BLACK LIVES AND OUR COLLECTIVE FUTURE

Alma Maquitico is the co-director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Her work has centered on developing initiatives to address rural development, climate change, and human rights. Over the past twenty years, she has provided technical assistance to various grassroots organizations addressing food, agriculture, and ecological sustainability with migrant and refugee communities on the US-Mexico borderlands. Additionally, Alma has helped built grassroots networks to monitor and document human rights violations resulting from immigration enforcement in communities along the US-Mexico border.

Nana Gyamfi is the executive director of BAJI . She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and her Juris Doctorate from UCLA School of Law. She brings with her over three decades of service to the Movement for Black liberation, and over twenty years of experience directing Black social justice organizations and networks. Nana is a human rights and criminal defense attorney, a professor in the Pan African Studies Department at the California State University Los Angeles, and radio personality who hosts two popular shows in Los Angeles, CA. She is also the president of
the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL). As a seasoned organizer and activist, Nana has been involved with and led various local, national, and international social justice organizations for over thirty years.

Angelica is the executive director of CHIRLA and a state and national leader in advocacy for immigration reform and immigrant justice. She was instrumental in the formation of the Executive Committee of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) and the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA), two of the country’s largest immigrant rights coalitions. Angelica is a recognized grassroots leader that plays a national leadership role in all major immigration reform campaigns and serves as a national spokesperson for immigrant communities and immigrant rights campaigns. Angelica comes to her understanding of immigrants and immigration first hand, she and her entire family lived in the country undocumented, experienced deportation, and were able to legalize their status.

Isabel Garcia is the co-chair of the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, a grassroots organization based in Tucson, Arizona, that promotes respect for human and civil rights and fights the militarization of the border region in the American Southwest. She is also a retired legal defender of Pima County, Arizona. Ms. Garcia has been at the forefront of immigrant and refugee rights since 1976. As a lead speaker on behalf of Derechos Humanos, Ms. Garcia holds press conferences and interviews, hosts media crews, leads demonstrations, weekly vigils, symposiums, and marches to draw attention to unjust policies and inhumane treatment of immigrants. She works to counter anti-immigrant hysteria and to change stereotypes and misinformation about immigrants

Elsadig Elsheikh is the Director of the Global Justice Program at the Othering & Belonging Institute, where he oversees the program’s projects on corporate power, food systems, forced migration, inclusiveness index, Islamophobia, and human rights mechanisms; and manages the Shahidi Project, and the Nile Project. Elsadig's research interests focus on the themes and socio-political dynamics related to state and citizenship; race and corporate power; and measuring social policies of exclusion and inclusion.