View from the Hill - Highlander Research and Education Center

#15; February 27, 2007 - Special Issue

New Staff at Highlander

Highlander is very pleased to announce the hiring of three new staff people: Manju Rajendran, Anasa Troutman, and Elandria Williams.

Manju and Elandria will join Highlander's Education Team, jointly staffing the Young and the Restless program -- which provides training and support for youth, young-adult, and intergenerational organizing -- and participating in other aspects of Highlander's program work as well.
Anasa joins us for 2007 as the coordinator of Highlander's 75th anniversary activities.

We are excited that Manju, Anasa, and Elandria have joined the Highlander staff, and we look forward to working with them. Their pictures and brief biographies follow.

Manju Rajendran is a 26-year-old artist and organizer of South Asian descent who moved to Highlander from Durham. She has been doing movement work for fourteen years. As Communications Director for the South Carolina Equality Coalition, she was part of a unique people-of-color-led les/gay/bi/trans (LGBT) campaign to stop an unjust amendment and build a stronger LGBT political base. She is co-founder and on the media/communications team of Ubuntu, a women-of-color, survivor-led organization fighting sexual assault. She is also on the advisory board of Not Your Soldier Project, which gives youth tools needed to stop the military invasion of our schools and communities. She worked the last several months with the League of Young (Pissed Off) Voters building a massive online directory of youth organizations around the country called Future 5000. Manju also worked with Youth Voice Radio, helped form Hip Hop Against Racist War, and at the University of North Carolina formed a Desi Conversation Circle for South Asian diasporic kids to rap politics and personal stories.

Anasa Troutman has spent her life growing into an artist, producer, strategist and activist-organizer, developing her personal mission to use arts, entertainment and mass media for issue awareness, social change and personal transformation. She began her career working with soul music singers, writers and musicians in Atlanta. Among her first group of clients was an unknown singer/songwriter named India Arie, whose simple combination of voice and guitar was meant for personal healing and social change. Anasa’s work with India led to a platinum-selling album and an international concert tour, proving to Anasa that her vision of using art and mass media to create global and personal change was real. In the years that followed, Anasa has served as a member of the National Coordinating Committee for the National Hip Hop Political Convention, as a member organizer for the Institute for Policy Study’s Cities for Progress Program, as the Urban Marketing Strategist for the Dennis Kucinich campaign for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination, as Consulting Producer for the Young Peoples Project’s “Finding Our Folk” Tour, and as an organizer with the Progressive Majority’s Racial Justice Campaign. In all her work, Anasa uses arts and culture to create justice, opportunity and compassion.

Elandria Williams has been involved in activism and organizing since she was a youth herself, starting out organizing around getting rid of the Confederate flag and trying to end the race riots in East Tennessee high schools. As an African and Indigenous differently-abled young person, she has spent the better part of three years working with youth and young adults of color from traditional families of color, multi-racial families of color, including transracial adopted folk, and transient youth both in foster care and emancipated. Before coming to Highlander she has been most involved in popular education and organizing around anti-oppression, anti-racism, nonviolence, education reform, the prison military industrial complex, and intergenerational education and organizing with many different organizations including the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. She is proficient in Portuguese and speaks some Spanish.

1959 Highlander Way - New Market, TN 37820 - (865) 933-3443
www.highlandercenter.org - hrec@highlandercenter.org

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