Our Team

Jim Keddy
Executive Director

Jim Keddy is the executive director of Youth Forward and a consultant to social change organizations. For thirty years Jim has served as a leader in social change efforts in California. He is the former director of PICO California, a statewide association of community organizing efforts, and served as a vice president at The California Endowment, one of the state’s largest charitable foundations. While at The Endowment, he played a primary role in developing the foundation’s youth organizing strategy. He began his work in promoting racial and social justice as a high school and college activist and entered the community organizing field in his early 20’s. He has been a member of several non-profit boards including the boards of The California Endowment, Public Health Advocates and the California Budget and Policy Center. As an appointee of Governor Brown, he serves on the state Tobacco Education and Research Oversight Committee. He also serves on the board of Kids First California. He is married to Gina Martinez-Keddy and is the proud father of 2 adult children. He is a worm rancher and a guitar player.

Sarah-Michael Gaston
Policy Advocate

Sarah-Michael Gaston is a Sacramento native passionate about serving her community and promoting racial and social justice. Over the years she has held leadership roles in various social change efforts. She has been a dedicated volunteer for Sharing God's Bounty soup kitchen since 2008 - having become a supervisor in 2016. She is a former board member and community organizer for Black Women United, a nonprofit founded in 2017 that elevates and empowers Black women through the annual Black Women's March. And during her final year of college, she served as President of Black Student Union.

Within Youth Forward, her work entails advocating for policies in support of racial and health equity, particularly surrounding cannabis state policies. Before coming to Youth Forward in February 2019, Sarah-Michael worked in nonprofit housing and health-care organizations. She holds a Bachelors of Science in Psychology with a Business Management minor from Linfield College.

Monica Ruelas Mares
Community Organizer

Monica Ruelas Mares (she/her/ella) is a South Sacramento native and is passionate about social change through the lens of healing and building transformational relationships. At Youth Forward, Monica serves as the coordinator of the Sac Kids First Coalition where she is building an advocacy platform with youth voices at the forefront. This includes organizing and building relationships with community based organizations and local schools to take action on policies and measures impacting kids in Sacramento.

Prior to joining Youth Forward, Monica was the Collective Impact Coordinator at the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California (LCHC) where she was a facilitator for LCHC’s Health Ambassador program providing women and youth of color in Los Angeles and the Central Valley advocacy tools to catalyze change in their local community.

Monica received her Bachelor of Arts in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles. Aside from her work with Youth Forward she is the co-founder and facilitator of arise - a virtual support group for womxn across California. She is a certified facilitator of self awareness workshops and was certified through Self Awareness and Recovery (SAR) in Sacramento.

Monica is the proud daughter of immigrants from Mexico and the youngest of 4. Outside of work she loves spending time with her nieces and nephews, catching up on pop culture, and listening to good music!

Nia Mooreweathers
Community Organizer

Nia MooreWeathers is a California native, and supporter of social interests. She participated in youth mentoring programs and LGBTQ efforts (Vice President of West Campus GSA 2010-2012) during her high school career. She pursued her higher education at Humboldt State University; there she obtained her B.A. in Anthropology, with an emphasis in Evolutionary Medicine (2012-2016). With a skill for research, understanding of cultural health versus public health interests, and motivation to see racial equity established in her community, she began working for Youth Forward in the winter of 2018. As a Community Organizer, she hopes to bring joy, knowledge, and health to youth, and inspire change in policy at a local level. She is the eldest daughter of two hard-working and creative parents, and older sister to a firecracker at Howard State University.

Araiye (Ray) Thomas-Haysbert
Community Organizer

I am very passionate about youth empowerment, organizing my community and working with communities of color and marginalized groups to create systemic change through personal experiences with oppression. Araiye (Ray) specializes in creating programs that focus on youth empowerment and mentor-ship for young individuals who grow up in areas of poverty encouraging them to look beyond their barriers as underrepresented students and to stop the per-determination and biases that keep them from being powerful beyond measures. I am also very passionate about and utilizing the many talents of the youth she works with by encouraging them to use their voices. I aim to empower and inspire positive, innovative change in their everyday lives.

Board of Directors

LaCresia Hawkins
President

LaCresia Hawkins is a Central Valley native. She has spent most of her adult life advocating for equity in the area of public health. She is currently a foster parent and is working to improve student health in low performing school districts. Over the years, she has played leadership roles in various organizations, including the statewide community organizing network, PICO California.

Fernando Cibrian
Treasurer

Since 2012, Fernando Cibrian oversees community organizing, community building and leadership development for Mutual Housing California families. He has over 20 years of experience formerly as a community organizer in the PICO National Network and PICO California, which focused on leadership development and community empowerment through policy campaigns targeted at improving conditions for lower and moderate income families. At PICO he supported the network’s civic engagement and immigration reform efforts. He is currently a board member of Sacramento Area Congregations Together and is a former board member of the Santa Ana Federal Empowerment Zone Board that worked to foster economic opportunities for Santa Ana’s designated federal empowerment zone. He holds a Bachelor of Science from the California State University, Pomona.

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karen kaur dhillon
Member

karen kaur dhillon is a first generation daughter of immigrants. As a person with multiple marginalized identities, karen is committed to restorative justice practices that focus on personal and social liberation to uplift the most oppressed through the lens of race, gender, and class. Her Sikhi (faith) is rooted in speaking up and ending all forms of structural violence. She’s not shy from seeking justice and fighting oppression by using her voice to let it be known.

