Catherine Salonek
Template:TOCnestleft Catherine Salonek has organized for nearly 15 years across movement and national groups. Her current work as the Director of Organizing and Policy at OutFront Minnesota is focused on building a statewide base of trans and queer folks to challange business as usual. Cat has spent time union organizing with Communication Workers of America where she led a campaign with immigration court interpreters that ultimately won an important case that will impact freelance workers for years.
She cut her teeth on national organizing with an Occupy Wall Street offshoot, Occupy Homes MN, an organization dedicated to holding Big Banks accountable for the chaos they impose on those who can least withstand it. She worked with community members to hold down multi-week home occupations that resulted in multi-billion dollar national settlements. Cat has trained thousands of new and experienced organizers and raised well over a million dollars in grassroots funds for our movement. In her free time she loves to play with her niece and nephews and sing loudly whenever she can.[1]
Facilitation Team
The Wildfire Project has a team of 17 experienced facilitators, all of whom are leaders in a wide range of movement sectors and issue areas. Many of these practitioner-facilitators emerged from the organizations we’ve partnered with, and now make up our Leadership Team – which is one way that Wildfire is led by its grassroots base. This team keeps us rooted in many different movement arenas, allowing us to cross-pollinate cutting edge innovation and insights from different social change efforts across the country. We are proud that our team is active in the movements they serve on the ground, and distilling these insights allows us to be uniquely multi-sectoral.
Akua Deirdre Smith, Andrew Smith, BJ Star, Catherine Salonek, Claire Bergren, Ileia J. Burgos, Jonel Edwards, Joshua Kahn Russell, Executive Director , Kirin Kanakkanatt, Lex Barlowe, Lu Aya Nephew, Michael Strom, Sachie Hayakawa, Sam Corbin, Sherika Shaw, Sofia Campos, Yotam Marom.