Rebekah Gorbea

Based at: Tennessee 4 All

Location: Memphis, Tennessee

Rebekah has been living in Memphis for six years now and in that time she gained experience in being an event planner and electoral organizer in local elections. She believes that politically Tennessee is in an incredibly defensive position and that the New Confederacy –  made up of greedy corporate interests and white supremacist organizations – needs to be taken down in order to build power for all Tennesseans not just the 1 percent of Tennesseans. She sees her work in rural organizing as a contributor to that larger vision. She is originally from Pembroke Pines Florida and loves to play piano, read and try new things. 

Norma Martinez Hosang

Based at: Recovery for All Connecticut

Location: Connecticut

Norma Martinez-HoSang has been a labor and community organizer for over 20 years in California, Oregon and Connecticut.  She has organized and bargained in public sector unions with membership in higher education, health care and other Public State Services.  As a community organizer she has led campaigns on issues affecting  immigrants, youth and other communities that have been left behind.  She is the Organizing Director at Recovery for All in Connecticut.  RFA is a statewide coalition of labor, community, and faith organizations representing hundreds of thousands of people—Black, Brown, and white – demanding dramatic investment in the programs and services that many Connecticut residents desperately need.  She is a CIWO fellow and believes that the only way to win the kind of structural change we need is by uniting labor and community members in building people power to win and developing Common Good Campaigns.

Cat Salonek Schaldt

Based at: Tending The Soil

Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Cat is a lifelong Minneapolis, Minnesota resident. She has worked across labor and community sectors and borders to bring low wage, poor, multiracial, and geographically diverse communities together for common good. Cat has helped foster movements like Occupy Wall Street’s efforts to reclaim foreclosed homes and win the largest bank payouts in history. She has organized mass direct actions in the streets of Minneapolis and around the country to hold major corporations accountable. Her work has taken her out of the streets to successfully lobby to pass local, state and federal policies. But when corporations and government interventions aren’t enough she has worked to create worker/tenant owned cooperative structures for people to work, play and live. She is currently the executive director of Tending the Soil, a community and labor alignment organization. She has worked for CWA and as national campaign lead, organizing spoken language interpreters and challenging misclassification laws