Meet the Team

Staff, Board and Advisory Board

Staff

Justin Lock is the Executive Director of Not In Our Town (NIOT), a movement of people across the country working to build safe, inclusive communities for all. Justin brings deep experience in conflict resolution and community engagement to his role as NIOT's Executive Director. He previously led the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service (CRS), “America’s Peacemaker,” which was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to help communities address hate crimes and identity-based conflicts. At CRS, Justin led nationwide efforts to mediate tensions, respond to bias incidents, and support communities in crisis. His work underscored both the corrosive impact of hate, eroding trust, safety, and civic bonds, and the possibility of healing when people respond with honesty, solidarity, and resilience. At NIOT, Justin is committed to equipping local leaders with resources to counter hate, strengthening school-based initiatives, expanding community networks, and amplifying stories of civic courage that inspire action nationwide.

Patrice O’Neill, Executive Producer is a filmmaker and Founder of Not In Our Town. For 25 years, O'Neill has fostered a network of “Not In Our Town” activists and helped lead screenings of her films and town hall meetings in hundreds of communities nationwide. (longer bio)

Andrew Giang is the Programs and Communications Manager for Not In Our Town and United Against Hate Week. He is a nonprofit leader and consultant, holding a Master of Business Administration from the University of Southern California and a Master of Science in Education from Johns Hopkins University. His prior experiences as a project director, K-12 teacher and academic chair in Title I Schools, youth coach, writer, and editor for major publications shape his holistic approach to communicating and collaborating across NIOT and UAHWeek's diverse audiences, grounding his work in both empathy and community impact.

Eliza Veronda is the Administrative Assistant for NIOT. Eliza is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Data Analyst. She is responsible for the support of our Executive Producer/CEO, Co-Directors and team of staff members. Her experience includes working with the Stephen D. Bechtel Foundation as a Grants Administrator collaborating with many non-profit education, environment and effectiveness organizations to fund much needed public initiatives. Previously, she worked as a Manager of Healthcare Data Analysis for HealthNet, Inc. and an Employee Assistance Counselor for the Teamster Union helping to treat family members with mental health and substance abuse conditions. She holds a Master of Social Work from Arizona State University and a Master of Public Administration from New York University.

Pardeep Singh Kaleka is a leader and senior strategic advisor to Not In Our Town. He first became acquainted with NIOT when the production team came to film the story of the attack at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. His father and six other Sikhs were killed by a white supremacist. Pardeep joined NIOT in touring the country to show the film, Waking in Oak Creek, in 2014. In 2020, he became co-leader of our virtual conversation series, and in 2022, he joined the NIOT leadership team. As a first-generation immigrant from India, Pardeep has spent over 25 years working in the fields of law enforcement, education, and social services, as well as assisting survivors of hate crimes across the United States with their recovery. Pardeep is the author of "The Gift of Our Wounds" and also serves as a hate and violence prevention advisor with The Working Group and a de-radicalization trauma-focused clinical therapist with Parents4Peace.

Board of Directors

Frank Dukes is a mediator and facilitator with the Institute for Engagement & Negotiation at the University of Virginia (UVA). He has mediated numerous collaborative change processes, including negotiations involving communities impacted by the 2014 Duke Energy coal ash release and work with Appalachian communities undergoing economic transition. He founded University & Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE) to address UVA’s legacy of slavery and white supremacy, led community engagement as a member of the design team for UVA’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, and was a member of Charlottesville’s Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces determining the fate of the City’s Confederate statues. He also served as lead mediator resulting in the descendants of the enslaved communities at James Madison’s Montpelier gaining parity at this National Trust for Historic Preservation property, including parity of representation on the board of directors.

Grande Lum is Director of the Martin Daniel Gould Center for Conflict Resolution at Stanford Law School which houses the Gould Negotiation and Mediation Program and the Gould Alternative Dispute Research Initiative. He is the co-author of America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights as well as the author of the books The Negotiation Fieldbook and Tear Down the Wall: Be Your Own Mediator in Conflict. Lum was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the US Senate unanimously as director of the Community Relations Service (CRS), an agency within the Department of Justice. A San Francisco native, his scholarship and work focus on civil rights community based mediation, consensus building, dispute facilitation, polarization prevention, negotiation, mediation, and public policy. Prior to joining Stanford Law School, he was senior partner at the Rebuild Congress Initiative, a program of the Harvard Negotiation Project and Issue One. He was the founding director of the Divided Community Project at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Grande joined The Working Group /Not In Our Town board in May 2020.

