Advisors

Our advisory board brings together long-time mentors and comrades who have supported our political and organizational development over the years. We have much gratitude for their leadership, guidance and support.

PATRICIA BERNE is a Co-Founder, Executive and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid (www.sinsinvalid), a disability justice based performance project centralizing disabled artists of color and queer and gender non-conforming artists with disabilities. Berne’s training in clinical psychology focused on trauma and healing for survivors of interpersonal and state violence. Her background includes offering mental health support to survivors of violence; advocacy for immigrants who seek asylum due to war and torture; community organizing within the Haitian diaspora; international support work for the Guatemalan democratic movement; work with incarcerated youth toward alternatives to the criminal legal system; and advocating for LGBTQI and disability perspectives within the field of reproductive genetic technologies. In addition to her work with Sins Invalid, Berne currently directs the Department of Disability and Deaf Services at San Francisco Women Against Rape, is the 2009 recipient of the Empress I Jose Sarria Award for Uncommon Leadership in the field of LGBTQI and disability rights by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and in 2018, she was named one of the “100 people shifting culture and creating change” by the  Yerba Center for the Arts. She is widely recognized for her work to establish the framework and practice of disability justice. Berne’s experiences as a Japanese-Haitian queer disabled woman provides grounding for her work creating “liberated zones” to center marginalized voices.

GOPAL DAYANENI has been involved in fighting for social, economic, environmental and racial justice through organizing & campaigning, teaching, writing, speaking and direct action since the late 1980’s. He currently serves on the Staff Collective of Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project, which brings a strategic understanding of ecological crisis and transition to racial and economic justice organizing.

Gopal is an active trainer with and serves on the boards of The Ruckus Society and the Center for Story-based Strategy (formerly smartMeme). He also serves on the advisory boards of the International Accountability Project, and Catalyst Project. Gopal works at the intersection of ecology, economy and empire.

Gopal has been a campaigner for Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition on human rights and environmental justice in the high-tech industry and the Oil Campaigner for Project Underground, a human rights and environmental rights organization which supported communities resisting oil and mining exploitation around the world. Gopal has been active in many people powered direct action movements, including the Global Justice/Anti-Globalization Movement, Direct Action to Stop the War, Mobilization for Climate Justice, Take Back the Land, and Occupy.

Gopal was an elementary and early childhood educator, working formerly as a teacher and as the co-director of the Tenderloin Childcare Center, a community based childcare center supporting children and families forced into homelessness. He has worked in teacher education and education organizing in the US and briefly in India.

Most importantly, Gopal is the father of Ila Sophia and Kavi Samaka Orion. He lives in Oakland in an intentional, multi-generational community of nine adults, eight children and a bunch of chickens.

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.

LINDA EVANS is a lifelong organizer for human rights and liberation. In 1985, she was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison for militant actions to protest and change U.S. government policies. Released from prison in 2001, Linda co-founded All of Us or None, organizing formerly-incarcerated people and their families nationally to fight for an end to all forms of discrimination based on past convictions. She is currently working with CCWP (California Coalition for Women Prisoners) and California’s statewide DROP LWOP Coalition, fighting to eliminate Life without Parole sentences in California. She is also active in the Immigrant Defense Taskforce of North Bay Organizing Project in Santa Rosa, and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Center for Political Education, Critical Resistance, and the Catalyst Project.

PAUL KIVEL‘s work grows out of four decades in community education, engaged parenthood, political writing, and practical activism all focused on one overriding question: “How can we live and work together to nurture each individual and create a multicultural society based on love, caring, justice, and interdependence with all living things?”

Kivel is a leader in the anti-violence movement developing resources to work with men against patriarchy and violence.  He is also a leader in the anti-racist movement developing resources for white people against white supremacy and inequality.  He is the author of “You Call This a Democracy?  Who Benefits, Who Pays & Who Really Decides”, “Uprooting Racism” and “Men’s Work”. 

SHARON MARTINAS joined the movement in the summer of 1965, when she was recruited to teach in a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Freedom School in Selma, Alabama.  She played a leading organizing role in the student strike led by the Third World Liberation Front  at San Francisco State University that won the first Ethnic Studies program in the country.  She was a legal staff worker with the National Lawyers Guild and developed curriculum at SF City College for working class women navigating the welfare and prison systems.  She was the volunteer coordinator through the 1980s with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES).

In 1990, she co-created a history course for activists called “Addressing White Supremacy in Progressive Movements.” After participating in a People’s Institute “Undoing Racism Workshop”, Sharon co-founded “The Challenging White Supremacy Workshop” in 1993, for which she wrote The CWS Workshop Exercise Manual. In 2000, she co-created Anti-racism for Global Justice which then became the Catalyst Project.  She is part of European Dissent in New Orleans and works closely with grassroots people of color-led organization work to rebuild New Orleans post-Katrina.  She continues to mentor hundreds of white anti-racists in the Bay Area and around the country.