Sara Abdurahman

Operations Manager – Oakland, CA

A twin-child of diaspora, much of Sara’s upbringing revolved around reconciling facets of identity to create her individual self. Self between her parent’s diaspora roots, self from her twin sister, self as a young biracial Black girl growing up in California’s Central Valley. From an early age she wondered: What is community? What is belonging? How does race and faith shape the way my family and I engage with the world? Searching for these answers led her to complete degrees in Religious Studies and Human Services at Cal State Fullerton. While most of her beliefs continue to shift, she firmly believes in storytelling as a core aspect of community building, [inter]personal healing and liberation. If left to story-tell herself, she will likely talk about her twin sister Susana, a slideshow of dogs whom she is a beloved aunt to, or her recent binge of Friday Night Lights.

Rae Breaux

CSS Partnership Manager, Communicating Our Power — Los Angeles, CA

Rae is an organizer, trainer, photographer, and full spectrum doula based in Los Angeles. She has over a decade of experience developing intersectional, cross-movement strategies around race, class, gender, and the systemic drivers of the climate crisis. Rae has a strong background in coordinating and implementing creative direct actions, ranging from technical actions to coordinating sustained mass mobilizations, and as a movement photographer using the power of images to create narratives and tell the stories of people and the planet.

When not organizing or on the streets, she is supporting people in her community as a doula, making pottery, and gardening or making art with her kid, partner, and pet rabbit and lizard.

Anna Couey

Resourcing Narratives Director — Oakland, CA

Anna Couey has worked at the intersection of art, communications, information, and social justice for multiple decades to re-imagine and restructure power. During the 1980s-1990s, she helped develop art/artists networks the Art Com Electronic Network and Arts Wire, and organized participatory, cross-cultural communication sculptures. Anna contributed to the creation of a research justice framework at DataCenter to legitimize marginalized voices and forms of knowledge. At Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, she engaged in resource development practices to build power and strengthen the voices of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and their families working to release incarcerated people, restore human and civil rights and reunify families and communities. In this phase of her social practice, she dreams of weaving story-based strategy and revenue generation to shape a sustainable and inclusive future.

Cris Lagunas

Program and Partnerships Senior Manager – Boston, MA

Cris comes from the Migrant Rights Movement and has been a story-based strategy practitioner and trainer for the last decade. He is a founding member of National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) and has also worked on Environmental Justice, Labor and Land Rights campaigns. He brings a strong connection to the frontline and is also a seasoned non-violent direct action / civil disobedience trainer.

Cris also enjoys the Ninja Turtles!

Mariana Mendoza

Public Trainings Senior Manager — Los Angeles, CA

Born and raised in Mexico City, currently living in Los Angeles, Mariana (she, ella, mariana) is an organizer, narrative nerd, and popular educator. She comes from justice and just transition organizing, and most recently worked in defunding carceral systems and implementing alternatives to incarceration and harm reduction practices for young people and adults in Los Angeles. She is committed to using her labor, energy and love into building collective-determination, demanding justice, asserting our right to healing and care, and creating opportunities for imagination and cultural change. When she is not organizing, learning, or eating with loved ones, she is usually climbing rocks.

Lenina Nadal

Communications and Network Engagement Senior Manager — Brooklyn, NY

Lenina loves story-based strategy tools and enjoys making impactful media, developing and leading strategic comms plans, storytelling, and collaborative leadership training. She has worked doing all these things with amazing national and local organizations like the Right to the City Alliance, the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, Global Action Project, and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. She taught Latinx literature and history, media and organizing skills at the New School, Hunter College and Brooklyn College. She received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College and studied historical documentary filmmaking at George Washington University. She likes to play Roblox with her daughter, tend to her balcony garden, dance, write, read and send love letters, and create care packages.

Zakiya Scott

Strategy Director – Austin, TX

Zakiya Scott is a Southern Black queer writer and editor, youth advocate, and communications strategist who believes in the transformative power of storytelling to uproot racist systems, transform culture, and ultimately change the world.

With roots in North Carolina’s community newspapers and radio programs, she moved to Oakland to fuse her passion for writing and storytelling with her desire to realize more justice and empathy. She found herself in a familial community as a communications and media intern at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Zakiya went on to work at Fenton, where she provided media relations, messaging and strategic communications support to grassroots nonprofits and foundations within the firm’s social justice practice. 

Most recently, she worked at Blackbird to further the communications strategies of the Movement for Black Lives — a coalition of more than 50 organizations committed to fighting for Black liberation and community, institutional, cultural, and systems transformation.

Zakiya is an aspiring DJ, avid roller-skater, and a fan of Afro-futurist art. She is a graduate of UNC and lives between Charlotte, NC and Oakland, CA.

Nayantara Sen

Executive Director- Bay Area, CA

Nayantara is a narrative and cultural strategist, trilingual storyteller, racial and social justice trainer, fiction writer and first-generation Bengali immigrant. For the last 15 years, she has built capacity and programs at the intersections of: story-based, narrative, arts and cultural strategies, social movement strategies, racial and gender justice, immigration, and systems change. She is recovering arts administrator with expertise in oral history, Theatre of Oppressed, and cultural organizing — and has worked across the philanthropy, arts and social justice sectors.

Nayantara is a creative capacity and movement-builder at heart. Previously, she worked as the: Senior Director of Field and Funder Learning at Pop Culture Collaborative; Director of Narrative & Cultural Strategies at Race Forward; Programs Director at Food Culture Collective, and Lead Designer and Narrative Strategist for the Butterfly & Chrysalis Labs for Immigrant Narrative Strategy. 

She is the author of Butterfly Lab Narrative Project Design Toolkit, the Creating Cultures and Practices for Racial Equity, How the Light Gets In: Narrative Power-Building through the Arts,  Storyline Partners’ Stories for Change, and the widely referenced Cultural Strategy Primer. 

She serves on the advisory boards of MOSAIC America, Food Culture Collective, South Asian SOAR, the Collective Change Lab’s Systems Storytelling Initiative, and is a practitioner-member of AWE (Another World Exists), a national artist and organizing collective. She lives in the Bay Area and loves hiking, poetry, cooking and dancing.

Diego Vergara

Digital Engagement Senior Manager — Greensboro, NC

Diego is passionate about the role of communications in social movements. He believes that radical imagination and bold visions are needed to free us! His prior work at the North Carolina Statewide Police Accountability Network (NCSPAN) involved reshaping how people think about safety. Before NCSPAN, Diego worked at Ignite NC, a youth fellowship program for young organizers. During this time, he worked with a lit team of organizers to train NC's next generation of organizers and communicators. Diego recently received his M.A. in Communications, and he is excited to bring his field and academic experience to the work of CSS.

Diego enjoys making food from cookbooks or Colombian recipes in his free time!