Jacquelyn McCormick is former Chief of Staff to Mayor Jesse Arreguin of Berkeley, CA. Jacquelyn is a community leader, devoted organizer and activist. In 2016, she joined newly elected Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin as his Senior Advisor and became his Chief of Staff in early 2019 following a career in architecture, project management and holding senior leadership positions in corporate facility management. During 2017, right-wing extremists came to Berkeley almost a dozen times.

In response to the tragedies of Charlottesville and in preparation for a similar demonstration in Berkeley, Jacquelyn organized the printing and distribution of over 50,000 signs in Berkeley and neighboring communities. These signs, still found in the windows of businesses and homes, bear the message that each community stands United Against Hate. This one-time effort has evolved into the United Against Hate movement, a growing regional week of action to build safe and inclusive communities that Jacquelyn co-chairs. Jacquelyn joined the The Working Group / Not in Our Town board in October 2019.

David Shim was born and raised in Pittsburgh by his immigrant parents. He has raised two daughters with his wife, Vicky, in Oakland, where he can often be seen on charity bike rides, hiking or volunteering at his daughter’s school. He also is an innovation and strategy executive and entrepreneur, most recently serving as the Global Head of Corporate Strategy and Innovation at Samsung. He led and supported innovation initiatives to improve access and delivery of healthcare, accelerate the growth of battery and energy storage products needed for a green energy sector, and increase opportunities in entrepreneurship and the tech sector for underrepresented groups. David previously was an executive at SAP and Sybase overseeing mobile and data analytic businesses, and founder of an early mobile cloud services company. He graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School.

Diana McLain Smith is a former partner at the Monitor Group where she chaired Monitor University, and a former executive partner at New Profit, a philanthropy firm that invests in social entrepreneurs. She has led change efforts for 35 years in some of America’s most iconic businesses and cutting-edge non-profits. Her Leading Through Relationship (LTR)™ approach turns intergroup conflict into a constructive force for change. She is the author of the award-winning book Remaking the Space Between Us as well as The Elephant in the Room, Divide Or Conquer, Action Science (with Chris Argyris and Robert Putnam), and dozens of articles. Diana has served as a guest lecturer at Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Boston College’s Carroll School of Management.

Ken Sorey is the Executive Director of the National Laboratory for Education Transformation (www.NLET.org), a California-based nonprofit committed to transformational change in K-12, higher education, and workforce development. He is a nationally respected expert in state data systems and solving complex institutional barriers to students using data. He has also successfully managed large, complex statewide school and college improvement initiatives leading to increased and equitable student success. Ken currently serves as the treasurer of the board of directors for Hack the Hood, is the past president of the PTO for a large middle school in Oakland, CA and joined the board of Not In Our Town in 2023 after a long advisory relationship with NIOT over many years.

Adam Strom is the Director of Re-Imagining Migration. Throughout his career, Mr. Strom has connected the academy to classrooms and the community by using the latest scholarship to encourage learning about identity, bias, belonging, history, and the challenges and opportunities of civic engagement in our globalized world. The resources developed under Strom’s direction have been used in tens of thousands of classrooms and experienced by millions of students around the world including Stories of Identity: Religion, Migration, and Belonging in a Changing World, What Do We Do with a Difference? France and The Debate Over Headscarves in Schools, Identity, and Belonging in a Changing Great Britain, and the viewer’s guide to I Learn America. Before joining the Reimagining Migration Project, Strom was the Director of Scholarship and Innovation at Facing History and Ourselves.

Advisory Council

Aman Ahuja is a founder of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of DataKind, a non-profit dedicated to helping NGOs and other organizations tackle data science problems. In his third year as chapter leader, Aman focused on developing processes and leadership structures that lead to successful, sustainable projects. With a background in engineering and physics, he worked for several years at a consulting firm that focused on content management systems, taking on roles as a project manager, business analyst, and data engineer.

