Sondra Goldschein is the Executive Director of the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy, which focuses on building grassroots support for family-friendly policies, and the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy PAC, which focuses on electing candidates who support paid family and medical leave and affordable elder and childcare. Sondra is an expert in developing and executing nationwide, state-based campaigns to advance policy change. Most recently, she served as the ACLU’s Director of Program and Strategy. In this role, she worked with the ACLU’s 54 affiliates to achieve high-impact civil rights and liberties wins by building program capacity and organizational power, with an emphasis on battleground states and the South.

Previously, Sondra was the ACLU’s Director of Advocacy and Policy and a Deputy National Political Director. In these roles, she led a team of strategists advancing ambitious goals such as marriage equality, repeal of the death penalty, criminal justice reform, expanding voting access, and disrupting the deportation pipeline. While at the ACLU, she also served as the Director of State Advocacy for the Reproductive Freedom Project where she designed defensive strategies for affiliates and their coalition partners facing attacks on abortion, contraception, and comprehensive sex education. Before her 20 years at the ACLU, Sondra was an attorney with a labor and employment law practice.

As a mother of two young children, Sondra is driven to build the systems of support needed for the next generation of working families to thrive.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Andrea C. Simonelli holds a master’s degree and doctorate in political science from Louisiana State University focused on governance responses to human migration; specifically legal and institutional frameworks to address internal and cross border displacement due to climate processes. She earned a diploma from the United Nations University Environment and Human Security Programme and Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre Summer School in Forced Migration. She is a speaker for the Climate Voices Network, sits on the roster of experts for the Adaptation Fund and the Climate and Development Knowledge Network, is a member of the Human Rights and Climate Change Working Group, is an associate with Millennium Alliance for Humanity & the Biosphere, and serves on the board of directors for Many Strong Voices.

Her first book, Governing Climate Induced Migration and Displacement: IGO Expansion and Global Governance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), was an institutional analysis of four intergovernmental organizations and their expansion, or lack thereof, to govern those becoming displaced by climate processes.

Dr. Simonelli’s work as a research associate on a project for the Norwegian Research Council regarding the Perceptions of Climate and Migration in the Maldives is continuing to yield many publications in both academic journals and edited volumes. Her next project stems from her work in the field, evaluating the facets of community resilience in the Pacific.

Prior to her academic career, Dr. Simonelli received her bachelor’s degree in political theory and constitutional democracy from Michigan State University’s James Madison College. She spent more than 10 years as a finance director for U.S. political candidates and a state party, electing officials at both the state and federal legislative levels.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Follow our show on our social media on twitter, facebook, and our blog – look for  womenpoliticsva

Follow our host and producer at @sherishannon27  and @carololson