OUR STAFF

Juanita O. Lewis brings almost two decades of community and electoral organizing experience. She joined the staff of Community Voices Heard as the Yonkers Organizer in 2009, then Lead Westchester Organizer. In 2016, she was elevated to Hudson Valley Organizer Director and became Executive Director in 2021.

She was born and raised in Saint Paul, MN. She graduated from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities with a B.A. in History and Political Science, and with her Masters of Advocacy and Political Leadership Degree from the University of Minnesota. Juanita began her work as a community organizer with the Minnesota chapter of ACORN. Since 2004, she has worked on numerous electoral campaigns at the city, state and federal level in different staffing capacities.

Juanita is a national trainer with VoteRunLead, a non-partisan organization that trains women to run for office from across the country. She has trained hundreds of women to run for local, state and federal office.

 

She is also a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc and board member for African Communities Together.

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Pronouns: She/Her

Michelle Perez joined Community Voices Heard in May 2002 after having worked in fundraising for arts/community development organizations for 19 years. She has previously worked for the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Meet The Composer, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and The Joffrey Ballet.

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Michelle has a BA degree in Economics/Political Economy from Barnard College, and has done graduate work in business administration at New York University. Michelle was also a member of the Fall 2015 cohort of the NY Community Trust Leadership Fellows program.

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Pronouns: She/Her

A native of Harlem and the Bronx, Alex brings nearly two decades of organizing, training and advocacy experience in community, faith-based, and labor settings. His experience includes serving as Director of Organizing for the Community Renewal Society, the National Organizing Director for Jobs to Move America, Campaign Manager for the Responsible Budget Coalition, Lead International Organizer for the American Federation of Musicians, Campaign Coordinator for SEIU 32BJ and the Coalition for Affordable Hospitals, and Associate Director of Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing. He received his Bachelor's Degree from SUNY Binghamton and a Master's degree in Social Justice and Community Development from Loyola University, Chicago. He is the author of "Seeds of Justice: OrganizingYour Church to Transform the World," published by Orbis Books and is a frequent trainer and coach for justice organizations across the country. He serves on the board of the New York State Council of Churches and is a Manager for Harlem Little League. But the job he is most proud of is being the husband of his wife, Sharaya, and the father to his two children Akina and William (who love coming to actions!) 

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Pronouns: He/Him

Alexis Contreras joined CVH after nearly 8 years of fundraising and nonprofit management across industries. In these roles, Alexis collaborated with team members to build sustainable development strategies and donor relations for optimal impact. 

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As a Latina raised in the suburbs of Long Island with family immigrant roots from Ecuador and Guatemala, Alexis was exposed to the extreme segregation that exists in Long Island, NY. This exposure birthed a curiosity about the why’s and a passion for creating equal opportunities for people of color in New York and beyond.

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Alexis chose to continue her academic journey in her backyard by getting her BA in Public Administration and Political Science from St. John’s University. As graduation approached, she knew she wanted to do something in the intersection of nonprofit and politics which led her to continuing her Public Administration education. She got her Masters in Public Administration with a concentration in Nonprofit Management & Leadership from New York University and worked for numerous nonprofits across the big city as a graduate consultant in nonprofit management and impact assessment.

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Pronouns: She/Her

Brianne is a Brooklyn native and holds a Bachelor's Degree in Public Relations from the State University of New York at Oswego.

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Before joining CVH, Brianne was the Operations Manager at Explore Schools of Brooklyn, where she managed operations with meticulous attention to detail. Her detail shined through as she coordinated logistics for family events within the community, managed day to day operations within the school, while also being a mentor to students and connecting families to community-based services and resources.

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She's excited to bring her skills to CVH to ensure day-to-day work, organizing, and events run smoothly and build power throughout the State.

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Pronouns: She/Her

Zoë joined Community Voices Heard in June 2022. She previously worked as Manager of Digital Media at the Coalition for the Homeless and Policy Coordinator at the John Jay College Institute for Justice and Opportunity, where she first started working on the Fair Chance for Housing Campaign. She believes in building collective power in Black, brown, and low-income communities and centering the voices of people with lived experiences. 

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Zoë holds a Bachelor of Arts in French with a minor in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, and is currently pursuing her Master of Public Administration at Baruch College.

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In her spare time, she fosters cats for Brooklyn Bridge Animal Welfare Coalition.

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Pronouns: She/Her

Eli joined Community Voices Heard in July 2019 as the Base-Building Organizer for Dutchess County. Their many years of direct service work with youth, families and formerly incarcerated people taught them the power of relationships in making change, while working alongside and within Black-led organizations more recently informs their commitment to building power through transformational organizing. Before coming to Community Voices Heard, Eli worked as Advocacy Director with the Staley B. Keith Center’s Community Justice Advocacy Program in Hudson, NY. They then served as Programs and Community Engagement Coordinator at the Center for Law and Justice in Albany. Eli continues to organize with Showing Up for Racial Justice, a national network dedicated to engaging more white people in ending white supremacy.

