Laura Abellera (she/her) received her M.S.Ed. from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL) while spending her graduate assistantship in the Research and Resource Center for Campus Climate working with college students involved with social justice programming. She has experience with hate response, prevention, and intervention and was a member of UWL’s Hate Response Team. She also received her J.D. from Loyola University Chicago, focusing on civil rights, public interest work, and legislative/policy research. Laura has undergraduate teaching experience in the area of Racial & Ethnic studies, in UWL’s Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department.
Laura currently works as a justice consultant and educator with Social Responsibility Speaks (SRS). She often brings her own identities as a queer, brown, multi-racial woman into educational spaces to better facilitate collective and shared learning experiences. She is passionate about cultivating strong systems of community care and social transformation rooted in liberation, healing, and harm reduction. Prior to her current role, she worked with and learned from the incredible youth-centered team at Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT) developing curriculum, providing leadership development for students, as well as political organizing around their organizational issue platform that has continued ground her educational philosophy and organizing framework.