2008 Taproots Fellows

Joseph Phelan, Miami Workers Center

Joseph Phelan is the Communications Coordinator for the Miami Workers Center in Miami, Florida. Originally from Long Island, New York he moved to Burlington, Vermont in 1997. While taking classes at Burlington College he worked as a baker in the cold early morning hours and spent his afternoons developing his political research and writing skills as intern at Action for Community and Ecology in the Regions of Central America. Fed up with oven burns on his arms he became a peer street outreach worker with Spectrum Youth and Family Services outreaching to homeless youth and doing harm reduction education in area high schools, while also staffing a youth homeless shelter. Through his solidarity work with communities in various parts of Central America Joseph got involved in the Global Justice Movement. He left school before gradating, in order to fully participate in the growing outcry against corporate globalization. In 2000, he landed in New York City and enrolled in Hunter College, where he worked with the Student Liberation Action Movement. He attended school full time and organized students against budget cuts and tuition hikes, which primarily impacted low-income students of color. He also continued writing as the editor of two sections of the award winning Hunter Envoy and worked his way through school as a bicycle messenger and cabinet maker. After graduating college, Joseph hauled sheetrock and hung cabinets while toiling in NYC construction. He eventually headed south to join the intrepid team at the Miami Workers Center, fighting for racial and economic justice. While working with MWC for the last three years Joseph has bolstered the strategic communications capacity of the organization. All in all he misses the romance of the bridges of Brooklyn, but Miami is creeping into his New York heart.

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Xiomara Corpeno, CHIRLA

 
Currently, Xiomara E. Corpeño serves as the Director of Organizing at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) , where she oversees the three organizing projects, which organize household workers, day laborers and immigrant youth, respectively. Ms. Corpeño was born and raised in Los Angeles in an immigrant family that instilled in her a strong sense of community values. While attending the University of California, Riverside, Ms. Corpeño was introduced to organizing after completing a Union Summer Internship with H.E.R.E Local 11.  She became a student activist on campus and worked to save affirmative action against Proposition 209. She also worked on financial aid and domestic partnership campaigns at the University of California. After graduating from college, Ms. Corpeño worked for SCOPE/AGENDA, organizing low income residents in West L.A around their Jobs and Healthcare Campaign. She later moved to El Salvador, which allowed her to better understand her family history as well as the reasons and condition under which workers are forced to migrate. While at CHIRLA, Ms. Corpeño has helped develop the organization's in-house voter education and mobilization campaign.  She is now working on reducing her carbon footprint by walking the four blocks to work instead of driving (this is L.A., you know).

Read her first post on the intersections of the queer and immigrant rights movement here.

Charlene Sinclair, Praxis Project

developed and provided leadership for the Center’s campaign to cultivate and mobilize the power and influence of low income voters for the 2004 presidential election.  In addition to her role at The Praxis Project, Charlene is a member of the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary.  At the Poverty Initiative she works with fellow seminarians and activists in the development of projects designed to create space for low-income leaders, grassroots organizers, public intellectuals and other thinkers to engage in deep dialogue and reflection about the intersection of spirituality and roots of struggles for social and economic justice.  She is the mother of two and grandmother of two and faces the constant challenge of explaining how her weight is merely “baby fat” when her babies are 26 and 21 years old.

 Jeffrey Buchanan, RFK Memorial Center

Currently, Jeffrey Buchanan serves as the Information Officer at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights (RFK Center), where he oversees the communications programs and advocacy efforts along the Gulf Coast in partnership with 2005 RFK Human Rights Award winner, Stephen Bradberry of ACORN in New Orleans. Mr. Buchanan was born and raised in Macomb County, MI, home of the Reagan Democrats. While attending the Johns Hopkins University, Mr. Buchanan was drawn to ideas of human rights in empowering working families and its implications to economics and politics, almost as much as he was to bruising rucks and mauls as a captain of the JHU Rugby Football Club.  While in school he worked as a research assistant with Clinton Administration communications operatives at Weiner Associates, writing commentary on both domestic and international issues.  He later moved to Washington, DC to work for the RFK Center.  Since then, working with partners at ACORN and across Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, he helped co-founded and coordinate the Gulf Coast Civic Works Campaign, a partnership of community, faith, environmental, student and human rights groups pushing for resident led human rights based rebuilding policies after Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Ike and Gustav including the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act.  Additionally, he’s helped publicize human rights crisis in the United States and abroad supporting RFK Center’s human rights laureates.  Mr. Buchanan also serves on the Board of Advisers to the Institute for Southern Studies' Gulf Reconstruction Watch.  He has written articles for the Washington Afro American, Louisiana Weekly, Dallas Weekly, and the San Francisco Bayview and magazines like Social Policy and ColorLines. He has been featured on numerous national and local television and radio shows including MSNBC, Air America, NPR, Pacifica Radio, and the Lars Larson Show and he is a contributor to the Huffington Post, Smirking Chimp, Black Agenda Report, Counterpoint, TomPaine.com and numerous news and commentary websites. He has written commentaries published in the Baltimore Sun, Raleigh News and Observer, Atlanta Constitution Journal, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Palm Beach Post, and Miami Herald.