Stacy Kono Featured in Center for Transformative Change Journal

Stacy Kono is the Director of Programmatic Partnerships at the Rockwood Leadership Institute. She oversees Rockwood’s trainings and fellowship programs which equip over 300 leaders a year with tools in collaboration and sustainable leadership. She joined Rockwood after having worked for ten years as an organizer with Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) in Oakland.

Stacy Kono has been a social justice activist for the past 20 years. I was moved to learn that her inspiration to work for social justice came from the stories of her family and community’s experiences during World War II. As a a third generation Japanese-American, Stacy’s parents went into the internment camps as children and so were just old enough to remember what it was like to be incarcerated. Just old enough to pass the stories on to her that became the roots of her social justice work. “The stories of [my parents'] and my community’s experiences made me aware of and angry at systemic racism and war. As I learned more about other social movements, I saw the connections with my family’s experience to many peoples all over the world and was moved to commit myself to work towards justice.”  read more...