ROCHELLE WATSON is a mother with 15 years experience
as a community organizer. She currently works as National Organizer for Friends of Sabeel North America, mobilizing Christians to act in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Rochelle is passionate about food justice, decolonization and indigenous solidarity. She participated in the direct action that led to shutting down the WTO Ministerial in Seattle in 1999 as well as an attempt to achieve similar goals during the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany in 2007. She co-founded the Olympia
Rafah Sister City Project after her friend, Rachel Corrie, was killed by the Israeli military in 2003 while protecting a Palestinian home from being demolished. Rochelle spent 7 months in Oaxaca Mexico during the 2006 People’s Uprising and has volunteered for the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center as a human rights observer in a Las Abejas community and in the Zapatista Caracol of Morelia. In 2010 Rochelle co-founded Olympia BDS, which led to Olympia Food Co-op becoming the first US Grocery
store to boycott Israeli goods. She loves to garden, make pottery and wander aimlessly in wild places.
Role: Staff
RAHULA JANOWSKI was born on a commune and grew up poor in rural, economically depressed Northern Vermont. She moved to California in the early 90’s and became involved in direct action organizing and activism, primarily with Food Not Bombs and Earth First! For most of the 90’s Rahula was involved in direct action, anarchist based organizing on the west coast. Following the global justice movement’s shut down of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, November 1999, during which she coordinated the legal support office, like many of her anarchist comrades Rahula sought to increase her knowledge and skills around anti-racist organizing. She participated in the Challenging White Supremacy workshops, and then, following the attacks of September 11, joined the Heads Up Collective, an organization of white anti-racists focused on solidarity with organizations of people of color and on supporting anti-racist development among white activists and organizers. As a member of Heads Up, Rahula focused on Palestine Solidarity work and developing Heads Up’s vision and strategy with an emphasis on developing and supporting white working class leadership. Rahula has worked closely with the Catalyst Project for years, in sister organizations such as the Heads Up Collective and through supporting the Anne Braden program as a mentor to participants and as a member of the Braden Leadership Team. Rahula enjoys talking about race, power, and anti-racism in unexpected places, like her child’s school’s PTA, the grocery check out line, or in her spiritual community. She is a trained mediator and facilitator and enjoys group process and working collectively to engage and resolve conflict. She enjoys doing crafts with her excellent 12 year old, reading liberatory speculative fiction, smashing the patriarchy, growing plants, and long walks on the beach.
MOLLY MCCLURE first became politicized through queer, feminist, and global justice organizing in the 90s in the Pacific Northwest, and spent most of the early 2000s teaching sex education in Philadelphia public schools. After organizing with Catalyst Project in post-Katrina New Orleans, Molly was recruited to join the Catalyst staff in 2006 to help develop and run the Anne Braden Program. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Molly works with Causa Justa :: Just Cause, an organization mobilizing working class communities of color against displacement, and was a key editor of the book Toward Collective Liberation. Molly has two young kids and likes to nerd out about anti-imperialist parenting, transformative organizing, and where to go on full moon hikes.
LEE GARGAGLIANO joined Catalyst Project after serving on the Anne Braden Program Leadership Team in spring of 2018. Much of Lee’s political work has been focused in the struggle for justice for Palestinians. As an organizer with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network based in Chicago and the Bay Area, Lee contributed to campaigns working to expose the settler-colonial nature of Zionism and its ties with US imperialism, as well as its cooptation of Jewish histories of oppression and resistance. He came to the struggle against Zionism after growing up in a radical, secular, Ashkenazi, Yiddishkite community that taught him to draw on those Jewish legacies that stand against oppression and with collective liberation.
Lee was an adult educator working with high school equivalency and English language students for 12 years, helping them to realize their educational goals and recognize their own capabilities.
Lee is a pizzabagel from Brooklyn who has strong opinions about both pizza and bagels. His politics were shaped by his parents who were politically active with People Against White Supremacy (PAWS) in the 1980s, and his mom was a part of Womansong, a feminist chorus. Lee is an avid soccer player and member/player of Left Wing FC.
ELLEN BROTSKY joins Catalyst Project after serving on the Braden Leadership Team in 2018 and 2019. Born and raised in a secular, Jewish, left-wing family in San Francisco, she has always lived on Ohlone land in the SF Bay Area. From her family she learned 3 important lessons that have served her well in life: capitalism is bad, Never Again means Never Again for Anyone, and don’t talk to the FBI. While in high school, Ellen organized a student union, visited Cuba with the first Venceremos Brigade in 1969, and participated in demonstrations against the Viet Nam war and in support of ethnic studies at SF State. These experiences deepened her commitment to anti-imperialist organizing and to fighting racism and capitalism. Her 20’s were spent organizing with communist organizations where she experienced how racism, patriarchy and sectarianism worked against building mass movements and sustainability. While raising her children, she primarily organized in the schools and in the community. Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza motivated her to focus on political organizing again. She was thrilled to re-enter a left movement that had radically changed and which had so much to teach her about the centrality of white supremacy and racial capitalism, about gender oppression in all its forms and about settler colonialism in the US and Israel.
Ellen joined Jewish Voice for Peace in 2014, where she organizes Jews in solidarity with the Palestinian people and to transform Jewish community into one not tied to Zionism. She is passionate about helping Jews understand that safety from antisemitism comes through solidarity and shared struggle for collective liberation, not through Zionism and a settler colonialist state. Ellen organized with the coalition that successfully ended Alameda County’s racist Urban Shield swat team training and is proud to have participated in disruptions of both Jewish Zionist and Christian Zionist gatherings. Ellen loves baseball and cats, enjoys reading novels and hiking, and loves spending time with her grandchild.
