Executive Assistant

Alea Chedekel

Alea Chedekel joins Alliance for Girls as the Executive Assistant. In her role, Alea coordinates executive correspondence, strengthens organization for internal databases and systems, and supports a variety of grant and reporting work in order to grow Alliance for Girls’ administrative capacity.

Alea graduated from American University in 2019 with a B.A. in Political Science with a focus in Gender, Race and Politics, and Public Health. Alea brings internal coordination and organizing experience from a breadth of political campaign and non-profit work, including multiple member organizations of AFG such as NARAL Pro-Choice California and Shalom Bayit. Alea’s passion for gender equity work stems from her connection to the Jewish value of Tikkun Olam, “repairing the world,” and her commitment to advocate for reproductive justice and liberation.

Outside of work Alea can be found learning to cook something new, reading about sustainable fashion, volunteering to improve reproductive health access, or enjoying a local hiking trail.

Deputy Director

Chantal Hildebrand

Alliance for Girls’ (AFG) is thrilled to announce the promotion of Chantal Hildebrand as the organization’s first Deputy Director. Chantal first joined AFG in February 2021 as the Director of Programs. Chantal’s leadership and expertise will help shape the next phase of impact of our dynamic organization, whose budget and staff have grown tremendously in recent years, and whose programs continue to grow in complexity, scale and reach.

Chantal has almost a decade’s worth of experience working in the nonprofit sector to advance equity, through community mobilization, capacity building, advocacy, technical assistance, community-based participatory action research, and program management in international and California-based programming. She brings an intersectional lens and a passion for creating spaces for historically oppressed populations to share their diverse experiences and lead decision-making processes to improve their lives and wellbeing, and that of their communities. Prior to joining AFG, she worked as a program manager at Rise Up where she managed the organization’s programming in five sub-Saharan African countries and California, developing the capacity of civil society and nonprofit leaders in girl and women-led advocacy to advance improve the lives of women and girls in their communities and countries. Through these programs, Chantal helped fund over 50 civil society organizations’ advocacy strategies that contributed to the amendment, passage, and implementation of over 20 policies, implementation guidelines, and budgets addressing issues of gender inequity at the local, state, and national level.

Chantal received her Masters degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in Public Health and City Planning, where she explored the relationship between the built environment, health, opportunity, gender, race, access, policy, and socio-economics.

Outside of work, Chantal is an artist and printmaker and volunteers with local and global organizations fighting for racial justice. She enjoys spending time in nature, swimming, and trying new foods.

Finance and HR Administrator

Danielle Sims Montgomery

Danielle has worked for more than 20 years in administration, bookkeeping, and Human Resources. She has her Masters Degree in Psychology and has earned her Professional Human Resource Certification. She specializes in working with small organizations and non-profit industries and has a passion for helping youth and young adults reach their full potential.

Favorite Quote:  If you do not have a goal, you are just complaining!

In her free time she enjoys spending her free time with her sons and her husband of 29 years.

Founding Executive Director

Emma Mayerson

Emma Mayerson is the Founding Executive Director of Alliance for Girls (AFG), the nation’s largest membership association of girls-serving organizations. Under Ms. Mayerson’s leadership AFG has become the nation’s largest regional alliance of girls’ organizations, working collectively to ensure girl-serving organizations are more connected, more effective and better able to prepare the girls of today to be the leaders of tomorrow.

Prior to AFG, Mayerson was a community organizer for the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, and worked in development for the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco and the Women’s Foundation of California. She has also served on the Board of Directors for Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice, ProjectGlimmer, and the Jewish Community Federation’s Impact Grants Initiative.

Mayerson is a recipient of Oasis for Girls’ Spark Award for Visionary Leadership, the National Council on Jewish Women’s Outstanding Advocate for Social Change Award, the Delilah Beasley Award, Love Never Fail’s Advocacy for At-Risk Girls Award and the National Girls Initiative Innovation Award. She has also received honors in recognition of her leadership from the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women and Equal Rights Advocates. Her work has been featured on CBS Channel 4 News, ABC 7 News, KCBS, the Oakland Post, NPR’s All Things Considered and Telemundo.

