Dear Friend --
We are excited to introduce you to CLUE's Young Religious Leaders Fellowship members for 2020! Because of COVID19, the internship is fully remote this year, and is CLUE's first ever digital organizing program.
The YRLF is overseen by our Program Director, Jeremy Arnold, and led by our Faith-Rooted Organizers, Lucero Garcia and Mary Duong.
As you will read below, this years' fellows come from diverse faith, racial, economic, and educational backgrounds. Each is focused on a concrete project that will enhance our work as we continue to move through 2020. Please give them a warm welcome if you see them online!
Linh Nguyen was born and currently lives in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is a second generation Vietnamese-American whose immigrant parents worked very hard to make sure that she and her siblings would have the opportunity to be the first in their family to earn college degrees. In 2019, she graduated from Sacred Heart University in CT, where she studied Healthcare Administration and Global Health. Linh recently served as a teacher through the Jesuit Volunteer Corp in the Federated States of Micronesia. She hopes to pursue a career in international service and development one day.
Formed in the Catholic Ignatian tradition, Linh’s faith informs her commitment to building a more just world that protects the dignity of every human being. As a Fellow for CLUE this summer, she is excited to learn more about immigration justice, how immigration policy is affecting the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in Southern California, and how interfaith organizing can be used as a powerful tool that builds solidarity and advocates for necessary change.
Mary Entoma is currently attending UCLA majoring in Political Science and Labor Studies. Growing up in the Bay Area, she has always shown interest in social justice due to the issues that she saw in her community and her experiences within her own family as a first-generation Philipino immigrant. She grew up in a Catholic household which has guided much of her organizing - using her faith to guide her in fighting against injustice. Aside from working with CLUE, she also works with UNITE HERE Local 11 mainly doing community organizing at UCLA and USC. She is also involved with student groups at UCLA working to make campus more welcoming and equitable for BIPOC students.
Nathan Carbajal was raised in Long Beach/Lakewood, California and is a recent graduate of California State University, Long Beach. At CSULB Nathan was a student organizer and became exposed to union organizing through the California Faculty Association. Before that, Nathan worked several sanitation jobs including being a janitor on campus. Nathan was born into the Jehovah’s Witness denomination but left while studying in college. Recently, Nathan has felt a call to return to a church and has been attending St. Luke’s Episcopal church in Downtown Long Beach.
Angeles Urban grew up in a traditional Latino, Spanish-speaking evangelical denomination in Inglewood, and has since expanded her faith tradition to include The Episcopal Church. She is currently a seminarian at Fuller Theological Seminary where she is pursuing a bilingual Masters of Divinity degree. Her faith calls her to actively confront the systems that perpetuate evil and injustice, and she is passionate about getting there alongside the Spanish-speaking faith community.
Riya Patel was raised in the small, predominantly low-income city of Chino, California in San Bernardino County. With her parents immigrating to the U.S. from India, Riya grew up as a first-gen Indian-American, struggling to find her identity in a community that looked nothing like her. She grew up listening to her parents share stories of Mahatma Gandhi and reading about other activists in the Civil Rights Movement and the abolitionist movement in the U.S, which inspired her to learn more about nonviolence and social movements. Trying to better understand the economy and its disparities, she studied Economics and Labor Studies at UCLA and recently graduated as the quarantined class of 2020. (Go Bruins!).
Her experience with conducting research with the UCLA Labor Center on the barriers faced by student workers in LA County has encouraged her to learn more about different ways to organize and bring systemic change to communities of color. She was introduced to the work of CLUE through her amazing Labor Studies professors and she wishes to learn more about faith-rooted organizing as a tool to unite individuals from different faith traditions together and bring economic justice to the forefront of our agendas.
Cecilia Ribordy is a student at Dickinson College double majoring in Environmental Studies and Latin America, Latinx & Caribbean Studies. Cecilia grew up as a missionary kid in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where she first witnessed the important role people of faith play in achieving equity and justice. Over time, Cecilia started developing her own passion for social and environmental justice, and uses her filmmaking and organizing skills to help raise awareness and organize people to fight for justice. She has produced, directed and edited award-winning short films that are centered around issues such as immigration, deforestation and mixed-race realities. Outside of these experiences, she also has led and participated in many campaigns, protests and organizing efforts. As a CLUE 2020 Fellow, Cecilia hopes to expand her knowledge on faith-rooted organizing and fulfill her calling to join CLUEs fight for economic justice.
Welcome, Fellows!
In faith and solidarity,
Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice
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Twitter/Facebook/Instagram: @ClueJustice
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