ELISABETH LONG joins Catalyst Project after participating in the Philadelphia Anne Braden Program in 2016, Braden Leadership Team in 2018, and joining the facilitation team in 2019. She grew up in Kansas and Missouri on Kaw, Shawnee, Osage and Illini territories. Politicized by her experiences as a rape survivor struggling for justice and healing, Elisabeth was pulled into feminist anti-violence organizing. Her politics were developed by Women of Color feminisms that articulated a vision for the world she wanted to live in and the strategy to get there – a world where accountability, care, and pleasure thrive, free from sexual and gender violence and therefore free from prisons, policing, and all forms of domination. She has spent the last decade in anti-racist movements for prison abolition, anti-carceral feminism, LGBTQ anti-violence, and health justice with groups such as the Colorado Anti-Violence Program, Elephant Circle, the Trauma Center Coalition, and Prison Health News. Most recently, she organized in Philadelphia with the Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration and the No215Jail Coalition to end life without parole sentencing, jail expansion, and money bail. She values the opportunity to use her trauma-informed practice, harm reductionist approach, and transformative justice orientation to support the resilience of movements for collective liberation. Elisabeth is the daughter of a single mother, an incarcerated father, and the power and generosity of queer and feminist networks of care. She loves reading, musicals, hot springs, feral cats and collective study.
DYLAN COOKE
After participating in the 2011 Anne Braden Program, Dylan joined the Braden Leadership Team in the spring of 2013, and came on as Catalyst staff in the fall of 2013. While growing up in the Bay area, Dylan became politicized as a teen through being friends with queer teens who were homeless and seeing how many barriers they had to accessing the basic things they needed. Dylan has organized around homelessness and housing, prisons and imprisonment, anti-violence, queer and trans community building, and decolonization/indigenous solidarity. After living in Vancouver, Dylan moved back to the Bay Area to be closer to family. Dylan was involved in the Occupy/Decolonize movement, using some of Catalyst’s Occupy Movement Toolkit.
DONNA WILLMOTT’s political roots are in the militant, anti-imperialist organizations of the 1960s, working to end the war in Vietnam, supporting Third World liberation movements at home and abroad, and challenging patriarchy in its many forms. The movements for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination for Black people have been foundational to her understanding of what it takes to build a truly transformative movement for social justice. Donna was incarcerated in the mid-90’s for activities in support of the Puerto Rican Independence movement. Since her release from prison she has worked to end the prison system and its devastating impact on families and communities, particularly communities of color. Most recently she was part of collective efforts to amplify the voices of California prisoners leading a movement to abolish solitary confinement. She continues to work for the freedom of political prisoners, many of whom have been in prison for 30 or 40 years. Building an intergenerational movement for collective liberation is a high priority for her. She was a mentor in the Anne Braden program for several years and was on the Braden Leadership Team in 2015 before being invited to join Catalyst’s collective.
DAVID IMHOFF was a participant in the 2018 Braden Program and served on the Leadership Team in 2019 before joining the collective. David grew up on Susquehannock Territory in rural Pennsylvania, where he attended his first protest at the age of five, joining his parents and neighbors in defending their farms against flooding from a proposed hydroelectric dam. David’s early politicization was rooted in his opposition as a teenager to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and his experiences growing up queer in an overwhelmingly conservative Christian community. He started organizing in York and Lancaster, PA in 2007 as a member of Students for a Democratic Society and Food Not Bombs before moving to the Pacific Northwest, where his commitment to feminism, queer liberation, anti-capitalism, and anti-racism deepened through his involvement in the DIY/punk scene and as a volunteer with a radical childcare collective supporting parent-led welfare and economic justice organizing.
For the last five years, David’s work has focused on cross-border organizing aligned with anti-imperialist social and environmental justice struggles in Guatemala as an international human rights accompanier, grassroots fundraiser, and national coordinator for the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA). Working alongside indigenous and campesino environmental activists and survivors of US-backed genocide in Guatemala has been deeply instructive to David’s approach to social change work and his desire to contribute to internationalist movement building at the intersections of indigenous sovereignty, climate, racial, and immigrant justice. David enjoys writing, cooking and eating, spending time with his cat, watching horror movies, doing music, and putting his body in the nearest body of water.
CLARE BAYARD has organized in grassroots movements, led trainings and political education for over 20 years and co-founded Catalyst Project and several other organizations. Clare has worked in many coalitions, organizations and campaigns in movements including migrant rights, global justice, housing rights and anti-displacement, anti-war and Palestine solidarity, conscientious objection and G.I. resistance from within the military, climate justice, and post-Katrina Gulf Coast Reconstruction. Clare believes in the power of mentorship and necessity of supporting each other’s continued growth as community leaders for change, and helps run our intern and volunteer program. Clare leads Catalyst’s anti-war and demilitarization work, and has served on the National Committee of the War Resisters League since 2005, building connections between racial and economic justice struggles in the U.S. and international anti-war work. Clare is from a family with several generations of military veterans, and works on issues of US and international demilitarization as a member of the War Resisters International network and War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, as well as working closely with Iraq Veterans Against the War and Civilian-Soldier Alliance. Clare’s writing has been published widely including Left Turn, the Guardian UK, Z Magazine, Alternet, Common Dreams, The Hill, and the recent anthology We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st century America. Clare loves peoples’ resilient spirits, gardening, horses, and building many different forms of family.