Our Staff
Sheerine Alemzadeh
she/her
Co-founder, Co-director
The proud daughter of Iranian immigrants, Sheerine works to transform responses to gender-based violence in marginalized communities as an activist, litigator, thought leader, and organizer.
Her career has focused on building bridges between social movements, applying intersectional approaches to human rights activism, and promoting shared leadership as a path to sustained social progress.
Karla Altmayer
she/they
Co-founder, Co-director
Raised on Chicago’s Southside by a single-mother from Mexico, Karla is driven by her family’s experience with poverty, sexual violence, racism, and incarceration to dismantle the cultural conditions enabling gender-based violence. As an attorney, she developed an innovative and nationally recognized promotora model so survivors could organize and build solidarity. As co-director of Healing to Action, Karla continues to collaborate with survivors, building their individual and collective power.
Mac Grambauer
they/she
Operations Director
Mac's experience as a nonprofit consultant
unearthed their passions in cultivating healthy work cultures, collaborative exploration, and collective liberation. Knitting together their interest in efficient system design, experience as life-long, year-round Chicago biker, and passion for social justice, Mac brings holistic and innovative approaches to teambuilding and sustainability.
Ashley Hart
she/her
Development Manager
Ashley’s own experience of domestic, workplace,
and gender-based violence fuels her personal
and professional work towards collective healing and liberation. In earning her Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and BA degrees in Psychology and Women’s & Gender Studies at DePaul University, Ashley found her passion for the decolonization and redistribution of wealth through trust-based and transformative philanthropy. Ashley bridges her development and social work experience to bring forth emergent strategy and sustainability
to the nonprofit sector.
Romina Vargas Bezzubikoff
she/her
Impact Manager
A first-generation immigrant born in Peru and
raised in Kansas, Romina has been passionate
about working with the people most impacted by community violence since volunteering at a grassroots organization in her hometown. After graduating from the University of Chicago, she explored the legal field by assisting survivors as a paralegal at the Domestic Violence Courthouse. She then shifted to organizing at Healing to Action to focus on addressing the root causes of gender-based violence alongside survivor-leaders.
Jocelyn Moreno
she/her
Organizing Manager
Raised in a mixed-status, working-class
family on Chicago’s South Side, Jocelyn’s lived experiences with poverty, racism, legal awareness, and harmful patriarchal culture shaped her commitment to survivor-centered, healing-focused work. These experiences led her to Healing to Action, where she works as an interdisciplinary leader weaving together her experiences as an organizer, doula, and graphic designer to support healing
and center survivors.
Clay Cofre
they/them
Campaign Organizer
Clay is a Queer Ecuadorian American Organizer
from Chicago passionate about immigrant rights, abolition, and liberation through creative practice. Fueled by their family’s generational experience with various forms of violence, Clay looks to break cycles through their community organizing work on the Northwest side and of course as a member of the Healing to Action team. In their free time, Clay moves through the world as a bilingual poet, an eldest sibling, and a proud Executive Committee member of Vecinos Unidos del Barrio 26.
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