Advocacy Director

Haleema Bharoocha

Haleema Bharoocha joined Alliance for Girls’ staff in June 2019, as the Advocacy Manager to build out a girl’s policy agenda and mobilize alliance members for gender justice. Now as Advocacy Director, she leads county and state level advocacy to meet the expressed needs of girls and gender expansive youth. Most recently, she led advocacy with AFG members to secure funding to address period poverty, support the needs of young moms, and address safety from gender-based violence on public transportation.

Haleema is a sociologist, public servant, and change maker driven by her commitment to the collective liberation of all people. Uplifted by generations of women of color in her family, Haleema centers her work in compassion, justice, and service. Following the teachings of the Quran which says “stand firm in justice even against yourself and your parents,” Haleema speaks truth to power in her advocacy and engages in critical self-reflection.

She believes in the power of people to make systematic change. Outside of Alliance for Girls, Haleema is a consultant and trainer, facilitating equity-focused workshops for advocates on topics including bystander intervention, Islamophobia, racial equity, and gender justice and has trained over 700 people. Haleema is also a self-defense trainer and facilitator at Malikah, a nonprofit that builds safety and power for all women.

Haleema studied Sociology at Seattle University, where she founded the Gender Justice Center, a student-led community center serving gender non-conforming, trans*, and female-identifying students, which provided trauma-informed healing circles, access to lactation facilities, non-binary sex education, and a free community food and hygiene pantry. She is an alumnus of the Women’s Policy Institute, Greenlining Institute, and Rockwood Leadership program. Her work was featured in the Seattle Times #UsToo highlighting the voices of Muslim women of color. Her views have been shared in Teen Vogue, San Francisco Chronicle, and Gizmodo, and other media outlets.

Outside of organizing and social justice work, you can find Haleema at her local CrossFit gym where she does weightlifting or at the beach drinking coffee.

Director of Membership Services

Kailin Chou

Kailin Chou joined Alliance for Girls’ staff in July 2014, providing broad support for leaders of girl-serving organizations, managing membership engagement and outreach, developing Alliance for Girls’ communications, and coordinating services and resources among members and the community. Since joining, Alliance for Girls has become the largest alliance of girls’ organizations and champions working collectively to effect powerful change for girls, young women, and their communities.

Kailin has a strong passion for supporting children, youth, and marginalized communities. She has more than a decade of experience in the nonprofit sector, both in direct service and in management and administration. This includes mentoring children, supporting unhoused people at emergency shelters, developing the digital strategy for a large international NGO, consulting local nonprofits, and leading awareness campaigns on human trafficking.

Kailin has a Masters in Public Administration from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, with concentrations in Nonprofit Management and International Development. Her studies culminated in a consultancy for the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace, an alliance of over 30 stakeholders in Monterey County working together to reduce gang violence in Salinas and its surrounding areas. She also holds a B.S. in Management Science/Economics from the University of California, San Diego.

Kailin enjoys cooking, the outdoors, art and design, traveling, and learning languages.

School Partnerships Fellow

Kamaya Jackson

Kamaya Jackson is the School Partnerships Fellow at Alliance for Girls where she is advocating to address sexual harassment in schools. She brings her expertise as a youth leader and passionate advocate for girls’ rights and safe access to education. Previously, Kamaya served as an intern for the Mayor’s Office in the City of Oakland where she was involved in addressing sex trafficking and missing persons’ cases and their impact on women and girls of color. She is an Oakland-based high school student and aspires to help Black girls be seen and support them to thrive.

Program Coordinator

Miari Stephens

Miari Stephens joins Alliance for Girls (AFG) as the Program Coordinator. In this role, she provides support for event and meeting planning to ensure smooth and efficient program administration for both AFG and member-led events. She brings experience from organizing event programming, conferences, and workshops within campus-based organizations for graduate students of color. Miari is passionate about youth education and mentorship- she has served as a mentor for college student researchers through the Leadership Alliance’s Summer Research Opportunity Program at Harvard and as faculty for the Pre-College Summer at Harvard program teaching a course on Race, Gender, Class and Politics of Beauty and Aesthetics for visiting high school students. As a Ph.D. candidate in African & African American studies, Miari is writing a dissertation centering Black Puerto Rican women’s use of social media to organize for racial and gender justice through strengthening networks of Black feminist organizing and curating community-driven narratives online.

