Cohort 10 (2026-2027)

Whittney Smith is Deputy Director and General Counsel for Lawndale Christian Development Corporation, where she seeks economic justice first for North Lawndale residents. Her leadership is rooted in the conviction that communities closest to the challenges must hold the power to shape solutions. As a community development practitioner, she has become a powerful voice elevating the structural realities facing disadvantaged communities, including historic disinvestment, fragmented land ownership, and barriers to capital, while advancing strategies to restore community control and economic opportunity.

She intentionally pursued education and career opportunities that would allow her to bring knowledge and tools back to North Lawndale. Her work spans trade, business, legislation, and access to capital. During law school at American University, she studied international trade law and traveled to El Salvador to learn about cooperative business ownership. She later served as a legal intern in Chile, where she apprenticed with a firm specializing in international law related to Indigenous property and human rights. Returning to the United States, she worked for Congressmen Davis and Clay, and then for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

As Senior Portfolio Director, Forced Labor & Human Trafficking (FLHT), Vijay Simhan leads Humanity United’s largest grantmaking portfolio and makes programmatic and operational adjustments to the strategy. As the FLHT ecosystem faces broad challenges from funding shifts and authoritarian crackdowns against workers and migration, Vijay leads the team and supports HU’s broad array of partners in creating new pathways for labor justice for workers.

Vijay also serves as Director of the Rights and Dignity (RAD) Working Group, which spans across The Omidyar Group (TOG) and exists to support and advance the rights and dignity of communities impacted by structures of oppression and marginalization, by transforming the tools of philanthropy so that we can be better partners to communities working to address the conditions and systems that threaten them.

Before joining HU, Vijay was Program Officer with Winrock International, where he led work on labor rights, migration, and anti-human trafficking projects in Africa, South America, and Asia. This included helping workers organize and advocate for their rights in the agricultural and textile sectors as well as both partnering with and challenging corporate behavior as it relates to labor rights in supply chains in the tobacco and tea sectors.

As Executive Director of Restore Oakland and co-founder and Board President of the REAL People’s Fund, Tash Nguyen has helped the East Bay ecosystem reimagine what economic sovereignty and shared power can look like in practice. At a time when marginalized communities face increased displacement, worker precarity, and widening racial wealth gaps, they’re organizing to demonstrate what becomes possible when capital is aligned with community-led governing power. Tash sees worker cooperatives and small businesses not just as economic engines—they are places where culture, leadership, belonging, and political power are fostered.

Tash was born and raised in the Bay Area as a child of refugees. For 15 years, they have brought their lived experience to their abolitionist politics as a community organizer who’s been fighting to decarcerate jails and redirect resources out of carceral budgets and into life-affirming solutions. They’re trained in restorative justice, mediation, and various conflict resolution techniques.

Tash also serves as a board member of Critical Resistance’s Building People Power project. They love noodles, backpacking to alpine lakes, and nerding out over music and poetry.

As Co-Director of Liberating Investment in the Food & Farm Ecosystem, Shantell Bingham is reshaping philanthropy to build economic power and self-determination within our food system.

For over a decade, she has united communities, organizations, and government partners to drive a just transition for our environment and food system. From catalyzing historic municipal investment at Cultivate Charlottesville’s Food Justice Network to forging diverse partnerships across the United States, she consistently turns grassroots strategies into tangible change.

Previously, as Organizing Director at the Climate Justice Alliance, she supported frontline communities to challenge polluting industries while advancing solutions for a regenerative economy. Her work with initiatives like the Fund to Build Grassroots Power and the Transformational Farm Bill Advisory Committee reflects her deep commitment to ensuring frontline leaders direct the flow of funding.

A 2020 Castanea Fellow serving on the organization’s steering committee, Shantell is guided by the spirit of her great-grandparents, who were North Carolina tobacco sharecroppers and railroad workers, in her unwavering belief in the fundamental right to self-determination for all. As a working mother of two, she enjoys building the diverse relationships required to realize a new world.

Sheena is a fundraising coach/strategist/bridgebuilder and producer committed to achieving social justice and healing by centering truth-based relationships between Black & Indigenous communities and the philanthropic sector. As Founder and Principal for Mountaintop Capital, she consults with social justice leaders, foundations and donors to mobilize resources toward power-building and self-determination in these communities.

Sheena is also the Principal Steward of Terrapin Fund for Restoration & Justice, a combined impact fund that supports organizations working toward strengthening local food systems. The fund promotes donor education and engagement on restorative solutions such as traditional land and water stewardship practices, community organizing, narrative power and relational leadership.

With three decades of experience serving across progressive movements, she held leadership roles at basebuilding and racial justice organizations such as Color Of Change and Center for Popular Democracy. Most recently, Sheena served as a Director at Decolonizing Wealth Project/Liberated Capital, where she led resource mobilization strategy, oversaw grantmaking for the Food & Land Justice Fund, and advised the Indigenous Earth Fund.

A member of the Narragansett Tribe, Sheena continues a legacy of land and water stewardship. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley and serves on the boards of the Watershed Center, North Star Fund and the Local Catch Network.

Saa’un Bell (she/her) is Executive Vice President at Power California, leading one of California’s largest youth civic engagement efforts and building political power in the Central Valley and rural inland California. She leads policy, narrative, and electoral strategies, and has built an artist and storyteller network. Saa’un believes in lineage over legacy: building leaders and institutions that communities can carry forward.

Saa’un spent a decade at Californians for Justice, rising from organizer to Senior Strategy Director. She organized Black and Brown youth, helped establish a requirement for student voice in the Local Control Funding Formula, co-developed the Relationship-Centered Schools framework adopted by 20 school districts, and founded a statewide education narrative strategy table.

Across her work, Saa’un sees how trust, place, and relationships build community power. She researches young Californians’ political participation through annual polling and explored these questions as an inaugural Democracy Policy Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. She weaves artists, local voices, and place into civic infrastructure to build trust, renew democracy, and expand economic opportunity. Saa’un serves on the executive committee of the Million Voters Project.

A daughter of a Black Southerner and a Bisayan immigrant, Saa’un’s working-class, Black Southern, and Filipino roots inspire her work. Saa’un studied philosophy and sociology at UC Riverside.

For joy, she writes fiction, reads the New Philosopher and sci-fi, collects art, and fishes along the California coast.