Susan Bro Susan Bro is the mother of Heather Heyer, and a Co-Founder of the Heather Heyer Foundation (HHF). Susan launched the foundation to carry on the legacy of her daughter, Heather, who was murdered while standing up for social justice with her friends on August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia. For 18 years, Susan was an educator with a specialty in Early Childhood education. Susan now works as the President of the Heather Heyer Foundation and Board Chair. Based on her daughter's adopted motto, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention," Susan brings Heather's legacy alive by sharing a positive call to action to speak up and step out for social justice and civil rights through dialogue and understanding.

Dawn Collins Since 2017, when her son, 2nd Lt. Richard Collins III, was violently murdered in an unprovoked attack on the campus of the University of Maryland, College Park, by a follower of an Alt Reich Facebook group, Collins has been a leader in the fight against hate crimes, particularly in the State of Maryland. Collins and her husband, Richard Collins Jr., are working to formalize the foundation, started in their son’s name; The Lt Richard W. Collins III Foundation. Their goal is twofold: 1) to provide scholarships to students attending historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the State of Maryland and 2) to educate the public, in general, and parents of students of all races and ethnicities about not only the preponderance of hate groups that are targeting majority-white colleges and universities for purposes of recruiting new members to promote hate but also to provide resources for combatting these groups’ insidious objectives.

Ellen Hume is a journalist, teacher and civil society activist who works on the front lines of democracy around the world. In Boston she is a cofounder of Boston Indivisible and a member of the vestry of Old North Church. She led the successful effort to landmark the historic North End immigrant bathhouse. Living in Budapest (2009-2016), she mentored journalists and founded a project on Roma integration. Before that, she was research director of the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT (2008-9), and creator of the New England Ethnic Newswire (2007-2009). Hume’s analysis of why independent journalism hasn’t done well in post-Communist countries “Caught in the Middle: Central and Eastern European Journalism at a Crossroads” was published in 2011 by the Center for International Media Assistance. Her earlier report “Media Missionaries” was the first comprehensive study of U.S. efforts to train foreign journalists, published in 2004 by the Knight Foundation. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the advisory aboard of the Center for International Media Assistance, the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University, and DIREKT36, a Hungarian investigative reporting group. An international journalism trainer from 1993-2020, Hume also served on the board of Internews.

Pardeep Singh Kaleka is a hate and violence prevention advisor and Strategic Advisor to Not In Our Town. He is a de-radicalization and trauma psychotherapist, assisting individuals off ramp from violent ideologies. Pardeep is a faculty member in the Peace Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the author of, “The Gifts of Our Wounds,” and an award-winning columnist with Milwaukee Independent. In 2012, following the murder of his father in the hate crime killings at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, he co-founded Serve2Unite, an organization nationally recognized for bridging school and community groups. As a first-generation immigrant from India, Mr. Kaleka has spent more than 25 years in the public arenas of law enforcement, education, social services, counseling, and assisting hate crime survivors and perpetrators across the United States with recovery. With a specialization in understanding the impacts of communal trauma, he has developed policies and practices to help mental health workers, social service practitioners, law enforcement agents, and educators build healthier, safer, more inclusive communities across the US. Pardeep understands that genuine healing must happen both internally and externally and that we all must empower one another to communicate, connect, and create a world that is less hateful and divided.

Arno Michaelis in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a leader of a worldwide racist skinhead organization, a reverend of a self-declared Racial Holy War, and lead singer of the hate-metal band Centurion, which sold 20,000 CDs by the mid-nineties and is still popular with racists today. Single parenthood, love for his daughter, and the forgiveness shown by people he once hated all helped to turn Arno's life around, bringing him to embrace diversity and practice gratitude for all life. After spending over a decade as a successful information technology consultant and entrepreneur, Arno is now a speaker, author of My Life After Hate, and very fortunate to be able to share his ongoing process of character development as an educator working with Serve 2 Unite. Founded as an ongoing peaceful response to the August 5th 2012 Sikh Temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, S2U engages students creatively with a global network of peacemakers and mentors in partnership with Against Violent Extremism, The Forgiveness Project, Arts @ Large, and Parents for Peace. Arno’s customizable keynotes and workshops leverage noble qualities of compassion, curiosity, and kindness to engage all human beings, building foundations for diversity appreciation and cultural agility.

