ABOUT

Matthew Armstead works at the intersections of art, spirituality, and social change and lives in Philadelphia, PA, USA. They have recently trained Black Lives Matter activists, B Lab executives, Amnesty International USA staff, Canadian Labor Council organizers, Unitarian Universalist ministers, United Nations advocates from the Sexual Rights Initiative, among other grassroots and grasstops groups.

Matthew has organized for environmental justice, racial justice, LGBTQ liberation, and accountability among masculine-identified people. Matthew training style weaves in their theatre practice to create opportunities for people to lean into play and embody the futures they strive to create. They serve as a Core Trainer with Training for Change.

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.

Andrea Parra is a queer Colombian human rights lawyer, activist, professor, trainer and translator, who has worked for almost 20 years on issues related to sexuality and rights,  gender-based violence, disability justice and immigrant rights. She has conducted numerous trainings to activists, public officials, attorneys, survivors, students and academics, among others. She has trained in several countries and various cities in Colombia and the US. She’s been a core trainer with TFC since 2014 and has worked with feminist and human rights organizations in Colombia and South Asia. She has also translated several texts related to feminism and social justice issues. @andreparrafo

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 (she/her) has been working alongside, inside, and up against the non-profit movement ecosystem for 25 years. She approaches her work as play, art, spiritual calling, and business. She is a mix of intuition and practical application with a special gift for building trust and pushing the envelope. Currently she is the Special Projects Manager for Rockwood Leadership Institute, a Core and Online Trainer at Training for Change, and an independent consultant specializing in management and leadership coaching.

Naomi started facilitating groups in 2002 as a community organizer in Racine, WI; she continued being a trainer while working on prison abolition and ending the War on Drugs at The Drug Policy Alliance. She’s most proud of her work moving organizing collectives toward sharper strategy, providing expert power mapping analysis to national networks, and mediating conflict inside organizations. Her two decades of training work spans several different types of support from helping active and recovering drug users do legislative advocacy to training political candidates at Wellstone Action to building Black Power collectives across the country.

She started coaching individuals in 2009 and has a deep commitment to the full range of experience— from those who are burned out and fed up, to those who see no problem too big. She built a program to sustain nonprofit staff while serving as a Partner at The Management Center and she is also known to get excited about helping people leave their jobs for healthier choices.

Naomi began learning curriculum design centered around Experiential Education in 2008 with Training for Change and is a highly sought after thought partner for training and design architecture.

As a chronic Drapetomaniac since childhood, she is also a lover of mind-bending dystopian science fiction, solo travel adventures, and caring for plant life. After surviving an incident of gun violence in 2021 she is following the breadcrumbs toward her wholeness, not just survival.

Her practices around facilitation, coaching, and design can be summed up by a simple philosophy: She believes each moment is a sacred opportunity for healing and deserving of her best.

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.

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.

Nikki Marín Baena loves North Carolina. She loves it so much, in fact, that she willingly moved back in 2015 after a few years in Texas with a tiny, fledgling dream to build a home for statewide Latinx basebuilding that would blend Southern relational organizing with the rigorous labor and worker center organizing she’d seen in her time away. That thing, Siembra NC, now exists and she is co-director there.

She believes in alternative economics and has trained dozens of groups on starting their own cooperatively-owned businesses, marketing, and bookkeeping and financial systems. She proudly helped build Mijente’s financial and operations infrastructure and has since trained other c3/c4/PACs on systems and processes.

She has a degree in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, which has come in very handy for banner-making and direct actions. You could say she knows her way around chicken wire.

Co-Executive 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.

Co-Executive Director

For the last 10+ years, Nicole has immersed herself in a diversity of social justice movements and campaigns, honing her skills as an organizer, trainer, rebel, and strategist. Raised in rural Minnesota, Nicole’s journey into social change work began at an early age, influenced by her family’s core values of community care and collective responsibility. 

She found expression of these values as a leader in the Divestment Student Network. She contributed to reshaping the narrative on climate change in the U.S. and supported divestment from fossil fuels campaigns at her college and across the country at several colleges and universities. Since then, she has continued to coach and train youth leaders across the climate justice movement. 

During her time at MN350 as the Statewide Organizing and Training Director, she led collaborative efforts to build a base of Minnesotans for campaigns against fossil fuel expansion projects and for transitioning to 100% clean energy in MN, a victory won in 2023! Most recently, Nicole served as the Senior Partnerships Manager at the Climate Advocacy Lab, where she designed and implemented a Partnerships Program that offered long-term coaching, research, funding, and training support to climate organizations engaged in multiracial, cross-class organizing.

While Nicole’s work has been mainly focused within the climate justice movement, she has always been a nerd about expanding our collective capacity to embrace uncertainty with curiosity and care, building strong teams to weather changing conditions and emerging needs together, and courageously practicing honesty and love in the face of disagreement or conflict.  

Now based in Southern California, Nicole finds rejuvenation and inspiration from spending time at the ocean, creating in the kitchen, maintaining a daily movement practice, and reveling in the joy of comedy. She finds continued grounding from her family lineage and especially from the unapologetic, spunky younger ones in her life. 

Nicole first connected with TFC in 2015 and was part of the Judith C. Jones Fellowship (2017-19). In addition to her staff role, she currently trains with the Online Facilitation Lab and Organizing Skills Institute. 

Operations and Development Director

Ali’s background is in community organizing and activist storytelling, connecting present-day movements to 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.

Sonia Silbert (she/her) is the Trainings Director for 350Vermont and supports local nonprofits with facilitation and consulting. Originally from New York City, she lived in Washington, DC for ten years where she served as Executive Director of the Washington Peace Center, providing education, resources, and action for activists in DC working for social justice and a world free from oppression. She has personally led trainings for groups up to 400 on Nonviolent Direct Action, Grassroots Fundraising, and more. She now lives in Brattleboro, VT, where she supports local racial justice organizing, plays in the woods, and tries to keep up with a very energetic puppy and a very large garden.

Alethia Jones is a strategist, writer, and learning experience designer dedicated to transformative grassroots social change. She is the former director of the Open Society Fellowship Program which supports global human rights fellows at early, mid and senior levels of their careers. Prior to joining Open Society, Jones directed education and leadership development for 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the largest health care union local in the United States. She led a team that customized learning experiences to deepen the movement building capacity of the union’s 400,000 members, staff, and executive officers. Her expertise includes immigrant incorporation policy, community banking, urban and racial politics, structural inequality in U.S. health care, and worker rights. Jones began her career managing policy initiatives at the New York City Council. She is the co-editor of the award winning book on black feminist organizing, A’int Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. She has held faculty positions and fellowships at MIT, Mount Holyoke College, University of Virginia and Yale University. She serves on the boards of Advancing Black Strategists Initiative (Jobs with Justice), Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice (City University of New York), the School of Labor and Urban Studies Foundation and Training for Change. She earned her PhD in political science (Yale University). She is originally from Kingston, Jamaica. Dance, yoga, travel and meditation retreats are sources of joy. Find her at alethiajonesphd.com and @alethiajonesphd.

Kirin is a first generation Desi queer femme. She is a class complicated Midwestern Brooklyn transplant. Kirin carries the resilience of her communities into every aspect of her work. She spends most of her time forging and maintaining relationships across class differences. Kirin is most likely to be found ordering dessert while gently teasing you. Her superpowers are resource mobilization, experiential learning training, holding contradiction and apologizing well. Find Kirin on a dance floor near you or @kirin_rosemary