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Patricia Vazquez Gomez (staff). Second Row: Brinda Sarathy, Rebecca Smith, Sarah Loose (staff). Click on a board or staff member's name above to read their bio. To learn about the Jefferson Center's founder, Beverly Brown, please click here. 
Kiko Denzer, President I was born and raised on the East Coast, where I went to college and then spent about ten years doing various kinds of community work – with food co-ops, affordable housing, community news and publishing. I came to Oregon in ’91, and worked a couple of years on a federally funded, rural community health project. When I went looking for help, the Highlander Center put me in touch with Bev Brown, who was just finishing her book prior to starting the JC. When I quit my job to see if I couldn’t make a living as an artist (like my parents), Bev asked me to help with the first JC meeting, and not long after asked me to be on the board.When I went back to art, I also ended up living on a small corner of a family ranch in western Oregon where I’ve been learning about growing my own food and trying to make a life in a fragmented,hard-pressed rural community. I now make my living doing community art projects (primarily with earthen materials such as “cob” or adobe), as well as teaching, writing, and publishing. The JC is an important part of my ongoing education, both as a rural dweller and as a teacher who believes that listening is more important than talking, and that real knowledge comes more from living and doing than from reading or writing. Beth Rose Middleton, Secretary/Treasurer I was born in Jackson, CA, in the Sierra Nevada foothills in northern California. My father's family is from Belize via Louisiana, and my mother's family is from Eastern Europe. They were the first "mixed" race couple in the rural area where I grew up. Continuing to build on my diverse roots and rural background, my current work focuses on activism in Native American communities, and how historically colonized communities survive the legacies of place-based genocide. I am broadly interested in and supportive of movements in rural communities of color, and I am fundamentally committed to the philosophy of popular education. My goals in working towards a PhD include making higher education more accessible, empowering, and relevant, particularly for rural people of color. I live in Mountain Maidu country, in northeastern California, and enjoy gardening, dancing samba, and being involved in the community. Emiliana Aguilar I’m originally from Santa Cruz del Quiche, Guatemala and am of the Maya Kiche ethnic group, from a family of internally displaced persons during Guatemala’s armed conflict in the 1980s. Being a war victim has led me to a deep conviction and to work or help support work around Human Rights. In my experience, the work that has given me much life is doing research and interpretation in the rural communities most hard hit and affected during the war, as part of a project carried out by the Truth Commission as a result of the peace accords. After that, and as a follow-up to the research, I worked on exhumations of some of the clandestine cemeteries of the indigenous communities of Quiche with the Forensic Team, undertaken by the Catholic Church through the Office of Peace and Reconciliation. My specific work was in the area of “Community Process.” Another of my commitments was my support as a founding member of the Center of Mayan Women Communicators NUTZIJ (my word), that work with audiovisual media in order to make their voices heard, taking into consideration the power of the media to preserve historical memory and as a tool to denounce affronts to Human Rights. Araceli Hernandez I’m originally from México DF where I studied Communication Sciences and Journalism. I came to the United States and began working in Casa Latina (Seattle, WA) over ten years ago where I helped found the Women’s Leadership Program. Currently I am Casa Latina’s Program Director. 5 years ago I began working as a Board Member for the Pro-Amnesty and Social Justice Committee, which coordinated massive pro-immigrant marches in Seattle earlier this spring. I also serve as treasurer for the National Network of Day Laborers and study Non-profit Management at the University of WA. I have a nine-year-old son. Rebecca Smith I am originally from Yakima, Washington, where I had the good fortune to begin to learn Spanish as a young child. I graduated in 1982 from the University of Washington law school, and worked with migrant farmworkers in the Yakima Valley and elsewhere in Washington for many years. I am now the Coordinator of the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the National Employment Law Project (NELP). NELP is a non-profit organization based in New York City that works in partnership with communities to promote new policies that advance economic opportunity and enforces hard-won worker rights. My work is focused on immigrant workers’ employment rights, and wage and hour and unemployment insurance law. Brinda Sarathy I currently live in Southern California. Various routes have also taken me to Saudi Arabia, South India, and Canada. I have left roots in all these places as well. I recently finished my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. In my research, I was privileged to document the social history generously shared by Latino forest workers and their families in Southern Oregon in 2004. I will begin a post-doctorate at UC-MEXUS (at the University of California, Riverside) in Fall 2006. I plan to work on a book manuscript based on my field-work in Oregon and also help promote research and dialogue on environment and society in California and Mexico. Octavio Sanchez I was born in Uruapan, Michoacán, México and came to the United States when I was 14 years old (my father already lived here). For 16 years I lived in Cornelius, Oregon in Washington County where I worked in many different jobs: at a nursery, a lumber mill and in construction. In 1993 I moved to Shelton, Washington to work in a plywood mill. Recently, I’ve become interested in participating in the community to help us organize ourselves in order to be better informed about what is happening with immigration laws and other things that happen to Latino people in the United States. I also enjoy spending time with my wife, Ellen, and my three children: Ariela, Maritza and Martín. 
Sarah K. Loose, Outgoing Executive Director Sarah grew up in Minnesota and now resides in Portland, OR. Before assuming the position of Executive Director, Sarah served as the Jefferson Center's Program Director from 2003-2005. Prior to her work in the Northwest, she coordinated a participatory oral history project (sistematizacíón) with popular educators, students and community members from a small, rural community in El Salvador. |
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