jessie ulibarri

Jessie Ulibarri is SiX’s Co-Executive Director. As a queer person of color, as a parent, and as someone who grew up in a trailer park, Jessie viscerally understands the demands the progressive movement makes of our elected officials for radical, transformative change. As a former Colorado State Senator, he knows how challenging it is to deliver on those needs, with little institutional support for public leaders in a system that is designed for slow, incremental change. With this dual view, Jessie has dedicated his career to building progressive power from the states outward. Over the last two decades, Jessie has passed hundreds of economic, racial, and gender justice policies into state law, including enacting wage theft protections, establishing workplace protections for pregnant workers, curbing police misconduct, modernizing Colorado’s election system, implementing driver’s licenses for undocumented residents, outlawing solitary confinement in state prisons, combatting climate change through clean energy technologies, and making the largest investment in affordable housing in Colorado’s history. Jessie previously served as the Interim Co-Executive Director of Wellstone Action, Public Policy Director at the ACLU of Colorado, Colorado State Director of Mi Familia Vota, Economic Justice Director at Colorado Progressive Coalition, and Policy Fellow in the Office of Congressman Luis Gutierrez (IL-4). He serves on the National Governing Board of Common Cause.

erica williams

Erica Williams is Executive Director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute and leads the team in shaping racially-just tax, budget, and policy decisions in the District of Columbia. She has nearly two decades of experience in pursuing racial, gender, and economic justice through public policy. Previously, Erica was Vice President for State Fiscal Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She led a 40-person team that supported and shaped the efforts of the State Priorities Partnership—a network of over 40 state-level fiscal and economic policy shops (including DCFPI). She has also been Study Director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Erica holds a B.A. in Sociology and Spanish studies from Santa Clara University and an M.A. in international policy from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

chris hoene

Chris Hoene has been the executive director of the California Budget & Policy Center since 2012. He has 20 years of leadership in state and local policy research and analysis, particularly on fiscal policy issues. Prior to joining the Budget Center, Chris was director of the Center for Research and Innovation at the National League of Cities in Washington, D.C. Chris also previously worked for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C. and the Public Policy Institute of California in San Francisco.  In 2011, in recognition of his service to the state and local community, Chris was elected as a Fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA). He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Government Finance Research Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Chris is married to Darrene Hackler and, in their free time they can be found traveling, cooking, seeking out good wine, playing tennis, hiking, and paddleboarding.

marisa bono

Lifelong social justice advocate and thought leader, Marisa Bono joined Austin-based Every Texan in 2021 as the first woman of color to serve as Executive Director. She is a licensed attorney and has specific policy expertise in social equity as it relates to education, immigration, voting rights, and political access. Before coming to Every Texan, Marisa served as Chief of Policy to San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg, and Chief Strategic Officer of VIA Metropolitan Transit in San Antonio, where she successfully led an initiative to expand service for working families and low wage workers. Earlier in her career, Marisa served as the Southwest Regional Counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the nation’s premier Latino civil rights law firm. Marisa has a law degree and master’s degree in public policy from the University of Michigan, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Rice University.

tracie gardner

As Legal Action Center Senior Vice President of Policy Advocacy, Tracie spearheads major initiatives and fosters strategic partnerships that support LAC’s mission. Tracie has worked almost 30 years in the health and social services policy arena as a policy advocate, trainer and lobbyist From 2015-2017, Tracie served as the Assistant Secretary of Health for New York State, where she oversaw the state’s addiction, mental health and developmental disabilities agencies. Tracie received a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College.

Shanetta Paskel

Shanetta is a Principal at Cornerstone Government Affairs, a government relations firm based in DC and with fourteen offices nationwide. She has been a member of the firm since May 2021. Prior to joining Cornerstone, Shanetta was the senior director of state and federal government relations at Navient – a U.S. corporation based in Wilmington, Delaware, whose operations include servicing and collecting student loans. In this role, she coordinated and lead the company’s government relations, advocacy efforts, and PAC strategy on the federal, state, and local level. Shanetta’s leadership and success led to her being the recipient of the Navient Navigator Leadership Award in 2020.

amber harding

Amber W. Harding is the Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.  Ms. Harding joined the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless in 2003 as a Steptoe & Johnson Equal Justice Works Fellow after receiving a law degree from Georgetown University and a degree in anthropology from the University of Arizona. Through individual representation and systemic campaigns, she advocates for the civil and legal rights of people experiencing homelessness; equal access to emergency shelter and housing: disability-rights compliance (particularly in emergency shelters); deeply affordable housing; right to shelter in severe weather; and removing barriers to housing.  In 2007, she received the Citizen Advocate award from the DC Center for Independent Living. In 2011, her work on improving the accessibility of emergency shelters was cited as a “particularly noteworthy” example of a successful reform campaign by the Shriver Center’s Federal Practice Manual for Legal Aid Attorneys. In 2013, she received the Excellence in Advocacy, State Issue Campaign award from Professional Women in Advocacy and recognition for “deep commitment to and outstanding legal support of Washington D.C.’s homeless” from Shelter, Housing and Respectful Change (SHARC). In 2021, she received the Humanitarian Spirit Award for Advocacy from The National Center for Children and Families. She is on the steering committee of the Way Home Campaign and the Fair Budget Coalition, is on the board of ACLU-DC, and co-teaches a class on legal advocacy around homelessness and policy at Georgetown University Law Center.

