Derald Wing Sue is Professor of Psychology and Education in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University.  He served as presidents of the Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity, the Society of Counseling Psychology, and the Asian American Psychological Association.  He is author of over 160 publications, including 21 books.  Three of his books, Counseling the Culturally Diverse:  Theory and Practice, Microaggressions in Everyday Life, and Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence are considered classics in the field.  Two national surveys have identified Derald Wing Sue as “the most influential multicultural scholar in the United States” and his works are among the most frequently cited.

Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant police misconduct attorney and organizer whose writing, litigation, and advocacy has focused on policing and criminalization of women and LGBT people of color for the past two decades. She is currently Researcher in Residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality and Criminalization at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, where she recently launched the Interrupting Criminalization: Research to Action initiative. She was a 2014 Senior Soros Justice Fellow, and is author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, and co-author of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States as well as a number of policy and research reports. She is a nationally recognized expert on policing issues, speaking and publishing frequently on the topic, and works with groups across the country to support campaigns to end profiling, police violence and mass criminalization, incarceration, and deportation.

Make the Road New York (MRNY) builds the power of Latinx and working class communities to achieve dignity and justice through organizing, policy innovation, transformative education, and survival services. With a membership of 22,000+ low-income New Yorkers, MRNY tackles the critical issues facing our community: workplace justice, tenants’ rights, immigrant civil rights, language-access, LGBTQ justice, public education, health care access, and immigration reform.

 

Rebecca Telzak 

Rebecca Telzak, Director of Health Programs, joined MRNY in 2009 as an organizer of small businesses working to support health care reform.  Since then, she has built our health department into a 23-person operation that serves over 7,000 community members a year and operates in all MRNY’s offices. Under Becca’s leadership, our services have expanded to include health insurance enrollment, health navigation services, food stamp enrollment, community health worker (CHW) training, CHW home visiting services, two food pantries, urban farming and TGNCIQ health services. Prior to working at MRNY, Rebecca received a Fulbright scholarship to Argentina and lived in Nicaragua for a year working at a women's sewing cooperative. She helped start a workers center in Michigan and worked on issues related to immigrant rights. She has a BA from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Social Science from the Residential College. She has a Masters Degree in Public Administration from Baruch College. 

 

Theo Oshiro 

Theo oversees the services departments at Make the Road New York, including MRNY's Legal Department, Adult Literacy and Health Advocacy, and serves as our lead health policy expert. A Peruvian immigrant raised in Queens, Theo has been recognized several times for his contributions to immigrant communities, winning the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest’s Felix A. Fishman Award. Theo was appointed by Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo to serve on city- and state-level policy task forces focused on immigrant health and health disparities. Theo joined Make the Road in 2005 after receiving a Master’s Degree from the University of Chicago. Since he began at Make the Road, he has been a leading fundraiser, building MRNY’s health access team from the ground up and expanding the organization’s overall services infrastructure by tripling our staff size across Legal Services, Health and Adult Education, expanding services for members into our Long Island office and leading our merger to create an office in Westchester. Theo also helped lead Make the Road’s expansion into New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. From his post at Make the Road, Theo has been a leader in improving language access policies in New York City and State. Theo led MRNY’s advocacy that resulted in the passage of a city-level law and the state-level SafeRx legislation to require comprehensive interpretation and translation services to limited English proficient patients at chain and mail-order pharmacies. Theo has also helped implement mental health supports for community members and has led on vital immigrant specific issues such as the 2020 Census and public charge. Theo has appeared on dozens of news outlets on a range of immigrant rights issues locally and nationally.

 

Ricardo Aca 

 

Ricardo Aca was born in Puebla, Mexico. In 2005, at the age of 14, he crossed the border in Arizona with his younger sister to join their mother in Brooklyn. In 2015 a video he released in response to Donald Trump’s remarks about undocumented Mexican immigrants went viral. In the video, he defended himself and fellow undocumented immigrants against Trump’s characterization of them as “criminals” “drug dealers” and “rapists”. This had particular resonance because he was working at a restaurant in one of Trump’s hotels at the time. Through this experience Ricardo found other young people, members of Make the Road New York, organizing to change the public narrative about undocumented immigrants. He has been involved as a member of Make the Road ever since and joined staff in 2017 as a digital organizer, bringing years of social media experience across all platforms, and skills in writing, photography, and video. Aca has an Associate’s degree in photography at LaGuardia Community College in Queens and he is currently working towards his Bachelor's degree in Public Affairs at Baruch College. He has spoken on behalf of Make the Road New York on many occasions, in local and national media. His op-ed “The Looming Uncertainty for Dreamers Like Me” was published in the New York Times right before the DACA decision was announced. Ricardo has contributed significantly, and in multiple ways, to Make the Road NY's work and the fight for dignity and justice for all people.

Panel Discussion: Nothing Micro about Them: Coping with Invalidation, Aggression, and Oppression

 

Over the past several years of the Winter Roundtable, the panel discussion at the end of the conference is a time for drawing together themes of the conference and offering recommendations for putting these themes into practice. This year, David Rivera, Kevin Nadal, Gina Torino, Sita Patel, Mariel Buque, and Benjamin Davis will speak at the close of our conference, taking the opportunity to engage with our attendees on how they have implemented action steps to address the conference themes within their professional, political and personal roles.