Alli Finn
Alli is a queer feminist advocate, organizer, facilitator, and writer from NYC, who works at the intersection of workers rights and gender, racial, and economic justice. She has been deeply shaped by life and revolution in Beirut, where she lived the last four years, and transnational feminist movements. In 2017, she joined the Anti-Racist Movement, a grassroots feminist organization that advocates for the rights of migrant domestic workers and other racialized groups in Lebanon. She founded ARM’s casework team, which fights for justice and resource access for migrant workers facing labor exploitation, violence, detention, deportation, and beyond – and explicitly pushes back against the traditional charity approach to care and social work. With ARM, she advocated with local authorities and regional and UN mechanisms to end the kafala system and administrative detention of immigrants and refugees. In Beirut, she also experienced FRIDA’s grantmaking process firsthand through her involvement with feminist collectives that build safe spaces for women and trans* people, fight sexual harassment, and build power of immigrant communities. She recently relocated back to NYC, returning to movement-building and mutual solidarity organizing at home. She is deeply committed to radical and queer feminist movements locally and transnationally, and redistribution of resources to amplify this work.
Alli is also the co-founder and a partner at Seachange Collective, a women-led training collective in NYC that builds capacity of groups engaged in social justice work. With Seachange, she uplifts organizers, unions, community-based groups, and organizations through strategic planning support and facilitated workshops around participation, identity, and power. Previously, she worked as a facilitator with youth community organizing programs across the US and Middle East and as a community mediator and restorative justice facilitator in Brooklyn. Alli holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from the American University of Beirut, where she focused her research on feminist organizing tactics, and a Bachelor’s degree in International Studies/Theatre from Northwestern University. In her free time, she climbs rocks, hugs trees, cooks spicy food, reads and writes poems, and dreams of opening a café/bookshop/organizing and performance space. She follows Arundhati Roy, always, in remembering that: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”