Barbara Byrd is the Secretary-Treasurer of the Oregon AFL-CIO and a member of AFT Local #2277.  Her duties include overseeing economic development, workforce training and green jobs/climate change issues. She also coordinates the activities of the Oregon Apollo Alliance, which is housed at the Oregon AFL-CIO. Barbara sits on the Leadership Council for the AFL-CIO’s Center for Green Jobs and teaches in the AFL-CIO’s Leadership Institute.

During the past year, Barbara  worked with community groups and unions to help craft a Community Workforce Agreement for the City of Portland’s pilot residential weatherization program, Clean Energy Works. She has also been involved in the effort to have Portland designated a pilot site for the Emerald Cities program.  About two years ago, Barbara helped to organize a Western regional labor group, including heads of the labor federations from the Western US and British Columbia, to push labor’s agenda with the Western Climate Initiative.

In December, 2010, Barbara attended the United Nations Climate Change Convention in Copenhagen, Denmark, Indonesia, as part of the official US labor delegation.

Barbara’s “day job” is as a faculty member of the Labor Education and Research Center (LERC) at the University of Oregon in Portland.  In that position, she teaches workshops and classes for union activists and leaders, including grievance handling, leadership skills, and internal organizing.  She also oversees LERC’s green jobs and climate change work. Recently, she and her colleagues have been conducting labor and climate training sessions around the state, attempting to mobilize greater labor participation in the state climate policy arena.

Barbara has a Masters Degree in Labor Studies and a Ph.D. in Adult Education.

Lisa Hoyos is the California Coordinator for the Apollo Alliance. She is also a Senior Specialist on Climate and Green Jobs at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Lisa has two decades of experience working on labor and environmental issues as a campaigner and policy staffer. She has worked for the national AFL-CIO as a California Senior Field Representative, as the Political Director of the South Bay Labor Council, and as an organizer of Latino immigrant workers with SEIU’s Justice for Janitors. She served, under state Senator Tom Hayden, as an analyst to the CA Senate Natural Resources Committee and has worked with environmental organizations including Greenpeace and the Environmental Project on Central America. In addition to her many years of US-based work, Lisa worked for two years leading a globalization project with the Congress of South African Trade Unions in Johannesburg and has coordinated the prominent global fair trade network “Our World Is Not For Sale”. Lisa serves or has served on boards of organizations including the Labor Network for Sustainability, the California Fair Trade Coalition, Working Partnerships USA, United for a Fair Economy and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Lisa is fluent in Spanish. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two happiness-inducing young boys.

Joe Uehlein, Jeremy Brecher, and Brendan Smith also serve on the LNS Board. (Bios available here)