SPEAKERS AND WORKSHOP LEADERS

Attorney at Law, National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms

In the wake of 9/11, the US government unleashed a massively destructive domestic “war on terror”. To demonstrate the need for a new and unprecedented level of mass public surveillance and the jettisoning of due process, the FBI and other police agencies targeted, entrapped, and jailed innocent young Muslim men and faith leaders in special solitary confinement units. As a founder of Project Salaam, Kathy Manley help reveal the lies and injustice that constituted the very core of this new repressive federal project. Today, she is the Legal Director of the Coalition for Civil Freedoms and the Vice-President of the Capital Region Council of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Her post-9/11 advocacy holds many lessons for our struggle today.

CT Organizer, Justice for Jayson Negron

Jazmarie is a community organizer and former Bridgeport Councilmember where she was the youngest Puerto Rican woman to serve on the Council and its sole abolitionist.  She resigned in protest of city council’s inability to serve as a check and balance on the mayor’s administration and recognizing the power of not being in the seat. During her time on council she championed the passing of the first ceasefire resolution in Connecticut, drawing connections between the struggle of the Palestinian people and how it mirrors the colonial violence faced by the people of Puerto Rico. While in college, Jazmarie experienced the tragic loss of her brother, Jayson Negron, who at age 15 was murdered by a Bridgeport Police Officer. In direct response, she founded Justice for Jayson, a collective whose aims are to transform current narratives around policing and describe its harms through bridging personal stories, community experiences, and structural critique. Jazmarie is passionate about educating others, seeking justice, and supporting families who have endured the same pain she has faced. She has collaborated with various organizations drawing connections between abolition movements and was a 2020 Soros Justice Youth Activist Fellow.  An aspiring civil rights attorney, Jazmarie aims to continue to address the urgent disparities seen throughout the state of Connecticut including police violence, the Prison Industrial Complex, and the school-to-prison pipeline.

Community Organizer & Freedom Fighter

Kerry Ellington is a freedom fighter, community organizer and radical educator, recognized by Connecticut Magazine as, “Connecticut’s 40 Under 40”. As an organizer she organizes to address issues of police violence, housing, community and economic justice. Since 2010, she has organized with victims, families and communities impacted by police violence across Connecticut. She organized with People Against Police Brutality to fight for a New Haven Civilian Review Board that was formally established in 2019. A powerful speaker, Kerry has helped organize statewide crisis response efforts, legal funds, direct actions, and campaigns addressing the crisis of state sanctioned violence, drawing connections between issues facing working class people and Black and brown people.

Professor of Sociology and Global and International Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies, Affiliated Faculty Chicana and Chicano Studies, University of California - Santa Barbara

William I. Robinson has spent the last 20 years writing effectively about the global economy and how it is undergirding a drive toward authoritarianism on a world scale. He will present on the political economic context in which neoliberal governments are losing authority and the far right is gaining ground and prepare us to address the question: What is the relationship between the global economic crisis and the strategy we use to resist today?
Robinson’s recent books include Epochal Crisis: the Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (2025), The Global Police State (2020) and Can Global Capitalism Endure (2022).

Southeast Regional Director of Teamsters’ LGBTA+ Caucus

Avery has spent seventeen of her nineteen UPS years as an elected shop steward, winning grievances and contract language to protect pensions and part-time workers. Her union, Local 728 spans the entire state of Georgia; its 11-plus-thousand members include UPS drivers, movie-industry drivers, sanitation workers, and attorneys.

Avery’s efforts capture the belief that workers—especially in the anti-union South—can and must take power for themselves. Her record shows that when stewards know the contract and connect shop-floor fights to community struggles, the boss’s divide-and-conquer playbook collapses and the rank and file wins.

Labor journalist, In These Times magazine

Hamilton Nolan is a journalist, author, and labor activist who helped lead the organizing drive at digital media platform Gawker. Nolan's own website "How Things Work" focuses on power, how it is wielded, and how it can be channeled for the common good. He thoughtfully looks at questions of social and economic injustice through the lens of the working class and class struggle. Nolan's writing is important for amplifying the call for unions and working people to join struggle against repression and inequality in all its forms.

Community Organizer and co-founder, Danbury Unites for Immigrants

Juan Fonseca Tapia is a community rights organizer whose Rapid Response Network has been growing and educating thousands about the terrible ICE interventions in his city. His experiences have convinced him that this threat requires a deeper level of community organization and preparedness, so Danbury Unites for Immigrants (DUFI) is now carrying out a canvassing campaign called “Families Belong Together”. Fanning out in the community, DUFI teams are educating residents about their rights, while building an ever-larger network of support for those threatened by the ICE arrests based on racially profiling our friends and neighbors. He will share his vision for involving many, many thousands of CT residents in the powerful movement the times require.

Recent Grad from Columbia University

Andraya Yearwood is a recent graduate of Colombia University and was a trans high school student athlete in Connecticut. After a successful year of high school track in 2017, she found herself under attack from the ultra-conservative non-profit “Alliance for Defending Freedom”. Hear her discuss important issues facing the trans and LGBTQ community.

Denied Free Speech by Texas State, Committee to Defend Tom Alter

On September 10th, 2025, Dr. Tom Alter, a respected and tensured professor of history at Texas State University, was fired for remarks he made at a socialist conference in his capacity as a private citizen. He was fired without due process, a clear violation of both Texas State University policy and Texas state law. Alter is a published labor historian, a popular teacher and adviser, a proud union member, a father of two, and a socialist activist.
Texas State University’s actions represent a blatant attack on Dr. Alter’s First Amendment right to free speech. The Committee to Defend Tom Alter demands his immediate reinstatement to his tenured teaching position at TSU. As a speaker, Dr. Alter will speak about his experience and call on individuals and organizations of conscience everywhere to join our campaign and fight to protect free speech and academic freedom in Higher Education. If Tom Alter can be fired from his job without due process and be denied his constitutionally-protected right to free speech, this can happen to any of us.

Executive Director of Higher Education Labor United (HELU)

Ian Gavigan is the Executive Director of Higher Education Labor United, the national coalition of higher education labor unions fighting to transform higher education into a public good that works for students, workers, and our communities. He helped found HELU when he was a graduate worker leader of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Ian holds a PhD in labor and political history. Before becoming HELU’s Executive Director, he organized new unions with the UAW. He lives in Philadelphia.

U.S.M.C. Veteran, member of About Face: Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace

Jeff is a third-generation veteran and graduate of Penn State University in 1999, with a BA in History. After years of struggling to save up to go back to school for a master’s degree, Jeff instead found himself in thousands of dollars in credit card debt with no health insurance. In 2006 he enlisted in the Marine Corps on active duty. In 2010, he went into the reserves and started working for a program with the National Park Service which inspired him to move to Massachusetts. In 2014, he met the woman who he would later marry and who helped influence his political awakening.

Two years later, Jeff joined Veterans for Peace and has been a member and a peace activist ever since. He joined About Face in 2023. As a member of both organizations, Jeff has been a critic of the military industrial complex and advocate for cutting defense spending to fund programs that help people instead.