About Us
Our Vision
We envision a future where all people have what they need to live in dignity, freedom, and joy, and to self-determine the shape and direction of their lives and families. In our liberated future, we exist in thriving communities interdependent with the Earth, where we radically love, respect, and share leadership and power with each other.
Our Mission
Forward Together is a national reproductive justice organization that centers peoples, families, and communities who experience reproductive oppression. We prioritize queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and other peoples of color. We utilize a cultural strategy to shift the ways we think about family and to build power and movements, grounded in our lived experiences, histories, theories and struggles for reproductive justice.
Our Politics
Forward Together is a reproductive justice organization. We shift the cultural conception of family through our queer and trans liberation frameworks and our history in reproductive justice.
Our Approach
Forward Together has always harnessed the power of culture to build courage, create connections, and make change—from our work on family definition with Family Values @ Work and the Family Justice Network to our Mamas Day and TDOR projects from our critical media and education interventions to our groundbreaking thought leadership. This work is part of our DNA—and it’s never been more necessary. As anti-abortion and anti-trans wedges threaten to split reproductive justice and LGBTQ movements, our approach can create greater solidarity, bring in more people power, and lift up solutions for and by those most marginalized.
We shift culture.
We shift culture. We transform shared beliefs and practices around family, care, and bodily autonomy. By collaborating deeply with cultural workers—artists, storytellers, educators, and more—we create meaningful opportunities for individuals to connect, learn, imagine new futures, and act toward building them together. Through visionary projects like Trans Day of Resilience focused on iteration, shareability, grassroots activation, strategic dissemination and memorable experiences, we create the cultural conditions for long-term change.
We build movements.
We build movements. We grow the people-power of our movements by activating individuals, weaving them into our networks, and strengthening connections between organizations. We build across strategies and issue areas, creating opportunities for collaboration and shared learning while lifting up the leadership of cultural workers. We incubate new projects and organizations—from comprehensive healthcare clinics in New Mexico and Oregon to the birth-worker led Queerception—to build movement infrastructure.
We change structures and policies.
We change structures and policies. We support structures and policies that remove barriers, advance bodily autonomy, and increase care for trans and queer people experiencing reproductive oppression. With our network of leaders, organizations, and cultural workers, we identify proactive policies, candidates, campaigns, and other structural and cultural interventions to make through both our C3 and C4. In New Mexico, we have passed reproductive healthcare and healthcare for all policies while supporting candidates and campaigns that secure bodily autonomy and access to care.
Board
Rosie is the former President/CEO for The Center for Asian Pacific American Women. “The Center” is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building leadership capacity within our communities. Previously, her career spanned multiple disciplines across government and corporate entities. Rosie holds multiple patents in manufacturing, software and laser applications and led projects in the US, Europe, Asia and South America. She left the technical sector to provide opportunities for women and our communities.
Rosie has taught martial arts for over 25 years and is a Gura Fifth Degree of the Kamatuuran School of Kali. She is a 2002 Fellow of the Asian Pacific American Women’s Leadership Institute (APAWLI). As a result of her APAWLI project, she co-founded Rosemary Pai, Inc., a small business focused on marketing and distributing products from artists and startup businesses. She is a recipient of the 100 Most Influential Filipinas in America award.
Yee Won Chong is a trainer, strategist and social entrepreneur. His consulting practice aims to increase organizations’ abilities to fulfill their purpose by focusing on movement building, becoming more strategic, and creating inclusive organizational culture. He has trained employees of government agencies and colleges to create transgender-inclusive workplaces, coached community-based organizations on using racial equity strategies, and led nonprofits through real-time strategic planning.
Yee Won is passionate about using storytelling to change hearts and minds. His TEDx Talk, Beyond the Gender Binary, is used widely to spark discussions about gender. He is currently working on Trans Dudes with Lady Cancer, a film documentary highlighting his personal experience navigating the healthcare system as a transgender patient. Yee Won’s Say This, Not That startup is an award-winning idea dedicated to bringing greater language consciousness and compassion to communication.
Latonya Slack, certified executive coach, trainer and facilitator, is principal and founder of Slack Global Consulting, specializing in co-creation, visioning and assisting individuals and organizations with planning and navigating critical decisions. She served as Senior Program Officer for California Democracy Program supporting civic engagement, community organizing, voter engagement and capacity building with the James Irvine Foundation for seven years. While at the foundation, she was elected vice chair then chair of the Southern California Grantmakers board.
Prior to working in philanthropy, she was Executive Director of the California Black Women’s Health Project, where she created a comprehensive policy advocacy program, a mental health initiative and an Advocate Training Program. She has also worked for SEIU as a community political organizer, engaging community, religious, labor and health organizations on healthcare justice. After graduation from UCLA School of Law, she worked with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles as a Consumer Law Advocate, and through the AmeriCorps Legal Corps, helped community groups in South Los Angeles establish nonprofit organizations.
Additional Affiliations: Los Angeles Social Justice Consultants Network, Liberty Hill Foundation, California Association of Nonprofits
