Schedule:

October 8: Rev. Guillermo Yela, Camino de Vida
Impact of racism and privilege in faith communities

Guillermo Yela was born in Guatemala. He has a "Bachelor Degree" in Industrial Engineering from the University of San Carlos de Guatemala and the University of San Francisco, California.  He obtained a Master of Divinity from McCormick Theological Seminary in 2008. From the age of fifteen he began to serve in different capacities within the Presbyterian Church, both in Guatemala and in the United States.  He is an Ordained Minister of the Presbyterian Church (USA) with recognition in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).  He did an internship in Multiculturalism at Second Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is currently the organizing pastor of Camino de Vida, a church focused on the Hispanic / Latino community in south-west Albuquerque.

 

October 15: Rev. Rob Woodruff and Rev. Kay Huggins, Second Presbyterian Church
Theological foundations

Rob is Pastor of Second Presbyterian Church, a bilingual and multicultural congregation committed to ecumenical and social justice work in Albuquerque and abroad. He completed his Master of Divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary and Doctor of Ministry degree at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Before coming to Albuquerque, he served churches in Ann Arbor, Boulder, and Seattle, and volunteered a year at Presbyterian Church (USA) as a Young Adult Volunteer in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Rob was ordained in August 2002 by the Presbytery of Plains and Peaks in Colorado.

 

Kay Huggins is known to the New Mexico Ecumenical community through her work as Chair of the Board of the Ecumenical Institute for Ministry and as instructor and associate director of the St. Norbert Master of Theological Studies Program in Albuquerque. She also serves as Interim Executive Director for the New Mexico Conference of Churches.  Huggins is a member of the Presbytery of Santa Fe, honorably retired, and serves on the Commission on Ministry. She serves as Parish Associate at Second Presbyterian Church and as moderator for the Laguna United Presbyterian Church.  

 

October 22: Olivia Underwood & Blythe Clark
Leverage Diversity by Building Inclusion

Dr. Olivia D. Underwood is a native of Brent, Alabama and has been a resident of Albuquerque, New Mexico for 5 years. Underwood received her B.S. and M.S. in Metallurgical Engineering from The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 2008 and 2009, respectively. In 2015, she became the first African-American to receive her Ph.D. from the Materials Science program at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Throughout her matriculation, Dr. Underwood has had the opportunity to broaden her engineering mindset and approach through a breadth of work experiences including: Honda Manufacturing of Alabama, Lincoln, AL; Chevron Oil Refinery in Pascagoula, MS; American Cast Iron & Pipe Co. (ACIPCO), Birmingham, AL; Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM; and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN. In addition, before pursuing her Ph.D., Dr. Underwood worked as a failure analyst engineer with CGI Federal Defense at Red Stone Arsenal, home to the U.S. Army’s Aviation and Missile Research Development Center. In 2015, she joined Sandia National Labs.
She is an advocate for children, education, STEM, and inclusion. In 2018, she established the Dr. Olivia D. Underwood Scholarship to help increase the number of women of color in the STEM field. During the summer, she serves as a volunteer instructor for the “Hands-On, Minds-On Technology” summer program for middle and high school students, where she teaches a class called “What is Materials Science?”.  In 2019, she co-authored a paper with Blythe Clark titled “Mitigating Implicit Bias for Leaders”. Dr. Underwood is an active member of the Minerals Metals and Materials Society (TMS), a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., an alumna of the Gates Millennium Scholars program, and has published several technical journal articles in her field. Recently, she was selected to serve as a member of the Board of Directors for New Mexico Voices for Children. She was awarded the 2019 Black Engineer of the Year – Science Spectrum Trailblazer Award. This award is given to “men and women actively creating new paths for others in science, research, technology, and development.” In March 2019, she was also awarded the 2019 Dr. Frank Crossley Diversity Award. This award “recognizes an individual who has personally overcome personal, professional, educational, cultural, or institutional adversity to pursue a career in minerals, metals, and/or materials. She was also selected to be a part of the 2019 40 under Forty Class by Albuquerque Business First.

