Lisa Castellanos

Lisa joined Forward Together in February 2016, and brings over 20 years of organizing, policy and movement-building experience to her role as Senior Policy and Organizing Manager. Her life-long vocation in social justice began as a teen when she participated in the Center for Third World Organizing MAAP program. Her work spans labor issues, immigrant rights, economic justice for welfare mothers and immigrant families, and education justice for youth of color, at the local, state, national and transnational levels. Lisa also served as a Program Officer at a small family foundation where her primary focus was to support community efforts to shift state policy on criminal justice, and to raise the dignity of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and their loved ones. Prior to joining Forward Together, she was the Policy and Organizing Director at a large multi-issue, multi-constituency community organization working on anti-displacement, migrant rights and transportation equity in Silicon Valley. Lisa graduated magna cum laude from UC Santa Cruz with a major in Feminist Studies, emphasizing social movements and the law. The daughter of Mejicano/Indigenous immigrant and migrant farmworkers, she identifies as both Xikana and muxerista. Born in California’s Central Valley, raised in the South Bay, and currently living in Oakland, Lisa is the proud mother of two amazing sons, dabbles in quilting, knitting and other textile arts, loves to run around Lake Merritt with her puppy, Luna, and enjoys brisk swims in the San Francisco Bay with her partner.