FOUNDING MEMBER

Manuwella Allen is a 24 year teaching veteran who has been a tireless advocate for students with special needs, as well as a champion for racial and gender equity justice in K-12 education. She has facilitated ethnic girls studies courses, Black Student Unions, and has been a vocal critic of Title IX implementation issues. She has served for years in her top level teacher union leadership, as well as in the black women's caucus of the California Teachers Association. She is currently leading her district’s efforts to bring a social justice focus into the elementary education level.

FOUNDER

Trina is a Bay Area public teacher, who has worked in multiple school districts, and has extensive experience in leading social justice based reforms in education. She earned her undergraduate degree in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, and her masters in Educational Leadership from Cal State East Bay.

While advocating for Title IX implementation for the past 8 years, she completed a multi-district confidential study on the lack of implementation of Title IX in Bay Area schools. She is a vocal critic of the exclusionary equity work in K-12 education, and has devised and led multiple equity based pilot projects in her present and prior districts, including being the creator and lead of a task force which brought together diverse stakeholders to fully implement AB 367 period equity law on her campus—for which she collaborated with the California Menstrual Equity Coaltion. She has also developed and implemented Title IX student educational materials for the middle school level for her current district.

She has prior experience running a domestic violence shelter and rape crisis hotline, and training domestic violence advocates on trauma response, crisis intervention, and harm reduction safety planning strategies.

She has advised numerous feminist student unions over the years, and collaborated with Women’s March Oakland to organize her feminist student union’s involvement in the march—the first ever public school to do so. Read more about her in the blog entry entitled, “Out of the Darkness”.

FOUNDING MEMBER/MENTOR

Founding Member and Mentor

Heidi Goldstein is an activist committed to improving K-12 institutional policy, practice and infrastructure to both prevent and respond to incidents of sexual harassment and assault, and to provide robust survivor support. She is a founding adult advisor of BHS Stop Harassing, an award-winning student grassroots organization in Berkeley CA, working continuously since 2015 to change the culture and response of the Berkeley Unified School District to incidents of sexual harassment and assault:

She has served since 2020 as the board chair of Stop Sexual Harassment in Schools (SSAIS), a national non-profit dedicated to educating students, families and schools about the right to an equal education free from sexual harassment.

She is also a founding collaborator in the development of SASH Club, a national organization providing free, ready-to-use tools and resources to empower youth to end sexual harassment and assault in their schools and communities.

Heidi's work in the public school environment is broad and deep. She was a founding member of the Berkeley (CA) Unified School District (BUSD) Sexual Harassment Advisory Committee (SHAC) in 2014 and has served on the BUSD Personnel Commission since 2016. She works as a human resources and management consultant to a wide variety of non-profit clients, including school districts, where she leads organizational development to build robust Title IX and Title VII policies and practices that integrate equity and access into daily operations.

Founding Member

Genevieve Mage is an educator and ombudsperson in the East Bay. An advocate since she was in high school, she speaks at high schools and universities on topics related to her experience including Title IX and self-advocacy in schools (based on her experiences working with survivors over the pandemic) and Ed Code 48907 for student journalists (as she amended the law in 2010). She is looking to expand her work in education to include liberatory consent and sex Ed.oes here

Founding Member

Amanda is a teacher, curriculum designer, author, and activist who has worked for the last 15 years in a wide range of educational settings teaching students grades 3rd-9th. She is her site’s Feminist Club Advisor, and is deeply committed to engaging and empowering her students. Amanda understands that helping students find their voice is core to being an effective teacher and social justice advocate. Amanda shares insights about implementing equitable teaching practices on her podcast and website amandawritenow.com