Blythe G. Clark is a native of Nashville, Tennessee and has been a resident of Albuquerque, New Mexico for 12 years.  She received her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University in 2001, and her PhD in the same field from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006.  She spent two years as a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Metals in Stuttgart, Germany before joining Sandia National Labs in 2008. 
Dr. Clark became passionate about the topic of Inclusion and Diversity in 2011, when her peer mentoring group began delving into literature on unconscious bias.  Since then, she has catalyzed and led multiple initiatives to improve the research environment, educate on implicit bias, and nurture an inclusive workplace culture.  She is currently co-organizing the fourth summit on diversity for her professional society, The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society, following her co-authorship in 2019 of Mitigating Implicit Bias as a Leader with Olivia Underwood.  She received a 2018 Women Worth Watching award from Profiles in Diversity, and received a 2019 Advocating Women in Engineering award from the Society of Women Engineers.
Beyond her professional society engagement, Dr. Clark has remained focused on external impact through community outreach.  Within her local community, Dr. Clark regularly volunteers for STEM outreach events and engineering design competitions, including within local schools where she gives presentations on microscopy and the power of science to teach us more about the world around us. 
When she is not focused on her engineering and STEM advocacy work, she spends time with her husband and two daughters, aged 8 and 10.  They enjoy taking road trips to national parks to experience the wonders of nature and traveling broadly to experience different cultures, languages, and cuisine.

October 29: James Jimenez, New Mexico Voices for Children
Organizational Change and Anti-Racism Policy 
James joined NM Voices in 2013 as the Director of Research and Policy, becoming Executive Director in 2016. He also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico’s School of Public Administration. In both positions he draws from his considerable experience in using the budget as a strategic tool while working in state and city government. James served as the Chief of Staff under Governor Bill Richardson from 2006 to 2008, and as Cabinet Secretary of the Department of Finance and Administration from 2003 to 2006. He was also City Manager for the city of Rio Rancho and serves on the boards of directors for several nonprofit organizations.

 

November 5: June Lorenzo, Laguna Presbyterian Church
Doctrine of Discovery
June L. Lorenzo, Laguna Pueblo/Navajo (Dine), J.D. and PhD, lives and works in her home community of Laguna Pueblo. She works with community organizations and Indigenous NGOs to address uranium mining legacy issues and resistance to new mining, sacred landscape protection, and recently on issues of repatriation of cultural patrimony.  She advocates in tribal and domestic courts, as well as before legislative and international human rights bodies.  She also participated in negotiations for both the UNDRIP and the American DRIP. She holds a PhD in Justice Studies from Arizona State University and a Juris Doctor from Cornell University.

 

 

November 12: Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, Sociology professor at UNM
Racism in housing
Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. Her research, which has been published in the American Sociological Review,Social Problems,Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, andCity & Community, among other academic journals, focuses on how housing inequality persists in contemporary urban contexts as well as how such inequality can be mitigated. Elizabeth's book, Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America, is forthcoming in April 2021 with Oxford University Press. She is currently working on several projects related to housing in New Mexico, including research with New Mexico Legal Aid and the McKinley Community Health Alliance.

 

November 19: Maria Martinez Sanchez, ACLU, Marian Mendez- Cera and Fabiola Landeros, El Centro de Igualdad y Derechos
 Maria Martinez Sanchez is a native New Mexican, born and raised in Albuquerque. She attended Albuquerque High School and New Mexico State University. She received her law degree from the University of New Mexico in 2008 and has worked in the public interest field since becoming an attorney. She worked at the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty for six years, where she fought to improve the living and working conditions of New Mexico's farm and dairy workers. Since 2014 she has been a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, defending New Mexicans' constitutional and civil rights.

Marian comes from an immigrant family and has lived in the U.S. since 2005. She is originally from Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. She moved to the U.S. when she was 11 years old. Recently, she graduated from the University of New Mexico and received a double major in Psychology and Philosophy with a concentration in Pre-law. Her interest in social justice began in 2011 “Initially, I became active with El CENTRO because they provided me with information and opportunities which allowed me to further my education, but later, activism became part of my life, part of who I am, part of my family”. Marian has demonstrated her deep passion for social justice and equity through her dedication in various campaigns and projects. She continues to promote human rights as one of El CENTRO’s workers’ justice and civil rights organizers.

Fabiola Landeros is  a proud mother of three children, Santiago, Sebastian, and Triana. She arrived in this country over 10 years ago seeking a better life, and is the eldest of three children. She was born in Torreon, Coahuila, and raised in Ciudad Juarez. She started as a member of El CENTRO in 2013 when her brother was placed in deportation proceedings. She never realized that organizations like El CENTRO existed, “When my brother was deported, I felt like I had lost my family, but when I arrived at El CENTRO, I gained a community.” Since that time, she decided to dedicate herself to the fight for immigrants’ rights and social justice.