People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights

Teresa Almaguer

Youth Program Director

She is the Youth Program Coordinator at PODER with Common Roots, a joint, leadership development, youth organizer training program with the Chinese Progressive Association. This past year Teresa also worked with the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic rights to coordinate the annual Youth Organizing Training Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico which had over 40 youth from the southwest. Teresa was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

Mayra Alvarenga

Administrative Assistant

Mayra is PODER’s Administrative Assistant.  Mayra was born in El Salvador.  She came to the United States in the mid-1990’s.  She has an 8 year old son and is a parent leader at her son’s school in San Francisco’s Mission District.
 

 

Antonio Díaz

Organizational Director

Antonio Díaz is the Project Director for PODER, Prior to joining PODER, Antonio was the Co-coordinator of the EcoJustice Networking Project at the Institute for Global Communications in San Francisco.

Before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1995, Antonio's previous work in the environmental justice movement included working as a Research Associate at the Texas Center for Policy Studies where he conducted research on a variety of statewide environmental issues, with a focus on the Texas/Mexico border. Additionally, he coordinated the Texas Environmental & Economic Justice Resource Center where he provided research and gave presentations on environmental justice issues and coordinated a statewide environmental justice network and its activities. Antonio was a founding member and Board Chair of People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources (PODER) in Austin, Texas, and served on the Coordinating Council of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice from 1990 to 1995.

He currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Advisory Board of CorpWatch and the Board of Directors of the Center for Environmental Health and Partnership for Immigrant Leadership and Action.

 

 

Oscar Grande

Community Organizer

Oscar Grande is the son of blue-collar Salvadoran immigrants who came to San Francisco in the late sixties in search of economic opportunities. Born and raised in the Excelsior and Mission Districts of San Francisco, Oscar and his schoolteacher wife Cynthia Meza, are raising their four kids in the same community they live and work.

He has been a Community Organizer with People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights (PODER) since 1999. His work over the years has focused on leading residents and workers to resist against gentrification and the toxic poisoning of working-class immigrant neighborhoods. Oscar has spent much time working alongside neighborhood leaders in an effort to strengthen skills and lead strategies that result in equitable distribution of resources, strong social policies and build grassroots political power for poor working people in San Francisco.

 

Laura Melgarejo

Community Organizer

Laura was born and raised in Mexico, in the state of Michoacan. She migrated at the age of 14 to the United States. Laura is the first generation of her family to attend college and the first organizer in her family. Laura was active as a volunteer in efforts to pass legislation (AB 540) that allowed undocumented students to attend college and pay tuition as California residents. In 2003, Laura was recruited as a Youth Organizer for the Common Roots: Youth Organizer Program. She is currently a Lead Youth Organizer at PODER working on environmental health issues and immigrant youth empowerment. A student at San Francisco State University, she recently received a scholarship from the Chicana/Latina Foundation.

Charlie Sciammas

Community Organizer

Charlie comes from an immigrant family and is the youngest son of a Turkish mother and Egyptian father. As a child, he remembers fumbling around the work bench and tools at his grandpa’s old eyeglass shop. He remembers being in awe of the old red aluminum tool chest in the garage where his poppa worked as a mechanic. He can still smell the aroma of garlic, lemon, and roasted eggplant that used to drift out of his grandma’s kitchen. And each day, he holds deeply in his heart the beautiful and wise lessons that his momma gave him while growing up. His family, including his momma and poppa, brother, long-time partner Laura, and sons Nicolo Baraka and Luca Habib, are the everyday heroes in his life.

Since coming to the Mission District, these streets have always reminded Charlie of the dense narrow streets of Istanbul, Turkey, where he was born. School children, street vendors, fruit and vegetable grocers, old men playing backgammon on park benches, working people, and families living life and just making it. Even the struggles of Mission residents against displacement relate. All along Charlie’s family’s old block in Istanbul, developers grabbed up land at cheap prices with the help of banks and the city government to put up apartment buildings and make big profits. Today, only an old fence remains, tucked away behind a tall apartment building, of the house Charlie’s grandparents built.

Before coming to PODER, Charlie worked with youth and families in the Mission to help build grassroots leadership and to create supportive programs for community members to grow and celebrate. He has worked in the labor movement to support several worker organizing campaigns and he also worked for MUNI on civil rights programs to improve access for senior and disabled riders. Charlie brings these experiences and a vision to help build strong, healthy, and just communities to his work as a community organizer with PODER.