Atlanta, GA. He serves on the National Planning Committee of the U.S. Social Forum. === Jackie Smith === Jackie Smith is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh where she studies the connections between globalization and political mobilization. Her current research focuses on the World Social Forum process and the larger global justice movement, across a variety of differences such as class, race, gender and national identity. She teaches courses on transnational social movements, global society, and the United Nations. She edits the Journal of World-Systems Research (www.jwsr.org), an Open Access journal and coordinates the International Network of Scholar Activists (www.scholaractivist.org). == Meetings == [wiki:leadership-committee/meetings See information about our meetings including how to connect, agendas and notes]. == Events == [wiki:leadership-committee/events See information about upcoming events, actions and workplan implementation].