Amy Fitzgerald
Secretary

Amy Fitzgerald is a Senior Program Officer at the East Bay Community Foundation. In that role, she supports organizations that amplify community voice and exercise grassroots power to build a Just East Bay. A Bay Area native, Amy worked for 12 years as a community organizer and Executive Director of Oakland Community Organizations (OCO), the largest grassroots organizing network in Oakland. Through her work, Amy manifests her passion for community-led, equitable systems change, faith active in the public sphere, and powerful multicultural coalitions.

Amy received her Masters of Divinity from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science from Santa Clara University. Amy is bi-lingual and served with Jesuit Volunteers International in Managua, Nicaragua. She lives in Oakland with her wife, and can often be found cheering for the Golden State Warriors.

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Jay Franco
Member

Jay Franco is a performing artist and poet who lives by the quote, “when you’re not on stage, you’re in the community.” With a mixed background and broad perspective, Jay advocates for his community’s needs and stresses the importance of youth empowerment. He says it’s one thing to give a kid a job but it’s another to build on one’s mindset. #EmpowermentOverEmployment
He has done motivating work with the organization, Brown Issues, in terms of engaging youth with civic participation & narrative building through the arts. He hopes to inspire the next generation of leaders while continuing his studies to lobby for progressive policy.

Carmen Medrano
Member

Carmen Medrano was born in Mexico and came to the United States at the age of 4. Carmen graduated from the University of Denver with a B.A. in Psychology. She has been working as a faith-based community organizer with the PICO Network since 2008 and held leadership roles at local, statewide, and national levels. In the fall of 2014, she brought her expertise and passion for social change to the Central Valley, and helped in the creation of a new regional organization, Faith in the Valley. Currently with her role as Regional Organizer she aspires to empower people of faith and families to address racial and economic equity.

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Alex Pitts
Member

Since 1998, Alex has served in leadership roles with the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) where she has created and implemented strategic vision plans for a variety of that agency’s programs and policies, including the national headquarters Congressional Affairs Office, the Pacific Southwest Region’s External Affairs program and also the USFWS response to the California Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan.

Prior to her positions with the USFWS, Alex served as a senior staffer in the US Congress in Washington, DC for seven years. Alex served as the USFWS Pacific Southwest Region’s Deputy Regional Director from 2010-2017. She is currently the region’s Chief of Leadership and Employee Engagement where she works to create a more equitable and inclusive environment for the 900 US Fish and Wildlife employees in California and Nevada.

A 4th generation Californian, Alex grew up enjoying the natural world in California and the West. She has a bachelor's degree in Botany and Geography from Portland State University and Master in Forest Science from the Yale School of the Environment. She completed the Senior Executive Program at Harvard University in 2014. Alex lives in Fair Oaks with her husband and many animals. She is the mother of 3 young adult children.

Jalen Washington
Member

Jalen Washington is a Sacramento native and graduated from John F Kennedy High School in 2020. He has held various leadership positions in organizations including Blacks Making a Difference and Source Media at Sac City Unified School District. Jalen is a student athlete in track and field. He is most passionate about helping young people prepare to enter the real world through education and through learning how to support one’s own mental health.

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Board Emeritus

Tia Elena Martinez
Emeritus Board Member

Tia Elena Martinez has over 25 years of experience doing social change work in low income communities and communities of color in the United States. Over the decades her work has spanned a wide range of issues including education reform, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the war on drugs, homelessness, affordable housing,
disconnected youth, and immigration. She is currently an independent consultant doing work on dismantling the school to prison pipeline and transforming life chances for boys and men of color. Prior to consulting, she was the Chief Equity Officer at the Stupski Foundation where she designed a R and D effort focused on applying knowledge from the psychology and neuroscience to help low income students and student of color own and drive their learning and increase academic achievement.

Tia came to the foundation from the Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at UC Berkeley Law School, where she was acting director of education, leading a policy unit focused on issues related to education reform, teacher effectiveness, and racial justice. Prior to joining the Warren Institute, she served as strategic consultant to the Office for Civil Rights in the US Department of Education leading their strategic planning process and supporting rollout and implementation of the new strategy across 12 regional offices. Prior to working with the department, Tia was a senior manager with the Bridgespan Group where she led engagements with large, national foundations and major civil rights groups. She’s also been a senior fellow at the Hewlett Foundation, a policy analyst for the Corporation for Supportive Housing and the San Francisco Mayor's HIV Health Services Planning Council, and a street outreach worker. Tia has an AB in History from Harvard University, a Master in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy, and a JD from Stanford Law School.

Mahlet Markos
Member

Mahalet Markos is 19 years old and currently attends Sacramento State University where she is seeking a degree in business and economics, She has been interested in business since her mother opened her own Ethiopian restaurant when she was 7 years old. She hopes to expand the business while also working on her own line of bottled Ethiopian Iced Tea. She was born in London, UK which means she is a first generation immigrant. She has lived in Sacramento for many years.She loves traveling and experiencing new cultures but she still is able to stay productive in her community and keep busy with extracurricular activities such as band dancing, soccer, and being an active member in the Black Student Union club through out high school and college.

Devoshar Madkins
Emeritus Board Member

Devoshar Madkins is a former foster youth who is now a foster youth advocate through Sierra Forever Families Youth Speak Out program. Since the age of 3 she has been in care and has seen nothing change within the foster care community. At the age of 13 she joined a new group called Youth Speak Out.

Devoshar saw this opportunity to use her voice and stand up for all foster youth whose words were not being able to be heard. With the group still moving forward and inspiring others Devoshar's vision for foster youth to have their own voices heard is becoming a reality.