United Teachers Los Angeles

I've been the chapter chair there for the last six years.

I've also served on the UTLA House of Representatives, the legislative body in UTLA for the last three years, and been involved in several organizing efforts surrounding, of course, our various strikes, solidarity strikes, and then some stuff within UTLA regarding other efforts to sort of, like, push our union to make more of a stance, particularly on issues surrounding immigration and Palestine, the, uh, genocide in Gaza.

I think like many people in, in the millennial age range, I feel like it was the Black Lives Matter movement that sort of, like, became the first moment where I felt like I was seeing how my politics were playing out in public.

I'm a little bit too young to be necessarily, like, within the Occupy movement.

Incredible.

But actually I'm gonna pick up, I'm gonna pick up on this thread that Katie brought up about, you were talking about Make the Road and thinking of it as a, a community organizing hybrid space.

And one of the things that interested me about UTLA and what they've been doing, but also part of why I brought Nick in in thinking about paraprofessionals, is precisely thinking about educators unions as these spaces that have been expansive in their thinking about what organizing can look like and how to incorporate community organizing, how to incorporate different issues that are perhaps not traditionally seen as part of the education space.

So I wonder perhaps if we could again go through and each of you, uh, tell me about an experience you've had either in organizing or personally that really brings that theme forward.

Yeah.

But also organizers like Rashad Robinson, right? Union members, union leaders, like former UTLA president, now National Education Association executive board member, Cecily Meyer Cruz was there.

And so it's, Really important to remember that it takes people in office, but also a momentum on the ground to push for the kinds of things that we need as black people, especially.

Yes, indeed.

Because when I ran for school board, I was, um, I got caught up in a philosophical fight between, uh, charter schools versus traditional.

And, um, you know, I was, uh, the labor candidate, right? So I was the UTLA candidate, and the Charter School Association had a lot of funds and had a, a big interest in, you know, having their candidate win.

So $16 million to beat me.

So for a few months, even a year after that, uh, I was, I felt very defeated myself-