Enlace Institute

The Enlace Institute’s purpose is to advance the field of strategic organizational development. The Institute assists organizations of low-wage workers to develop disciplined, mutually accountable teams who continually improve the work of the organizations for their constituencies.
Click here to download the Enlace Institute Brochure.
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Enlace Institute

The Enlace Institute’s purpose is to advance the field of strategic organizational development and to develop peer trainers within Enlace member organizations and close allies who can become a resource to their own groups as well as to the social and economic justice movement overall. The Institute assists organizations of low-wage workers to develop disciplined, mutually accountable teams who continually improve the work of the organizations for their constituencies. The Enlace Institute helps them develop the expertise to make continual internal improvements, evaluate their work and plan effective campaigns that empower the working poor in the face of plant closures, hostile legislative and ballot initiatives, raids by ICE, vigilante-style violence against immigrants, diminished access to human services and abusive employers.

The Enlace Institute provides trainings in Enlace’s frameworks.  These are collaborative brainstorming processes that are useful for virtually all work groups in base-building organizations, including top staff leadership teams, strategy groups, organizing teams, boards of directors, and teams that include volunteers, unless otherwise noted.  A few can be used by an individual. Enlace Director Peter Cervantes-Gautschi first developed the frameworks in the 1980s. They have been built upon and improved over the past 12 years by Enlace trainers and participants from more than 70 organizations.

Click here to download the Enlace Institute Brochure.

We will customize a training program and/or an individualized consultation to fit your organization’s needs and budget. Contact us for a needs analysis.

Enlace Institute Advisory Board

Nadia Marin-Molina, the Workplace Project
Nadia Marin is the Executive Director of the Workplace Project and has headed up its worker cooperative efforts among Central American immigrant domestic workers and gardeners.  Nadia is one of six recipients of the annual Gloria Steinem Award for 2001.

Jon Liss, Tenants and Workers United
Jon Liss, Executive Director. Jon has over twenty-five years of community organizing, political campaigning, community-based education, administration and fundraising experience. Jon is a recipient of the 2003 Leadership for a Changing World Award of the Ford Foundation and Advocacy Institute.

Danny Park, Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance
Danny Park, Co-Founder & Executive Director.  Danny has been building a progressive force in the Korean community of Los Angeles since he was a college student in the 1980s.  As co-founder in 1992 and now executive director of KIWA, he has helped create a model multi-cultural workers center dedicated to empowering low-wage immigrant workers.  In 2005 Danny won an Alston/Bannerman fellowship. 

Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, UCLA Institute for Research and Labor Education
Gaspar Rivera-Salgado is currently Project Director at the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. He directs the Institute for Transnational Social Change, an international labor solidarity initiative based at UCLA. He also serves as an advisor to several migrant organizations in California, including the Binational Center for Oaxacan Indigenous Development (CBDIO), the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), and in June 2008 was elected as the Binational Coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB). He has extensive experience as an independent consultant on transnational migration, grassroots philanthropy and Mexican economic development. He is the editor with J. Fox of the volume Indigenous Mexican Migration in the United States (University of California, San Diego, 2004).

Ken Margolies, Cornell Industrial and Labor Relations Extension Program
Since 1986 Ken Margolies has been on the Extension Faculty of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University working out of the NYC office.  He has also served as the Education Director for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Organizing Director of the Communications Workers of America.  Ken earned a BS in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University, a MS in Labor Studies from the University of the District of Columbia and will complete the requirements for a Masters of Professional Studies degree from Cornell University in September 2010.

Lee Schore, director of Center for Working Life and chair of Board of Directors of Communities United for People (Enlace’s fiscal sponsor)
Lee Schore is the founding executive director of the Center for Working Life, which has developed curriculum and methodology in peer training and support for workers suffering from plant closures and layoffs. She has written books on this subject that have been used by many states in the Rust Belt and by the governments of Poland and Hungary. Lee is the chair of the board of directors of Communities United for People, the fiscal sponsor of Enlace.

Janice Fine, School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University
Janice Fine holds a Ph.D. from MIT in political science and is assistant professor of labor studies and employment relations at the School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University. She is also a senior fellow for Organizing and Policy at the Center for Community Change (CCC). Her book, Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream, was published in 2006 by Cornell University Press and the Economic Policy Institute. Fine has written for academic and popular publications on community organizing, the labor movement, and the influence of money in American politics. She has received fellowships from the Open Society Institute and the MIT Industrial Performance Center and has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. In addition, Fine has worked as a community, labor, and electoral organizer for 23 years. From 1994 to 2002, she was the Organizing Director at Northeast Action, the hub of a regional network of statewide progressive electoral coalitions and citizen action groups across New York and New England. Fine also has written an extensive grassroots organizing curriculum and used it to train hundreds of community leaders and organizers.

Joann Lo, Food Chain Worker Alliance
After graduating from Yale University, Joann Lo worked as an organizer for two unions in Los Angeles. In 2000 Joann joined the Garment Worker Center. As lead organizer she supported garment workers in Los Angeles who led a successful boycott against young women’s retailer Forever 21, a campaign memorialized in the Emmy-winning documentary “Made in L.A.” In 2005 Joann joined Enlace, a strategic alliance of low-wage workers centers and unions in the U.S. and Mexico, and a year later became Co-Executive Director until April 2010. In the fall of 2009 Joann became coordinator of the new Food Chain Workers Alliance, a coalition of worker-based groups organizing to improve wages and working conditions for all workers along the food chain. The Alliance works to build a more sustainable food system that respects workers’ rights, based on the principles of social, environmental and racial justice, in which everyone has access to healthy and affordable food.

 

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