OUR Team members
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Executive Director
Cheryl M. Williams is a 43 year resident of Santa Cruz County, recently retired after a long career working for the Santa Cruz County Administrative Offices. Her career spanned across all branches of local government: judicial, executive, and administrative. She learned how money is disseminated and public policies are designed to impact marginalized and underserved communities. Her involvement at the level of which she was working illuminated the need for collaborative and cross-sectional problem solving. During her tenure, she was an active member of SEIU serving on the Board of Directors, in many roles. While there, her primary focus was making certain that her community was included and represented, and pushed for a Black/African American Caucus.
Prior to moving to Santa Cruz County, Cheryl lived in the South End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. She attended Boston University where she pursued her passion for Biology recognizing the importance of having a visual representation of having a Black Woman in the role of scientist. While there, she requested to be housed in the intercultural floor of her dorm where she amplified her love for other cultures.
Cheryl’s social activism was sparked at the age of 13 when her Mother gave her the book,100 Years of Lynching by Ralph Ginzburg, chronicalling the lynching of 5,000 American Black Males and 10 Females through photographs, newspaper articles, posters. Upon recognizing the atrocious events contained in the book, she chose instead to learn about how the Black community pushed back rather than how they were victimized.
Currently, Cheryl is the Executive Director of Santa Cruz Black, a Black led grassroots organization dedicated to empowering the Black community across generations and intersectionalities. Her work focuses on housing affordability, wealth generation, and mental wellness. Her vision is to see a more inclusive community free of the stressors brought upon by racial injustice.
Cheryl is an artist at heart with a passion for making jewelry and her best creation has been her son Damian, a self taught musician.
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Staff member
Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on Black geographies and the African diaspora in Italy. Camilla is founder and co-director of the UCSC Black Geographies Lab, and also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean and co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders and Citizenship and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity. In 2020, Camilla was named one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 "Women of the Year" for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Hellman Foundation, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the Italian Scientists and Scholars in North American Foundation. Camilla received her PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley in 2018.
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Staff member
Christine Hong is Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) and Literature at UC Santa Cruz. She directs the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz, serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, and co-chairs the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council. She also is a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. In greater Santa Cruz, she serves on the board of Santa Cruz Black and organizes with Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice. Her book, A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, was published by Stanford University Press in 2020. Along with Deann Borshay Liem, she co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. She also guest-edited a two-volume thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies on Reframing North Korean Human Rights (2013-14); a special issue of positions: asia critique on The Unending Korean War (2015); and a forum of The Abusable Past on “White Terror, ‘Red’ Island: A People’s Archive of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre.”
