Sandra Mendoza

Lead Campaign Organizer - Central America

Sandra is a labor and community organizer, and social justice advocate, with over fifteen years of experience working with unions, human rights, and advocacy groups across the United Sates to empower, organize and strengthen low-income communities and vulnerable populations. She has worked on numerous political, electoral, and organizing campaigns that included airport, food service, distribution centers, industrial laundries, and hospitality workers in the South with UNITE, UNITE HERE, and Workers United-SEUI unions. Sandra worked as a human rights investigator monitoring the Fair Food Program, a worker-lead, market-driven social responsibility initiative to ensure compliance of a human-rights code of conduct that included zero tolerance for forced labor and sexual assault. In this role, she conducted field investigations of human and labor rights violations in migrant worker camps, including incidents of discrimination, retaliation, and sexual harassment experienced by female farmworkers in tomato fields in Florida. Before GLJ-ILRF, Sandra was Senior Manager of Community Impact with United Way Suncoast where she built strategic collaboratives and managed community partnerships to successfully established a family resource center and an after-school program, both place-based initiatives which provided community resources and services, and education equity to low-income neighborhoods that greatly reduced social and economic barriers to access. Sandra is originally from El Salvador and fluent in Spanish.