Staff

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Raffi Mercuri

Raffi Mercuri is the Data Director for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). Raffi joined team SURJ in 2022 as its first National Phonebank Director, and brings the experience of over a dozen progressive issue and candidate electoral campaigns including Bernie 2020. Though he made a jump to electoral organizing work in 2015, Raffi spent the previous 5 years doing various work in public education, ultimately becoming a Social Studies teacher for a brief time.

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Taryn Hallweaver

Taryn has worked for 15 years at the local, state, and national level on a range of issues, from stopping oil pipelines, to raising the minimum wage, to passing harm reduction policies in response to the opioid epidemic. Whether working in the legislative or electoral or community organizing arena, the through-line has been her commitment to shifting power structures and building a more leaderful movement.

Taryn believes that everyone, including and often especially white people, are ultimately out there looking for a sense of belonging – something the Right knows all too well and exploits as an essential part of their divide-and-conquer strategy. She draws hope and inspiration from movement history and SURJ’s organizing lineage, as well as from science fiction. She is her happiest when knocking on doors, puttering around the kitchen, or involved in any kind of team-based activity.

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Z! Haukeness

Z! is a long-time racial justice organizer working at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability on various campaigns and projects with a homebase at SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice). They are trans, gender non-conforming and have worked in various local, statewide and national organizations rooted in racial justice with a focus on other interconnecting systems of oppression and liberation. They have been interviewed and published in a few books and other publications. Over the past 10 years they have been deeply involved in various movement moments including SB1070, Take Back the Land to do housing liberations, Wisconsin Uprising, Occupy, Black Lives Matter affiliate, Young Gifted and Black Coalition, to stop the building of a new jail in Dane County WI, and being part of the legal team at Standing Rock. They come from the small town of Strum in midwest WI, lived in Madison for the past 15 years doing social justice work, and now live in Louisville KY. They are a poet, auntie of many friends and family members kids, and a cat lover. They are all about creative expression and cultural organizing and love to see the grind of direct action intersect with collective healing and beautiful cultural work that leads to concrete systemic change. Their work is very spiritually based, with an eye towards the magical, and rooted in love for new possibilities of getting free.

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Alex Flood

Alex was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His professional background is in non-profit leadership and staff management. His organizing history includes issue-based grassroots campaigns across Arizona, and electoral politics from local races to presidential campaigns. Alex joined SURJ after his involvement with our field operation in the Georgia Senate runoff elections.  After that, he joined a coalition in Alabama as SURJ’s representative that was instrumental in blocking new prison construction in three rural areas across the state. Alex now serves as Lead Kentucky Organizer where he directs electoral, abolition, and economic justice campaigns across the Commonwealth.

Alex is a father of greyhound dogs and one human child. He enjoys hiking up mountains, playing soccer and chess, and reading science fiction novels.

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Ash Trull

Ash is a white, trans/non-binary, queer class straddler from a working class background, who currently lives in Rhode Island on Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pokanoket, and Wampanoag land. Ash has been been organizing with grassroots movements for justice for about 14 years now: originally getting politicized by learning about climate change and then expanding their work to international solidarity for land-based movements, racial justice, queer liberation, economic justice/new economies, police accountability, and most recently prison abolition. SURJ has been their primary organizing home since 2015 when they co-founded SURJ RI, and since then they’ve also organized as a member of SURJ Boston, coached SURJ chapters in New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island, and joined the staff in 2021. As a facilitator, trainer, and organizer it is their passion and purpose to create learning spaces that develop new leaders and build the base of white people joining BIPOC-led movements for justice and defecting from white supremacy. Outside of SURJ, Ash’s other passions include reading sci-fi, studying herbalism, farming, gluten-free cooking, dancing, and going on long-distance bike rides (preferably with their twin).

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Ava Bynum

Ava Bynum (they/them) is the Director of Impact at Showing Up for Racial Justice, where they organize the resources needed to build anti-racist multi-racial movements for justice. Ava has spent over a decade moving money to movements for racial, economic, and environmental justice, organizing philanthropy, and scaling organizations to have transformational impact.

Ava comes from a mixed class family and has been a class straddler throughout their life, which has reinforced their commitment to people of all class identities having a role to play in undermining the power of the Right and moving the hearts, minds, and votes of white communities towards justice.

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Avery Martens

Avery Martens (they/them/theirs) is a community organizer and strategist who builds power with people and communities most vulnerable to structural violence, working toward collective liberation for all people and the planet. Born in Cleveland, Avery grew up poor/working class in rural southwestern Ohio and currently lives back in Cleveland, with time spent in the San Francisco Bay Area in between. Currently, they are the statewide director for SURJ Ohio and a member of chapter leadership in the Northeast Ohio SURJ Chapter. Avery also organizes with the Cuyahoga County Jail Coalition in Cleveland and supports movement work across the state. Avery has been working on social justice campaigns for 19 years.

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Beth Howard

Beth Howard is the Appalachia People’s Union Director for Showing Up for Racial Justice, the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice in the country. She lives in Lexington, KY, but grew up in a rural white working class community in Eastern Kentucky. She has been organizing in the American South for sixteen years, primarily in her beloved state of Kentucky. Beth has been a lead organizer on winning campaigns to raise the minimum wage, restore voting rights, and win treatment programs for incarcerated people. She has worked on winning electoral campaigns that engaged white working class Southerners, including defeating an abortion ban ballot initiative in the 2022 Kentucky midterms and running a rural field office for the 2020 runoff election in Georgia. She is the creator of the viral narrative campaign “Rednecks for Black Lives” and has been featured in Matter of Fact’s Listening Tour with Soledad O’Brian, NPR’s Here and Now, Now This News, the book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, and the New York Times, including publishing an Op-Ed in The Boston Globe.

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Celina Culver

Celina joined the SURJ team in April of 2022 as the Eastern KY organizer. Before SURJ, she learned how to organize as a staff organizer with her movement fam at Voice of Westmoreland and Pennsylvania United, a multi-racial, grassroots member-led organization building power throughout Western PA.

Celina is currently in the process of becoming more outdoorsy – so these days catch her on a kayak, swimming in a lake, or on top of a mountain in beautiful Appalachia.

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Chelsea Strelser

Chelsea grew up in Virginia where she was involved in youth-led movements for human rights since she was a teen. She has supported organizations working on fair housing, food justice, sexual & domestic violence prevention, and indigenous rights. She has a background in non-profit communications, systems management, and event planning. When not working, Chelsea enjoys cooking and baking, hiking, reading sci-fi and YA, and meticulous travel planning. She lives in Richmond, VA on Powhatan land with her partners, two chonky cats, and an ever-growing collection of plant babies.

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