CLARE BAYARD is a core member, organizer and trainer with the Catalyst Project. She has played a lead role in forging alliances between mostly white global justice and anti-war groups with immigrant-led economic and racial justice organizations. As a member of Catalyst, Clare serves on the national committee of the War Resisters League supporting counter-military recruitment organizing. Clare worked for many years with Food Not Bombs and was a participant in the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition fighting against gentrification and for community power in community planning. Clare played a leading role in building relationships between Food Not Bombs and the Day Labor Program and Coalition on Homelessness. Through her work with the anti-imperialist Heads Up Collective, she continues to develop strategic alliances to build movement in the Bay Area.

INGRID CHAPMAN, a core member of the Catalyst Project is a community organizer, educator, and carpenter by day.  Her roots within radical left organizing began as a leading member of the global justice movement in the late '90s. She was a student organizer and member of the Direct Action Network that mobilized thousand of people to shut down the WTO in Seattle.  She was a founding member of "Active Solidarity; a collective for anti-racism education" and has led workshops with activists around the country.  She has led trainings on direct action skills with the Ruckus Society and played a role in their anti-racist transformation process. She spent much of the last year in New Orleans working with the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund and Common Ground supporting the struggles for the right of return and equitable rebuilding. The last 5 years she has worked with Oakland residents in struggles for tenant rights, community safety and alternatives to incarceration and policing.
 

CHRIS CRASS is the coordinator of the Catalyst Project.  He has been engaged in left/anarchist politics for the past 18 years.  He participated in anti-war organizing during the Gulf War in 1991 and was heavily involved in struggles for Ethnic Studies and immigrant rights In Orange County, CA.  For six years he played a leadership role in San Francisco Food Not Bombs with a focus on building the anarchist movement nationally.  He was a co-coordinator of the Challenging White Supremacy Workshops from which the Catalyst Project emerged.  He was a co-founder of Colours of Resistance with Helen Luu and Pauline Hwang.  His essays on collective liberation politics,  anti-authoritarian leadership, organizing strategy and movement building have been published widely in Left Turn, Clamor and on ZNet and Infoshop.org.  He is a member of the anti-racist/anti-imperialist Heads Up Collective in the Bay Area that bridges organizing for economic and racial justice with global justice and anti-war struggles.  Chris is also a Unitarian Universalist and lives with his comrades, including Natasha Janoski who is four, at Praxis House.

AMIE FISHMAN has been a member of the Catalyst Project since 2001, after participating in and being a trainer with the Challenging White Supremacy Workshops.  She developed as an anti-racist organizer by working both within and outside of the criminal justice system to support alternatives and challenges to the prison-industrial complex.  Amie also organized for many years with Jews for a Free Palestine, a group of Bay Area Jews working to support Palestinian self-determination and right of return through political education and direct action, and she continues to be part of a growing network of Jews engaged in this work.  Amie is currently exploring the intersections of incarceration and public health at San Francisco State University, and is inspired by work that connects healing and transformation with organizing for justice and collective liberation.  She can often be found tending to the vegetables in her makeshift back porch garden, daydreaming about the full-fledged urban garden she hopes to have one day.

  MOLLY MCCLURE first became politicized through queer, feminist, and global justice organizing in the 90s.  While living in Philadelphia for 5 years, Molly supported immigrant rights and gender justice organizing, taught sex education in public high schools, and facilitated self-defense and anti-racism workshops. Since Hurricane Katrina, Molly has been doing Gulf Coast solidarity work in and out of New Orleans, and organizing around the struggle for a just reconstruction.  Born and raised in the Bay Area, Molly moved back home in 2006 to be closer to family. In addition to Catalyst project, Molly works with Just Cause Oakland whose work is organizing to prevent displacement and to build power in working class communities in Oakland.

 

BETTY JEANNE RUETERS-WARD met Catalyst while serving as a national youth organizer for Young Religious Unitarian Universalists, where she was first politicized around race in the late 1990's. Betty Jeanne is a member of Groundwork, a faith-based, multigenerational, multiracial collective of anti-racism trainer/organizers; she has led courses on community organizing, sociology, youth ministry, and sexuality education at colleges and seminaries. While studying Religious Leadership for Social Change at Starr King School for the Ministry, Betty Jeanne created a series of "theological zines" exploring mental health and personal sustainability in social movements. Also while in seminary, Betty Jeanne interned with Catalyst and served on the newly-launched Fundraising Team and Anne Braden Program Leadership Team, coordinating the program's mentor circle. Leading up to the 2008 elections, she organized Bay area clergy to mobilize progressive voters and build the religious/spiritual left. Betty Jeanne can also be found baking fruit tortes, and corresponding with her awesome family in Germany.