After celebrating our annual membership meeting and board elections last Sat. December 17th 2016, NYC NOWC is proud to announce the election of our new board of directors. Our newly elected board is comprised of three members that had been serving on the board in an interim capacity over the past year, but are now slated to serve a full year; these include Nicholas Bedell (TWU Local 100), Dana Skallman (Worker-Owner, Glocal), and Adriana Mendoza (Worker-Owner, Sunset Scholars & UJC). We also have a new crop of directors who will be serving for the first time; these include Carmen Dixon (NAACP LDF), Telesh Lopez (Worker-Owner, Caracol Interpreters), and Raybblin Vargas (Worker-Owner, Bits & Bites & Greenworker Cooperatives). Sheila Akbar, the board’s current Vice-President, is the only remaining board member that is serving a two-year term from last year. You can find full bio’s here.
The past several years have seen lots of changes for NYC NOWC as an organization, none more so than this past year. At the end of last year, we acquired our first dedicated programming staff with the hire of Tamara Shapiro and Pablo Benson, adding much-needed capacity to run regular programming and managing direct services for our membership. During the end of summer, our tireless and committed founding Executive Director Chris Michael moved on to become general counsel at ICA Group. In his place, NYC NOWC hired Saduf Syal as Coordinating Director, allowing for NYC NOWC’s board of directors to relinquish management responsibilities and providing us with the ability to stabilize and formalize operations. These big changes wouldn’t have been possible without the heroic commitment of our outgoing board of directors, who took on great responsibilities and self-sacrifice during the most difficult periods of these transitions. In particular, we would like to recognize the work of our treasurer Matt Keesan, our former board chair Annie Sullivan-Chin and our outgoing Board Chair Anh-Thu Nguyen.