Leadership

Leah Jo Carnine (she/her) is a community organizer, and primary care medical provider who moved to her hometown of Eugene after being part of migrant and racial justice organizing in the Southwest. She co-founded and organized with SURJ chapters in Arizona and Albuquerque for almost a decade before joining the National Leadership team in 2020. As a white, class privileged femme, she is deeply committed to SURJ because she believes that white people have a stake in the fight against racism, and we must be organized into powerful multi-racial, cross-class movements for justice to get everyone free. She’s passionate about the intersections of transformative health care and collective liberation, and enjoys making art and spending as much time as possible with her new baby, beloved family, and many tiny dogs.

Blyth Barnow is a minister, harm reductionist, writer, and community organizer. She was raised working class and has found community as a fat, queer, femme, with a chronic illness. She is the founder of Femminary, an online ministry offering spiritual support for queers, femmes, people who use drugs, and harm reductionists. She currently serves as the Director of HEAL Ohio, where she works to bring clergy and people who use drugs together to end the racist war on drugs.

Rebecca Vilkomerson (she/her) is a long-time community organizer. From 2009-2019, she was the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace, a grassroots membership organization working from an anti-Zionist framework for the freedom and equality of all people in Israel/Palestine. She’s currently Co-Director of Funding Freedom, a philanthropy organizing project. She’s passionate about organizing, passionate about movement-building, winning strategic campaigns that build power to end white supremacy and capitalism and about being attentive to the infrastructure and processes needed to do all that sustainably and for the long haul.

Rebecca is a white, Jewish, cishet class-privileged person who is committed to working class and BIPOC leadership of our movements. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, and when not organizing you’ll probably find her walking her dog or working on her latest knitting project.