Supporting, empowering, Mobilizing
Our Staff
Our Team
Our organizational and administrative team are hard at work supporting our Global Grassroots Activists Network around the world. They act as connectors, supporters, and emergency contacts in times of need.
Katherine Hughes-Fraitekh
Katherine Hughes-Fraitekh is one of the three co-founders of Solidarity 2020 and Beyond and its current Director. She is an expert on peacebuilding, social justice movements and nonviolent strategy and resistance. She trains, convenes, and researches hundreds of grassroots activists and nonviolent campaigns and movements struggling for peace, self-determination, women’s rights, economic and environmental justice, and immigrant rights in Africa, Asia, Middle East, Europe, Latin America and North America.
Over the last 10 years, she has traveled to 75 countries, invited by organizers and activists, to provide training and education, strategic planning, capacity building and solidarity for social justice movements. She was a 2020 Rotary Peace Fellow at the Chulalongkorn University in Thailand and, upon return, co-founded Solidarity 2020 and Beyond, an international network of grassroots activists, journalists and scholars supporting nonviolent movements. She provides consultancy expertise for the Global Fund for Women, the EU Peace Initiative in Palestine/Israel, UN, EU and Danish-led Youth Advisory Panel, YAP, in Palestine, Women in the Peace Process in Afghanistan, curriculum development, training, and strategic planning support for Action Aid projects with African Youth Movement and Afresist.
Previously, Katherine served as the Director of Global Field Initiatives at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, ICNC, the Executive Director of Peace Brigades International USA, and Director of the Teamworks Program at the Commission on the Status of Women. She earned her MA in International Development and Peace and Conflict Resolution at the American University School of International Service and completed the Arab Studies program at Georgetown University, both in Washington, DC.
Ms. Hughes-Fraitekh is on the board of Day Africa, an economic empowerment and micro-farming initiative for women and youth in vulnerable communities in Kenya. Ms. Hughes-Fraitekh is herself a grassroots activist involved in anti-racism, anti-Islamophobia, anti-militarism, indigenous rights, gun control, immigrant and women’s rights and Palestinian human rights organizing in the US. She provides commentary on international news programs, serves on panels and speaks on webinars, publishes articles and contributes to books, including in Open Democracy, and the Middlebury Institute, and teaches classes on movement building and MENA, specifically Palestine/Israel.
Bayingana Simon
Simon has experience in community organizing, movement building, civil resistance, public narrative and leadership mentorship. He is the recipient of the Sie fellowship, an academic scholarship for human rights and social justice activists. He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in arts of International Human Rights at Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver in Colorado, USA. He holds a number of certificates and training in civil resistance and human rights advocacy and community organizing.