Staff

The Rural Organizing Project (ROP) has paid staff to implement not only specific campaigns, but the daily needs of a network supporting over 65 human dignity groups.

AMY DUDLEY started down the path to social justice organizing in the Blue Ridge Mountains of SW Virginia where she lived until 1998. Amy began her organizing with fellow students and young women on issues of gender oppression. After two years working with a community based natural resource management project in Central Africa, Amy shifted her focus to inclusive democratic participation through neighborhood organizing where she thought she could make the most difference in our global struggle for justice and liberation. In her four years as a neighborhood organizer, Amy initiated and supported ally efforts, relationship building, and education for racial and economic justice between white, middle class neighborhood activists and the homeless community, immigrant groups, and communities of color. Amy is thrilled to be working with the Rural Organizing Project which she sees as a move back towards her rural roots. You can reach Amy at amy@rop.org.

KARI KOCH’s connection with rural communities runs back to Ponca City, Oklahoma where she was born and raised. She got her first taste of organizing during her school years at Baker University in Kansas. After some on-campus harassment of queer folks, she and other students organized to get the university to include sexual orientation in the school’s non-discrimination clause. Kari moved to Oregon in 2002 and has since worked on environmental, fair trade, and labor union organizing. Her current extracurricular passions include volunteering on Latin American solidarity efforts, building community spaces in her neighborhood, making things, reading books about food, and gardening. Kari is thrilled to be at ROP – she believes whole-heartedly that organizing with rural communities is the only true way toward building our peoples’ movement. Send Kari an email at kari@rop.org.

AMANDA AGUILAR SHANK’s commitment to social justice began as a student activist and has continued throughout her 8 years in Oregon. The daughter of a Salvadoran mother and a Californian father, she works to bring these two identities together by working to create a country with bonds of solidarity among all of our communities, whether immigrant or native-born. To ROP, she brings experience union organizing in rural Oregon and around the country, as well as experience working in El Salvador, where she learned about the social justice movement from organized communities who continue to raise their voice as social and political actors despite rural isolation and extreme poverty. Originally from California’s Bay Area, she now considers Oregon home and loves living and working in the Northwest, with all of the people that have roots here and those that have gravitated to the beauty and grounded lifestyle of Oregon. Send Amanda an email at amanda(at)rop(dot)org.

SARAH K. LOOSE grew up in a small town-turning-suburban community in southern Minnesota. The daughter of a preacher and a teacher, her first notions of justice and compassion came from her parents. Her understanding of global justice and democracy were radically expanded while living in El Salvador for several years, where she coordinated a community-based oral history project (sistematización). In 2003, anxious to find her niche in social movements in the US, Sarah moved to the Pacific Northwest to work with the Jefferson Center. There she further developed her skills as a popular educator and community-based organizer working primarily with Latino immigrants in rural communities of Washington and Oregon. She’s excited to continue her learning with fellow participants in the struggle for justice in Oregon’s rural and small towns at ROP! Send Sarah an email at sarah@rop.org.

MARCY WESTERLING

  For over twenty years, Marcy Westerling has been a leader in organizing, educating, and mobilizing grassroots responses to violence, bigotry and injustice in rural communities. Marcy founded the Rural Organizing Project (ROP) in 1992 to develop the ongoing capacity of pro-democracy groups in over 60 rural and small town communities in Oregon. This network of human dignity groups, committed to a broad agenda of social change, is the first of its kind in the state of Oregon and has since become a national model. The ROP is noted for its work in not only empowering rural, small town and frontier activists to develop and use their progressive voice, but also for linking issues through transformational organizing which understands the long term nature of justice work. Fully inclusive democracy is the frame through which issues are woven together. The 2008 book Lessons from the Field: Organizing in Rural Communities leads off with a chapter from and about Rural Organizing Project.  Marcy is on leave from the ROP as an Open Society Fellow. Send Marcy an email at marcy@rop.org

VOLUNTEERS also serve critical roles in making the work of the ROP happen. Nearly all of ROP's member groups are volunteer managed and led, meaning ROP works with upwards of 150 volunteers to make work happen at the local level. Around the state office, the staff is strongly supported by dedicated volunteers that provide computer support, data entry, event coordination and maintenance of our office-home. The ROP works with dozens of volunteers who give between two to twenty hours a month.