My name is Peter Brogan and I am overjoyed to be joining the PAT this year as your new UniServ Consultant. I was born and raised in New York City, but for the last few years I've been working with teachers and other education workers across Northern California, as an organizer and representative with the California Federation of Teachers (CFT). Prior to working at CFT, I was an organizer with the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), where I organized and represented mental health workers at Kaiser Permanente, from Fresno to the Napa Valley.

In my former life before I was full-time union staff, I worked at York University in Toronto, Canada, teaching geography and labor studies while I completed a PhD in critical human geography. When I wasn’t busy teaching, I was a rank-and-file leader in my local union and engaged in a wide array of social justice organizing and training. My research examined the connections between urban transformation and corporate education reform, and the ways everyday classroom teachers in Chicago and New York City organized to transform their unions into effective vehicles to contest the corporate assault on teachers, our unions, and public education more broadly.

As a writer and an organizer, I have tried to distill the many organizing and political lessons of my research and on-the-ground work with education and healthcare workers. I believe it’s still possible to build strong, member-driven unions, and that they can be powerful vehicles for achieving social and racial justice in our cities and building the schools that our students and communities truly deserve.

I am excited to put my varied activist, organizing, representational, and research experiences to work at the PAT, so that I can support you in achieving your goals of winning the schools that Portland deserves.