 

Pronouns: They/Them

Kim is an Afro Latina mother of 4 from the Bronx. She is a co-founder of an activist group called NYC Shut It Down, a group committed to ending racist policing in our neighborhoods. Kim has been organizing for 9 years in both a labor and a community setting. Kim is passionate about community control, giving power back to the people, advocating for Black and Brown children, and tearing down systemic oppression. Her organizing around anti-police brutality work has been featured in Netflix (Copwatchers) and BET (Copwatch America).

 

Pronouns: She/Her

Juan Pablo Molina is a Newburgh native and a longtime volunteer of the Deacon Jack Seymour Food Pantry. He started his organizing experience in college, organizing students around voting rights with the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). After organizing students with NYPIRG around voter mobilization, environmental conservation practices, and public transit, he graduated from college and worked as a paralegal for almost three years. His time in the legal field had allowed him to learn the stories of many clients who lived in the Hudson Valley. Oftentimes, these clients were juggling legal battles alongside their housing problems, but they were treated as separate issues. Listening to many clients' stories made him realize that there was much more work to be done organizing Newburgh residents for better housing conditions and better housing policies.

Juan Pablo is passionate about ensuring residents of Newburgh determine the future of their city and re-investing tax dollars into public infrastructure. 

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Pronouns: He/Him

Edward Adonis Iciano, or just Adonis, is a Bronx native. He started his organizing journey in 2020 when inadequate security, loiterers, and bad sanitation plagued his building, creating poor living standards for the tenants. Volunteering for North West Bronx Community Clergy Coalition (NBWCCC) was where Adonis first got his organizing experience. He would become the tenant leader of his apartment complex, help organize meetings, facilitate conversations with the loaners to his complex, and much more. He would then join the Social Change Fellowship at City College of New York, being the first cohort in which he would learn more about organizing, story of self's, 1:1's, and campaign building - this fellowship aligned Adonis with CVH during the summer of 2022 in which he did his internship, at the end of the summer, Adonis would eventually become a full-time NYC Base-Building Organizer at CVH!

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Adonis graduated from City College of New York with a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology.

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Pronouns: He/Him

Gabriel was raised in Miami, FL from the age of 5, but was born in Queens, where his family originally emigrated from Bogota, Colombia. He graduated with a Political Science degree from Florida International University in 2015. Afterward, he was selected to the AmeriCorps Public Allies Miami program where he served as an intern under Community Justice Project (CJP) a community-movement-lawyering non-profit (2016-2017). From 2020-2024, Gabriel worked as the Intergenerational Organizer at the Miami-based community organization, Power U Center For Social Change. Power U is a base-building organization focused on public education issues. Gabriel was tasked with developing the leadership skills of teachers and organizing them into the local rank and file caucus within the local teachers union so that teachers could push for a more democratic union fighting for issues beyond the classroom and into the community. 

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Gabriel joined CVH in March 2024. He is excited to continue base-building at CVH because he believes base-building is the antidote to give working class folks the power they need to change the current makeup of society that is heavily geared towards the interests of the elites, corporations, and Wall Street. He is motivated by the experiences of his working class single mother who always made the moral choice over the economic choice when it came to her children, even if it was at her own cost. He is also motivated by his own experiences as a restaurant laborer, having worked in fine dining restaurants for over 12 years in and around Miami Beach and the City of Miami. 

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Pronouns: He/Him

Libby Torres joined Community Voices Heard in September 2024. Prior to that, she worked as a communications organizer for Workers United-SEIU, where she helped develop social media strategies and a dedicated comms committee for the Starbucks, Think Coffee, and Tabletop Workers United shops. She first became passionate about organizing after becoming a union steward while working at Business Insider as an entertainment reporter. Along with the Insider Union (a Newsguild of New York shop), she helped lead a historic open-ended strike in June of 2023 that culminated in a life-changing contract for journalists at the company. As a Newsguild member, she worked as a member organizer, which included prepping other units to go on strike, and leading seminars on how folks could make their unions strike ready.

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Libby holds a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from New York University. She is originally from Kansas City, Missouri.

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Pronouns: She/Her

Cheryl Watts came to Community Voices Heard from Speaker Adrienne Adams' office, where she worked as a Constituent Liaison. She has been a member of Community Voices Heard since 2017 when her Bishop invited her to a meeting. She started working on the housing campaign to fully fund NYCHA, and from there joined the political process of endorsing candidates. She has been one of the leaders of the Follow Black Women campaign since its inception. She was also a previous Board Member of CVH Power for almost 2 years before making the decision to become Political Organizer at CVH.

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Pronouns: She/Her

Shreya joined Community Voices Heard in June 2023 after previously working on the Policy & Political Affairs team of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C. She holds a Bachelor's Degree concentrated in Systemic Racism, Sustainable Urbanism, and Public Policy from New York University. 

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Shreya is a proud Maryland native who became passionate about the intersection of urban planning and racial justice due to the transit and housing inequity that affects Black and Brown communities in Baltimore City. She enjoys working with digital platforms to harness the power of collective civic engagement to fight for equitable urban development and gain back control of public land. 

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Pronouns: She/Her