Board & Staff

Itzhel Gibson is our part-time Operations Associate. Itzhel is a member of Dream Team LA, a grassroots organization that advocates for the rights of immigrants across the country. On top of that, she has been a volunteer for the City of Los Angeles for over two decades, helping with all types of community events. As a teenager, she helped with the growth of the Heart of Los Angeles Youth Program for four years and won a grant for college for all of her hard volunteer work.

Now as she continues advancing her career, she attends Paul Mitchell, the school for her cosmetology license and still manages to help her community by offering haircuts and makeovers for free. She often visits Skid Row, senior centers, and centers for battered woman to help organize haircut events along with the non-profit Fred Jordan Missions organization.

She came to Alliance through UFCW Local 770 in Los Angeles as a El Super Boycotter in Los Angeles in the union’s campaign fighting the injustice that immigrant food workers endured at El Super grocery chain.

Jose Lopez is our Operations Manager. He was a dedicated intern and volunteer of the Alliance from 2013-2016. Jose worked with Alliance member UFCW Local 770 in Los Angeles as am El Super Boycott Lead, which put him front and center in food worker struggles on the ground. Jose also comes with communications experience as a volunteer leader of the Dream Team LA, an immigrant rights organization. He also runs trainings and other member recruitment and retention activities for Dream Team LA.

Christina Spach joins the Alliance with over a decade of experience in social justice and grassroots organizing. She began her work in Southern Belize developing community-based projects with local villagers that fostered local economies, environmental justice, and cultural preservation. Upon returning to the States, Christina became a community organizer and later national trainer for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). She was the Education Organizer for San Francisco Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment before joining the food justice movement in 2010 to advocate for racially-equitable food and farm policy. She has traveled extensively throughout the US, Latin America, and Europe. Originally from South Carolina, she has returned to the South with a continued commitment to support social and worker justice efforts grounded in grassroots solutions.

Elizabeth Walle joined the Food Chain Workers Alliance in 2018 as our half-time development coordinator. She comes to us from the world of the arts. From 2015-2018 she worked in fundraising for the Mosaic Theater Company of DC, quickly advancing from a part-time assistant to Director of Development. In that capacity, she was proud to co-direct the design and implementation of a company-wide I.D.E.A. (inclusivity, diversity, equity, and access) initiative to push back against white supremacy in the workplace and in the arts. This process taught her a lot about the long and complex struggle to win justice and dignity for all people, and she is honored to continue supporting that work in a new context with the Alliance.