jennifer allen

Jennifer M. Allen, she/her, is the CEO of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates,

 a 501(c)4 non-profit organization where she works to protect and promote sexual and reproductive health, education, rights, and justice in Alaska, Hawai’i, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Washington, and nationwide. She also serves on the Executive Team of Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky, where she provides oversight for the 501(c)3 affiliate's government relations, education, global, and communications programs. 

She is a national leader for Planned Parenthood public affairs professionals serving on the executive committee of the State Public Affairs Network, (SPAN), since 2013, and currently represents SPAN on the Planned Parenthood Action Fund national board of directors. She previously served as CEO of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, leading that team to major election victories in 2017 and translating those victories into successful Medicaid Expansion and increased access to contraception.

ellen reddy

Ellen Reddy has been a force for her community and, especially, for the rights and health of young people. Reddy founded the Nollie Jenkins Family Center with her twin sister, Helen Johnson, in 1994, with the goal of providing area families with safe, affordable childcare for their babies and preschool-aged children. Today she serves as CEO and executive director of NJFC.

In 2003, Reddy partnered with the ACLU of Mississippi, the Mississippi Center for Justice, and the Southern Poverty Law Center to create the Mississippi Coalition for the Prevention of Schoolhouse to Jailhouse to identify and end the systemic factors contributing to the “pipeline” between schools and prisons.

The most recent focus of Reddy’s energies is the use of corporal punishment in Mississippi’s public and charter schools. She worked to organize the Mississippi Coalition to End Corporal Punishment, which formed in 2021, to pass legislation eliminating corporal punishment in schools throughout Mississippi and the Southeast.

Fraidy Reiss

Fraidy Reiss is a forced marriage survivor turned activist.

She was 19 when she was forced to marry a stranger in New York City’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community — and she was subjected to a virginity examination before the wedding. She was stripped of all sexual and reproductive rights within her abusive marriage, forced to have unprotected marital sex and forced to have two children without her consent. Even though her husband was violent from the first week of their marriage, her insular religious community refused her the right to leave; in that community, only a man can grant a divorce.

Determined to escape her forced marriage, Fraidy eventually defied her husband and community to become the first person in her family to go to college. She graduated from Rutgers University at age 32 as valedictorian (called “commencement speaker” at Rutgers). With her journalism degree, she was hired as a reporter for the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey, eventually getting promoted to the paper’s elite investigative-reporting team. She went on to a career as an investigator at Kroll, then the world’s largest investigations firm. At the same time, Fraidy managed to get divorced, win full custody of her two daughters and get a final restraining order against her ex-husband.

Her family declared her dead, but Fraidy is very much alive. She founded and now leads Unchained At Last, the only organization dedicated to ending forced and child marriage in the United States through direct services and advocacy.

Through Unchained, Fraidy has helped hundreds of survivors across the U.S. to escape forced marriages, and she now leads a growing national movement to end child marriage in every U.S. state and at the federal level. Legislation she helped to write and promote has been passed into law in multiple U.S. states.

Fraidy’s research and writing on forced and child marriage have been published extensively, including in the New York Times, Washington Post and Journal of Adolescent Health and by Oxford Press, making her one of the foremost experts on these abuses in the U.S. She has been featured in books (including as one of the titular women in Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s The Book of Gutsy Women), films (including the award-winning documentary Knots: A Forced Marriage Story) and countless television, radio and print news stories.

Michael Cassidy

As the director of Policy Reform and Advocacy, Michael Cassidy advances the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s efforts to inform, guide and influence public policy at the local, state and federal levels. He is responsible for the Foundation’s KIDS COUNT® Network and State Priorities Partnership, as well as grant-making portfolios in poverty reduction and in budget and fiscal issues.

Before joining the Foundation, Cassidy served as founder and president of The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis (TCI), where he provided the vision, inspiration and strategic management to achieve the organization’s goals of greater economic opportunity for all Virginians. Under his leadership, TCI grew from a small startup into the state’s leading independent voice on state fiscal and economic policy issues.

guillermo mena

Guillermo Mena is the Director of Legislation, Policy and Advocacy at the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators (NHCSL). He has done federal and state-level legislative work on Hispanic issues from Washington, DC.

For over a decade, he worked as a communications and political consultant with expertise in LGBTQ, Youth, Hispanic and Transportation affairs. He also has political campaign experience at the local, state, and national levels.