Rachel McCullough is the outgoing Political Director of Jews For Racial & Economic Justice. She has been on staff at JFREJ for twelve years, and her impact on JFREJ, the Jewish Left, and New York City and State has been immense. In her time on staff, she has trained scores of staff and leaders and helped build JFREJ into a powerful political force to win material changes for everyday New Yorkers. Under Rachel’s leadership, JFREJ members launched The Jewish Vote, JFREJ’s electoral arm, which today is one of New York’s most effective grassroots electoral formations.

A third-generation New Yorker and a tireless organizer for a more just and caring city, Rachel has helped build numerous campaigns and coalitions to reduce the size and scope of the NYPD, fight back against austerity, win dignity and respect for workers, and expand our democracy. Because of Rachel, JFREJ is a leader in the movement to build a more caring and feminist economy. Under her leadership, JFREJ helped pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010, and co-founded the New York Caring Majority in 2018. Rachel has co-led the Caring Majority campaign to raise home care workers’ wages in New York and end the state’s devastating home care shortage. At the start of this campaign in 2020, home care workers were making $11.80 in many parts of the state. In no small part due to Rachel’s leadership, they now make $18.55 and rising.

Imara Jones, whose work has won Emmy and Peabody Awards, is the creator of TransLash Media, a cross-platform, non-profit journalism and narrative organization, which produces content to shift the current culture of hostility towards transgender people in the US. She was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People on the planet in 2023. As part of her work at TransLash, Imara hosts the WEBBY-nominated, TransLash Podcast with Imara Jones as well as the investigative, limited series, The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality which received the Excellence in Podcasting Award from the National LGBTQ+ Journalists Association. Imara is also the first trans person to ever receive an award from the National Black Journalists Association, having garnered the Journalist of Distinction Award in 2022. Also in 2022, Politico named her as one of the 40 power players at the intersection of race, politics, and policy in the United States. In 2020 Imara was featured on the cover of Time Magazine as part of its New American Revolution special edition. In 2019 she chaired the first-ever UN High Level Meeting on Gender Diversity with over 600 participants. Imara has been featured regularly in The Guardian, The Nation, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, Fast Company and GQ. Imara is a 2021 Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellow and a 2019 Soros Equality Fellow. She serves on the New York City Commission on Gender Equity. She also serves as Chair of the Board for the Transgender Law Center, the nation’s largest transgender non-profit organization, and as Co-Chair of the New Pride Agenda. Imara is als on the boards of the GLSEN, and the LGBTQ+ Museum. Imara is also part of the Move to End Violence.

When founded in 1999, VOCAL-NY (then the NYC AIDS Housing Network) emerged as one of the leading groups to win quality, stable housing for people living with HIV/AIDS to improve health outcomes, and literal life expectancies of people whose homelessness could have been a death sentence. During these early years, VOCAL-NY joined coalitions to support the larger fight for affordable housing for all, and to end homelessness. VOCAL-NY’s primary focus is to win quality housing for low-income people impacted by the war on drugs, mass incarceration and HIV/AIDS, and is dedicated to the belief that safe, affordable and stable housing is a human right for all.

This work is carried out by VOCAL-NY’s Homelessness Union, which unites people who are currently or formerly homeless towards ending the homelessness crisis throughout New York by fighting for policies rooted in access to services and care, rapid rehousing, and an end to the criminalization of homelessness. VOCAL-NY’s Homelessness Union is leading campaigns to: use all available vacant housing stock, NYCHA units and vouchers to rehouse homeless New Yorkers; immediately end encampment sweeps & quality of life criminalization that target homeless New Yorkers; provide access to public, taxpayer-funded bathrooms in subways & in streets; and provide safe and dignified shelter and other vital services to all New Yorkers, including new migrants.