Chicago Food Policy Action Council Welcomes Brenda L. Rodriguez

Brenda L. Rodríguez joins CFPAC after organizing in the labor movement for the last seven years. After she graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she was a literary graduate student in Texas and a rank-and-file leader of the Texas State Employees Union. After working closely with union leaders, she decided to leave her program and join the labor movement. Her background includes organizing with Unite Here! and working for four years with Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO. During this time, she’s organized film and dairy workers in Albuquerque, trained new organizers across the Western region, and created electoral analysis and strategy. She grew up in Little Village, an environmental justice community on the southwest side of Chicago. She currently resides in Berwyn and volunteers as a board member for IXCHEL to raise awareness, build power, and address the environmental and health hazards so that the western suburbs have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work. Recently, she served as the Associate Director for Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, a worker center on the southeast side of Chicago working on the intersection of immigrant and workers’ rights. During her spare time, she is a part-time student seeking her Master’s in Public Health and a steering committee member of the Cook County Collaborative for Health Equity. She seeks to advance equitable food systems, democratic workplaces, and environmental justice in her work and aims to bring these movements closer together.