ROSE MENDELSOHN came into social justice movements through student organizing, working with dining hall workers and janitors who were fighting for better working conditions on her college campus. She went on to organize with childcare workers in Alameda County who were building a union to improve the California childcare system for both workers and families. Rose then joined the California Faculty Association and Students for Quality Education, supporting college students from across the CSU system as they campaigned against tuition increases, for free public higher education, and for sanctuary campuses. She is excited to now be working with Bay Resistance and Everyday People PAC to fight back against Trump’s attacks on our communities, connect new activists to local grassroots organizations, and help win big for Bay Area movements in 2020 and beyond. Rose also helps move resources from white communities into people of color-led racial justice work by fundraising with SURJ Bay Area.
Role: Advisory board
MAX ELBAUM has been involved in peace, anti-racist and radical movements since joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Madison, Wisconsin in the 1960s. Through the 1970s and 1980s he was active in then-widespread efforts to build a new U.S. revolutionary party as a leader of one of the main organizations in the New Communist Movement. In the 1990s, he was the editor of CrossRoads, a magazine featuring dialogue and debate among socialists and revolutionaries from different radical political traditions. In 2001, he was among the founders of War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, until 2006 a free bilingual in-print tabloid distributed nationwide and until 2011 an on-line information and analysis project. He is currently an editor of Organizing Upgrade, a web-based publication focused on assessment of the political landscape and development of effective power-building strategies for social justice movements and the left..
Max is the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, a history of the 1970s-80s New Communist Movement first published by Verso in 2002 A third edition was released in 2018 with a new foreword by Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Alicia Garza.
JASON NEGRÓN-GONZALES is co-coordinator of Seed the Vote, a collaborative project to mobilize organizers, activists, and volunteers to support work against Trump in the 2020 election. He began his political work organizing as a student at UC Berkeley around Puerto Rican community issues. During his time there he was involved in building multi-racial student alliances and worked against the ending of affirmative action and the cutting back of ethnic studies. After graduating Jason organized with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), a membership-based community/labor organization in San Francisco. In his time at POWER he served as Organizer, Campaign Director, and Education Director as well as in alliance building work locally and nationally. After leaving POWER Jason became the director of Movement Generation, a Bay Area strategic leadership project for organizational leaders of grassroots groups, and a founding member of the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project which works to do training and technical support for community organizations to address issues of the environment and climate change. He has also worked as a consultant with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, developing curriculum on workforce development for domestic workers, and as a shop steward and rank-and-file organizer with the San Francisco nurses group of SEIU 1021.