Celebrating 30 Years of Grassroots Leadership

Si Kahn has worked for over 40 years as a civil rights, labor and community organizer and musician.  In 1980, he founded Grassroots Leadership, a southern-based national organization that works to abolish for-profit private prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers. 

Kahn has published three organizing handbooks: Creative Community Organizing, A Guide for Rabble-Rousers, Activities & Quiet Lovers of Justice, How People Get Power and Organizing: A Guide for Grassroots Leaders, and  The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy, co-authored with feminist philosopher Elizabeth Minnich, his partner and spouse. 

A songwriter and performing artist, Kahn has released fifteen albums of his original songs and a collection of traditional labor, civil rights, and women's songs with Pete Seeger and Jane Saap.  His songs of family, community, work, and freedom, have been recorded by hundreds of artists and translated into many languages.  He is also a composer, lyricist, and book writer for musical theater. 

Before joining Grassroots Leadership as executive director, Donna Red Wing served on the board from 2006 to 2009.  She was chief of staff of the Interfaith Alliance where she designed the First Freedom First campaign and created the Green Paper Project on LGBT equality and religious freedom. 

Previously, she was the policy director at the Gill Foundation until 2003, where she managed several initiatives including the National Faith Leadership Project, which brought together national mainline faith leaders around the intersections of faith, politics and sexual orientation, and the National Research Project, which gauged public attitudes towards gay and lesbian Americans. From 1996 to 1999, she served as the National Field Director for the Human Rights Campaign, where she managed an advocacy network of tens of thousands of members. 

Red Wing was the National Field Director for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation from 1993 to 1996, assisting GLAAD as it moved from a loose federation of local media watch groups to a national organization with media advocacy networks across the country. She was executive director of the Lesbian Community Project, in Portland, Oregon, from 1989 until 1993.

Ann Beeson is a distinguished social justice lawyer and a zealous advocate for the transformative power of culture. She is currently a senior fellow with the Open Society Foundations. Having worked as an executive in law and philanthropy for many years, she is dedicating the next phase of her career to pursuing two of her passions: expanding support for the role that culture plays in social change and building the progressive base in her home state of Texas. She recently moved back to Austin from New York City with her family.

Beeson was the executive director of U.S. Programs at the Open Society Foundations from 2007 to 2011. At the Foundations, she launched programs to strengthen government transparency and address the crisis in journalism, increase the capacity of Muslim, South Asian, and Arab organizations to advocate on their own behalf, and advance achievement for African-American men and boys. 

Ann was previously the national associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, where she worked from 1995-2007. She argued twice before the U.S. Supreme Court, litigated numerous cases around the country, and launched groundbreaking programs to stop the erosion of civil liberties in the name of national security and to expand the use of international human rights strategies in the areas of immigrants' rights, women's rights, and racial justice.

In June 2007, Beeson was named one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America by the National Law Journal. Ann was a law clerk for the Honorable Barefoot Sanders, then chief judge for the Northern District of Texas. She holds a law degree from Emory University and a master's degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Texas.