By Kayla Gilchrist, NLIHC Senior Housing Advocacy Organizer
NLIHC extends a warm welcome to Kayla Gilchrist (she/her/ella), who is joining us as a senior housing advocacy organizer on the Field Strategy & Innovation team. In collaboration with grassroots groups across the country, Kayla will work with people most directly impacted by housing injustice and support communities with the tools and strategies needed to build people power and fight for systems change at the local, state, and national level.
Kayla has worked as a community organizer and nonprofit leader for over 15 years. Previously, she served as a senior organizer on the Housing Justice Team at Community Change, working in collaboration with directly impacted people across the United States to build community power and launch strategic campaigns. Before moving to Washington, DC, she organized for nearly a decade in South Carolina, where she served at the Charleston Area Justice Ministry (CAJM), and later co-founded and led Midlands Organized Response for Equity and Justice (MORE Justice), organizations that deeply engage with community members to achieve systems change around intersecting issues such as wage theft, housing and food insecurity, mental health, and racial profiling by police. She has extensive facilitation, strategic planning, and grassroots fundraising experience and a developed anti-racist lens through which she does her work.
Kayla earned her undergraduate degrees from St. Louis University in Madrid, Spain, and the American University in Cairo, Egypt. She completed her graduate work at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California and there earned a MA in Spanish Translation and Interpretation and a MA in International Policy Studies, with a focus on Conflict Resolution and Community Development. She is a graduate of the Anne Braden Anti-Racist Organizing Fellowship and Catalyst Project’s anti-racist facilitation training.