Director of Finance and Administration

Michelle Sare

Michelle comes from a strong leadership and university operations management background working for the University of Southern California (USC).  She has over ten years of leadership experience responsible for financial and grant management programs, faculty and student administration support and university operations development.  She started her career as a budget assistant at the USC Marshall School of Business for two years, progressed in her role as a business manager to manage finances for USC Student Affairs for seven years, receiving her Master of Arts in Education from the USC in 2011.  Michelle wanted to further advance her role to understand university financial operations and served as a grant manager helping lead the department grant programs at the USC Keck School of Medicine in the Preventive Medicine for over four years and advanced to serve as the Finance Director for another two years.  In her most recent role as the Senior Finance Director for the Kaiser Permanente Medical School where she served two years to help develop the finance infrastructure during the school’s start up phase.

Michelle is a current member of the National Council of Research Administrators (NCURA) and a member of the Financial Management Association (FMA).

Michelle received her PhD in Educational leadership from Walden University in 2021, Master of Arts in Education from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2011 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Business Administration from the University of California, Riverside in 2004.

Michelle loves spending time with her family especially with her nine-year old daughter Charlotte.  She loves to travel and learn about different cultures around the world.  She believes in helping create a culture where organizational stakeholders have opportunities to build a positive work environment and community. Transparency, ethics, strong support and communication, building and maintaining relationships are critical elements to ensure growth where organizational stakeholders can thrive, grow and built a better university culture.  She’s excited to become part of the AFG family and looks forward to its growth and success.

Communications Associate

Uchenna Esomonu

Uchenna Esomonu is the Communications Associate at Alliance For Girls. She joined the organization in 2020 serving on the Young Women’s Leadership Board where she helped champion youth-driven research that produced the Uniting Isolated Voices: Girls and Gender-Expansive Youth During COVID-19 report. She also served as a youth design strategist on the first Bay Area community and youth-led effort to end gender-based violence on public transportation. She hopes to leverage this position to amplify her work as a gender justice advocate and community leader.

Now as the Communications Associate, she is helping streamline AFG’s communications operations and implement AFG’s internal and external communications needs. Her goal is to help bring AFG’s mission and work to a broader audience by ensuring consistency and accuracy in the organization’s messaging. Using a combination of efficient social media and communications tools, she also hopes to engage the youth within AFG’s network, uplift their voices, and inform them of the extensive resources available to them.

Uchenna is a storyteller at heart. She graduated from Sacramento State University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism. While in college, she covered a variety of important issues in the Sacramento community and was published in local news outlets like the Sacramento Observer and the Sacramento News & Review.

She is passionate about expanding support services for girls* and gender-expansive youth as well as increasing girls*’ awareness and access to these services. Her goal is to help create a society that prioritizes girls*’ wellness and safety – one where barriers to girls*’ success no longer exist.

Outside of work, Uchenna is a fiction writer striving to tell stories that humanize and celebrate people who have been written off of popular narratives.

Advocacy Fellow

Viviana Arenas

Viviana Arenas is the 2021 Advocacy Fellow at Alliance for Girls where she joined the team to co-lead the “When Young Moms Thrive, We All Do” one year pilot program in Santa Clara County. In addition, Viviana is supporting Alliance for Girls’ overall advocacy program to facilitate collective advocacy for systemic change to create radical safety for girls* and gender-expansive youth at the local and state level in California.

She hopes to continue her work by helping people get access to valuable resources, knowledge, and to be an advocate for her community. Viviana is passionate about breaking down the barriers that young families face such as unaffordable child care costs, access to basic resources, and gender inequity. She envisions a world where all young families and their children have the resources they need to thrive.

Outside of work, Viviana is a full time mom of three, two girls and one boy. She is motivated everyday by her children who inspire her to create a better future for them. Viviana served as an Ambassador for Teen Success Inc. (TSI) for the last four years, and is an alumni of the 2017 program cohort. Through her perseverance and determination, she was able to receive a scholarship through TSI upon graduating from high school. She is also a part time college student in the Bay Area studying to receive her Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration.