Babay L. Angles
Special Projects and Trainings Manager
Babay L. Angles aka Bomba Brown / Angelica Janabajal Tolentino / Ifadoja Oyajokun is a Pilipinx interdisciplinary performance artist, DJ, joy and rest practitioner, educator, cultural strategist, and community organizer. She holds a B.A. in Ethnic Studies and a Masters of Arts in Urban Education and Social Justice with a Single Subject Teaching Credential in Social Studies. She has over 15 years of experience as an educator, mental health worker, and grassroots organizer. She also has over 15 years experience battling/cyphering in the styles of Breaking and Rocking with Time II Rock Crew and Soul Heavy Crew and 7 years of studying modern/contemporary movement. Babay L. Angles practices deep listening and channels movements to express the inherited resilience of the diasporic psyche. She is moved by funk, bass, percussion, environmental sound, breath, and land memory. Babay blends decolonial hxstorical research, ethnography, trauma informed facilitation, pedagogy, movement, installation, adornment, sound, and ritual to heal and get FREE. She is the creative director of Olongapo Disco, cofounder of The Shake It Show and dances with Time 2 Rock. Her current interests are surfing, listening to the ocean, and gamelan!
Rae Breaux
Senior Partnerships Manager
Rae is an organizer, trainer, and photographer. 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.
Tihi Hayslett
Acting Executive Director
Tihi Hayslett is a queer activist, writer and storyteller who has been a part of the CSS training network since his first Advanced Training in 2015. While working as an online campaigner for the Working Families Party, Tihi won consumer campaigns against Netflix, UPS, and worked with a coalition to remove David Koch from the Boards of the Smithsonian and PBS. He currently works at Demand Progress, leading online campaigns in the tech sector focusing on privacy and human rights. Tihi holds an MFA in Creative Writing and his debut short story collection, Dark Corners, is published by Running Wild Press. As one of the few fluent Dothraki speakers in the world, Tihi recently worked on the upcoming Netflix series Daybreak as a Dothraki Language Consultant.
Carly King
Project Manager, Healthy & Safe Schools
Carly (she/her) is a project manager and previous wellness practitioner committed to systems that support collaboration, liberation, cultural change and social impact. With over a decade of experience spanning multicultural affairs, higher education, and community movements and wellness work, Carly brings an intersectional understanding of organizational dynamics and strategic growth. She received an M.S. in Higher Education Administration at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Carly loves going to live reggae shows, exploring museums, dancing, or enjoying beach days with her loved ones.
Mariana Mendoza
Public Trainings Senior Manager
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.
Meghan O'Hara
Director of Operations and Finance in Operations
Meg is excited to bring her passion for operations and finance work to CSS, viewing them as essential forms of care—critical tools for ensuring an organization lives out its values and takes care of its people and community. She comes from a background in organizing and movement work focused on education and climate justice, as well as experience as an educational professional in both traditional classroom settings and at the YMCA. Outside of work, Meg loves diving into science fiction and fantasy books that imagine better futures, nerding out on donor organizing and wealth redistribution work, making music, and spending time outdoors with her pup, Frankie. Always up for a good geek-out session, she’s excited to chat about any of those passions and thrilled to join the team at the Center for Story-Based Strategy.
Ruby Pinto
Custom Trainings Manager in Program
Ruby is an organizer, narrative strategist and embodiment practitioner focused on cultivating cultural strategies that move us toward relationships and systems that center interdependence and loving stewardship of the land and each other. Since 2013 she has had the honor of organizing within movements for racial, economic, gender and queer liberation with an emphasis on prison and police abolition, working on campaigns like Chicago youth-led #NoCopAcademy, #FreeBresha and the successful fight to end cash bail in Illinois. Her community organizing is grounded in creative interventions as a former member of For the People Artists Collective and Lifted Voices Direct Action Collective. She finds immense connection and inspiration in community practices of improvisation and play, and seeks to help build a world where earthly gifts are decommodified, and the cycle of life is celebrated and sustained in systems of reciprocity and care. She loves to sleep, dance, bask in the sun and explore the world alongside her kids, family and community.
Diego Vergara
Digital Engagement Senior Manager
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 involved reshaping how people think about safety.