Stories Used Strategically Can Reshape Reality

Career Profile

Experience

Communications Director, U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives — Sept 2022 - Dec 2025

• Reframed organizational reporting from program updates to strategic impact arguments for members, funders, and partners.

• Led marketing for a 600-participant national conference, collaborating with two host organizations to achieve sold-out registration and exceeded revenue targets.

• Increased brand awareness by investing in storytelling capacity that led to 14 new stories featuring worker-owners and worker co-ops, one of which was recognized with an award from the U.S.’s cooperative apex organization, NCBA CLUSA.

• Consulted startup cooperative artisan marketplace on their launch narrative that positions makers and customers as protagonists taking on Wall Street’s drive for profit above all else.

• Developed and executed creative ways to market technical assistance and training resources to worker cooperatives and their support organizations, including through email and social media marketing.

• Developed new avenues for list growth by making technical assistance and training resources downloadable through signup pages, resulting in downloads from over 140 businesses and organizations in one year.

• Managed a 7,000+ subscriber newsletter with above sector average open rates and click-through rates. Reversed year-over-year subscriber decline by implementing gated virtual resources, recovering pre-decline baselines and generating incremental small-dollar donations.

• Primary copywriter for an email and social media end-of-year donor fundraising campaign that raised $17,700 from small and major donors. The campaign was a central part of a broader fundraising strategy that surpassed donor revenue targets by 50%.

• Increased the consistency and reliability of organization’s communications through operational improvements that established a backbone of routine communications tasks and outputs, resulting in timely monthly newsletter delivery and expanded social media promotion of programs and offerings.

• Identified an opportunity to reduce workload by semi-automating board election communications through a database and website integration, saving 12+ staff hours per election cycle and eliminating manual data entry errors.

Communications Coordinator, La Unión del Pueblo Entero — May 2010 - Aug 2022

• Lead communications strategist for a 50-employee regional nonprofit, managing all strategic communications, media relations, and digital advocacy during high-stakes political conflicts under the Trump and Abbott administrations.

• Led strategic communications for grassroots campaigns that won over $150 million in public funding for rural communities, including $14 million in disaster recovery drainage funds for 30 neighborhoods and their 10,000 residents, $122 million to repair homes damaged by Hurricane Dolly, and $15 million in county drainage bonds.

• Led strategic communications for grassroots campaigns that moved 20 RGV cities and counties to pass resolutions opposing the border wall, stopped the City of McAllen, Texas, from constructing a for-profit detention center, won the creation and implementation of a public streetlights program for rural, unincorporated Hidalgo County neighborhoods, known as colonias, and flipped 10 Rio Grande Valley jurisdictions from supporting Texas’ “papers, please” immigration law SB4 to suing the state to strike the law down.

• Scaled the organization’s email audience from a few hundred to over 80,000 subscribers by building digital systems, leveraging moments of crisis, and using resource-gating strategies.

• Designed and operationalized a comprehensive media monitoring and spokesperson development system, tracking messaging consistency, skills mastery, and placement rates. The system reduced media response times by 30%, greatly accelerated spokesperson readiness, and increased placement rates by 10%.

• Created and led spokesperson trainings that trained and coached dozens of staff and hundreds of leader spokespeople.

• Managed the organization’s email marketing strategy and execution, including managing an automated welcome series, monitoring open and click-through rates and adjusting content and tactics accordingly, resulting in above average open rates and donation rates.

• Shifted organization’s social media and email reporting from vanity metrics to outcome-oriented metrics that measured member interest, online donations and subscriber action rates.

• Built communications and data systems that supported the growth of the communications department from one employee to five employees.

• Developed and executed digital advocacy and lobbying campaigns for Reform Immigration for Texas Alliance (RITA), a coalition of c3s, c4s, unions and businesses.

• Managed staffing and data systems for 501(c)3, nonpartisan Get Out The Vote (GOTV) campaigns employing dozens of canvassers making thousands of voter contacts.

• Maintained the organization’s compliance with IRS rules for nonpartisan GOTV campaigns. Advised the organization on activities, messaging and strategy, and trained and coached canvassers on compliance.

Divest/Invest RGV, May 2020 - April 2026

• Built relationships with the family members of Jorge Gonzalez, victim of police violance. Used one-to-ones, mindfulness exercises, and politicial education to guide them through leading a public campaign targeting powerful political entities to demand justice for their slain family member.

• Led Laredo community activists in creating a basic power map of forces influencing city and police budgets in a campaign to get the city of Laredo to take all budget shortfalls due to COVID-19 from the city’s police budget.

• Created and led workshop and series of discussions to define the purpose and scope of an all-volunteer project to create and maintain a database of misconduct by police in the Rio Grande Valley.

Steering Committee Member, Student/Farmworker Alliance — January 2008 - December 2010

• Promoted a single, unified message across a nationwide distributed network of student activists in support of farmworker rights through mass media and social media.

• Provided guidance and strategic support to distributed network of student activists running local actions and campaigns in support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Campaign for Fair Food.

• Developed and coordinated brand-busting of corporate branding and marketing across a distributed network of student activists to associate Subway and Wendy’s brands with human rights abuses in the fields.

• Coordinated student and youth activist groups in various cities to sing adapted holiday carols inside Quizno’s restaurants to call out the sandwich chain’s support of human rights abuses in the fields.

• With the steering committee, led the student component of a multi-pronged strategy to exert pressure on fast-food giants Burger King, Wendy’s and Subway to enter into an agreement with the farmworkers who pick their tomatoes to establish a pay increase, human rights-based farm code of conduct and three-way agreement between workers, farms, and corporate fast-food chain.

• Collaboratively created power analyses and theories of change tailored to the vulnerabilities of each corporate target.