Jane McAlevey

Dr. Jane F. McAlevey (born October 12, 1964 in New York City, New York) is a union and community organizer, educator and author.

Jane McAlevey has been involved in movements and political campaigns throughout her entire life. McAlevey was the youngest of seventeen children, and her mother died of breast cancer when she was not yet in kindergarten. Her father was a locally elected politician—the county executive of Rockland County—who had innovated progressive land use planning concepts in suburban New York. As a little girl, she was exposed to raucous campaign politics.

By junior high school she was engaging in politics of her own, organizing student strikes and walk-outsover issues ranging from stopping nuclear energy to the possible reinstatement of the draft.

While at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in the spring of 1984 she was elected student government president at age 19, after being recruited, sweeping all six offices with her slate of candidates. She went on to be the president of the Student Association of the State University of New York (SASU), one of its most effective presidents. She orchestrated the takeover of the SUNY business office which resulted in the SUNY trustees voting to divest the university system from entities doing business in South Africa.

McAlevey was recruited to move to California to work out of David Brower’s new Earth Island Institute on a project aimed at educating the environmental movement in the US about the ecological consequences of U.S. military policy in Central America. She was involved with EPOCA, the Environmental Project on Central America, one of Earth Island's projects. She risked her life on this project, helping protect environmental activists from attack by death squads.

After two years working on coalition building in the US and the international environmental movement, she was recruited to work at the Highlander Research & Education Center in Tennessee where she created a joint program between the Highlander Center and the National Toxics Campaign on globalization and toxics.

McAlevey became Associate Director of the Highlander Center, after being recruited, where her exposure to the thinking and mentorship of John Gaventa occurred, she eventually left the south and became a program officer at the Veatch Program, a foundation that is at the center of financing many progressive social change organizing organizations in the U.S.A. While at the Veatch program, she was involved in funding immigrant worker centers and union democracy institutes hoping to nurture the more progressive parts of the labor movement.

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