WILL Empower Fellows
Mariko Yoshioka
Mariko is an organizer, facilitator, and coach with a passion for collaborating with other changemakers to co-create healing and transformative experiences. She takes a whole-person approach to coaching and leadership development, encouraging and supporting leaders to show up as their most powerful, authentic selves, while honoring their own well-being and humanity. Mariko has more than 20 years of professional experience working for social justice, including 13 years as an organizer and leader in the worker justice movement. She is particularly passionate about supporting leaders of color who find themselves navigating challenging organizational hierarchies and power structures. She draws on her own lived experience as a biracial queer woman and changemaker, bringing compassion, grace, curiosity, and connection to her coaching and facilitation practice. Mariko grew up in a small foothill community in Northern California. She received a B.A. in Spanish and political science from Denison University and a J.D. from the University of Oregon. She completed her coaching certificate from Blooming Willow’s Healing Centered Coaching program. Mariko and her wife currently reside in Eugene, Oregon with their two cats, Gandalf and Tonks.
Malcolm Shanks
Malcolm Shanks (they/he) has spent more than 15 years as an organizer, facilitator, and political educator. Born and raised in Washington, DC, Malcolm considers themself a product of the cultural and political organizing of Black movements in their hometown. Malcolm has created and led hundreds of trainings with thousands of students, workers, organizers, and artists. Their approach uses storytelling, media, and art to ground people in the why’s and how’s of oppression, exploitation, and resistance. With these methods Malcolm has developed projects as diverse as skills training on electoral campaigns, identity development workshops among college students, and participatory history projects for community activists. From 2016-2020 Malcolm worked at Race Forward as their Senior Trainer and Content Manager. They designed and led racial justice trainings and organizational coaching for groups building racial equity in their programs and workplaces. Since leaving Race Forward to pursue independent work, Malcolm has given university lectures, created multimedia social justice educational materials for global audiences, facilitated dozens more workshops and political education sessions, and continued their organizational consulting work.
Former Fellows
Mary Grace Menner
MaryGrace Menner is a recent graduate of Northeastern University School of Law, where she earned her JD with concentrations in both Labor, Work & Income and Poverty Law & Economic Justice. MaryGrace’s work in workers’ rights began while living in Immokalee, a small farmworker town in Florida. While there, she worked in the immigration department of Legal Aid, where she recognized the need for a multi-faceted approach to migrant workers’ rights. As a result, she also became involved with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. She continued her work at Metrowest Worker Center – Casa del Trabajador in Framingham, Massachusetts. At Casa, MaryGrace advocated alongside workers in low-wage, high-risk jobs like roofing and siding. In 2019, she was a Peggy Browning Fellow in the Employment Unit at Greater Boston Legal Services, and in 2020, a Peggy Browning Fellow at Migrant Justice in Burlington, Vermont. She has also interned for the Hon. Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts and in the Fair Labor Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office. She is interested in the ways labor and employment law can be used to create effective social change and justice for marginalized communities.
Erica Smiley
Erica Smiley is the executive director of Jobs With Justice. A long-time organizer and movement leader, Smiley has been spearheading strategic organizing and policy interventions for Jobs With Justice for nearly 15 years. Prior to taking up her current position with the organization, Smiley served as organizing director for Jobs With Justice developing campaigns that resulted in transformative changes to how working people organize and are civically engaged at their workplaces and in their communities. During her tenure at Jobs With Justice, Smiley has served in numerous leadership capacities including as campaigns director and as senior field organizer for the southern region.
Her passion for advancing innovations that prioritize the South is evident on the boards she serves on today and in the past, which includes the board of the Highlander Research and Education Center, based in Tennessee, a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South and the leadership council of the Workers Defense Project based in Texas. Additionally, she is on the board of the SEIU Education and Support Fund, the Workers Lab, and she participates in the Bargaining for the Common Good advisory committee. In 2021, she was appointed by the Board of Governors at Rutgers University to sit on the State Advisory Committee for the School of Management and Labor Relations.
Smiley is originally from Greensboro, N.C. where she is a proud product of public schools—ultimately graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently resides in New Jersey alongside her partner, Amanda, and their daughter.
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