Rabbi Sydney Mintz was ordained in 1997 by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion where she progressed through the Jerusalem, Los Angeles and New York campuses. Rabbi Mintz has served on the Reform Movement's Commission on Social Action, the Board of the Brandeis Hillel Day School and the Pacific Association of Reform Rabbis, the Rabbinic Advisory Councils of Shalom Bayit-the San Francisco Jewish Domestic Violence Board and the Jewish Community High School of the Bay. In addition to lecturing widely in the area of Midrash and Jewish humor, she is currently on the Board of the Documentary Production, "A Gift for Laughter-Comedy and the Jews." Rabbi Mintz became a Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem after completing her fellowship in 2004. She helped to found the award-winning Late Shabbat Young Adult Program at Congregation Emanu-El where she has served as Rabbi since her ordination in 1997. Rabbi Mintz led Team Emanu-El in the AIDS Lifecycle Ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles and is an avid open ocean swimmer.

Deepak Puri is a Silicon Valley veteran with executive experience at Oracle, Netscape and VMware. He specializes in applying technology to maximize the impact of philanthropy and volunteers with non-profit groups such as Ashoka, Taproot and IESC. Deepak is the co-founder of Democracy Labs, a nonprofit that applies innovative storytelling apps to social justice and voting rights causes, and also serves on the board of the Tides Foundation.

Brian Williams is a professor of public policy in the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Williams is also a Visiting Scholar and Advisory Board Member for UVA’s Center for Public Safety & Justice. His research centers on issues related to demographic diversity, local law enforcement, and public governance, with special attention devoted to the co-production of public safety and public order. He is interested in understanding how the assorted experiences and perceptions of officers and members of the public affect the formation and functioning of their working partnerships to understand and mitigate or address community problems. He is currently involved in research projects that study how law enforcement professionals experience and manage work related trauma that they encounter during their daily routine.

Contributors to Not In Our Town and The Working Group:

Charene Zalis, Linda Peckam and Lisa Frank are producers of Repairing the World: Stories From the Tree of Life Jeremy Jue, a decades long contributor to Not In Our Town, was Associate Producer of the film, along with Emma Schwartz.

Rhian Miller, Co-Founder of The Working Group, is an independent documentary television and radio producer. Miller served over 25 years as the senior producer on the company’s award-winning national public television programs focusing on labor, civil and equal rights. Miller was a producer on the original Not In Our Town film, Not In Our Town II, When Hate Happens Here and Class Actions. Along with Patrice O’Neill, Miller helped develop the Not In Our Town program. Miller has served as a freelance producer on numerous NPR/PBS television and radio programs for over ten years, with specific community focus and local engagement aspects. Miller created and produces the Wonderland Radio Hour series, a community showcase of musicians, artists, historians and characters from along and around the Russian River and the My American Dreams television series presenting the lives and voices of undocumented youth seeking deportation relief and federal recognition through the Dream Act.

Kelly Whalen is an independent documentary film director and producer, and a Berkeley City College faculty member of the Multimedia Department, where she teach video arts. Kelly directed and produced the national Emmy-nominated documentary “Tulia, Texas” (PBS’ Independent Lens,) documenting a landmark civil rights case exposing racial injustices in America’s War on Drugs. Kelly was a producer for Not In Our Town specials “Light in the Darkness,” and “The Fire Next Time,” (POV), and produced numerous regional episodes of the anti-violence storytelling project. She was a producer at San Francisco's PBS/NPR affiliate KQED, where my team covered the region’s creative communities and beyond. Her producing and directing credits include “Rising from Ruin” (MSNBC’s Hurricane Katrina special,) “Policing the Force” (WNET’s Expose: America’s Investigative Reports,) and “Murder in St. Petersburg” (PBS FRONTLINE World.)

Erika Gosser, and Alicia Upano were integral to the creation of NIOT.org. Additional producers and contributors include Barbara Nishi, Diana Smith Emma Clune, Diana Calloway, Mimi Shum, Kate McLean, Heather Blackwell Gersh, Christina Corodimas, Kirthi Nath, and Sue Fishkoff; producer Adrienne Calo; and editors Anthony Lucero, Bob Laird, Matt Dibble, Andy Gersh, Jeremy Jue and Jill Strong. David Molina is responsible for some of the music featured in the videos on NIOT.org. You can find David's music here. Additional music was provided by Music Orange and Dave Nelson of Outpost Studios.

NIOT.org was built and designed by EchoDitto and their collaborators at Biro Creative. NIOT is in the process of creating a new version of this site in collaboration with Ben Johnson and Courtney Miller.