Staff

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Emma Keeshin

Emma (she/her) grew up in rural Vermont and has spent the last decade in Cleveland. Emma has been a member of the SURJ Northeast Ohio chapter since 2015. Before joining SURJ staff, Emma worked in policy advocacy at the ACLU and as an organizer with the Bernie 2020 campaign and Pennsylvania United, a multi-racial, grassroots, member-led organization in Western PA. She loves cooking, growing flowers, and spending time at Lake Erie’s beautiful beaches.

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Erin Heaney

Erin Heaney is the Executive Director of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), organizing in majority-white communities to undermine the power of the Right and bring millions of white people into multi-racial movement. In her time at SURJ, Erin has shepherded significant growth and strategic shifts including the growth of the SURJ Chapter Network to over 150 local groups, the launch and growth of SURJ’s electoral organizing programs and the robust centering of and expansion of SURJ’s organizing in poor and working class, rural and Southern communities.

Erin is currently a Fellow in the Atlantic Fellowship Racial Equity and a board member of the Action Center on Race and the Economy and a board member of the National Committee of the Working Families Party

Prior to her work at SURJ, Erin was the founding director at the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York, a multiracial, grassroots, member-led organization that supported front-line communities to win victories over corporations that harmed their communities including shutting down notorious polluter Tonawanda Coke and winning millions of dollars for the community, winning green infrastructure investments at major port, and winning a just transition at the Huntley coal plant.

Erin is a queer woman from a white Irish-Italian union family from Buffalo, NY where she lives with her wife Emma.

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Grace Aheron

Grace Aheron (she/her) is a multiracial Asian American femme raised in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains in Southwestern Virginia. She was politicized in her church that planted a commitment to liberation theology and justice deep in her heart as a wee one. She helped start the SURJ chapter in Charlottesville, Virginia and organized through the Unite the Right Rally in 2017. Prior to her staff position at SURJ, she served on SURJ’s board, worked for Resource Generation, started an intentional community land project, and helped run an anarchist Christian carnival.

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Jeff Rodgers

Jeff (he/him) comes from a family of public-school educators and was raised in very small farm towns across central Illinois. He has spent most of his career working as a theatre producer, arts administrator and theatre-maker. He currently serves as a co-chair of the League of Resident Theatre’s Equity Diversity and Inclusion Mentorship program. He is a co-founder of the Fairness Campaign, Louisville’s LGBTQ civil rights organization that believes dismantling racism is central to its work. He and his husband live in Louisville, Kentucky. He will always say “yes” to kayaking, hiking, volleyball, biking, and traveling.

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Julia Daniel

Julia Daniel ​(she/her) comes to anti-racist organizing seeing it as key to our collective liberation and the right thing to do. Most of her organizing experience is with young people fighting the schoolhouse to jailhouse pipeline in Miami, and she helped found the Boulder, CO SURJ chapter. She’s currently completing a dissertation in education policy. Julia identifies as upper working/lower middle class.

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Katy Medley

Katy Medley is an organizational strategist and nonprofit leader who helps to build powerful and enduring social-change organizations. For over fifteen years she’s helped nonprofits and change-makers to get organized, secure funding, build healthy capacity, design effective internal systems and structures, center strategy, and assess impact. Katy holds a Masters in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon, and her management and leadership approaches are informed by her commitment to weave into the nonprofit model greater flexibility, justice, boldness, and care.

Katy joined Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) in 2022 as its first Managing Director, strengthening and overseeing the growing organization’s internal operations, strategic planning, finance, and labor-management relations. A lifelong queer activist, Katy found a political home in SURJ when she co-founded a local chapter in 2016. Engaging in Indigenous solidarity struggles, living in a southwestern sanctuary city, and parenting in the age of climate crisis have shaped Katy’s understanding of the stakes of this political moment and the critical role for movement organizations like SURJ in the fight for an anti-racist abolitionist future.

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Kelly Sue Waller

Kelly Sue Waller grew up in trailer parks across Tennessee and Georgia. When she was working low-wage jobs in Nashville, she found Worker’s Dignity, an organization that brings together workers to fight for workplace justice issues like unions and wage theft. With Worker’s Dignity and other groups in Nashville, she organized as a member for four years and then joined Southern Crossroads staff in 2018. Along with other folks in Shelbyville, Tennessee, she founded SCOPE’s first base building project: the Bedford County Listening Project (BCLP) that brings together renters across the community to fight for renter protections. She now serves as the Director of Southern Crossroads.When not organizing, Kelly Sue can often be found with her nose buried in fiction books featuring folks fighting the system with an eye towards building better worlds. She believes that those most affected by injustice have the experience and wisdom to come up with solutions. And that building power with our neighbors across lines of difference– race, class, ability, sexual orientation– is how we all get free.

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Kelsey Washburn

Kelsey was born and raised in a working-class family in rural Kentucky. She has an educational background in clinical psychology and has worked in the mental health field as well as several roles in human resources. After working in the corporate world, Kelsey was first introduced to non-profit work with CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) training volunteers to advocate for abused and neglected children caught up in the Family Court System through no fault of their own. Kelsey is passionate about working in fields that she can feel passionate about and have a sense of contribution to the greater good.

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